When I was in college, someone broke into my parents’ house in rural Kentucky in the middle of the day and set it on fire. I found out while I was — literally — at Disney World in Orlando with a friend for spring break. I’d been unable to reach anyone at home, the phone just rang and rang, and so I finally called my grandmother. There had been a conspiracy not to tell me until I got back, but she blurted out: “Someone burned your house down.” Had I been doing my usual spring break routine, I’d have been there still in bed when it happened. The police never found out who did it. Sifting through the rubble of my childhood with my mother, both of us in masks to protect from smoke inhalation, and cataloguing every loss (every book, every photo album, almost everything) was my first personal encounter with seemingly inexplicable evil.
But by that point I’d been reading true crime and crime fiction for years. I was unsurprised to discover it existed.
Did you hear? Remember that one guy who . . . ? We true crime obsessives speak in shorthand. Yes. We saw. Yes, we heard. We remember. Some of us have been here since the beginning, picking "Helter Skelter" off the bookshelf too young or reading Michelle McNamara’s earliest posts on "True Crime Diary." Some of us are brand new, having discovered the "My Favorite Murder" podcast and embracing the murderino label last week. It doesn’t matter. In this community, the most important bona fide is showing up.
There is a deep compassion in most people who are drawn to true crime stories. We remember. We’re here to bear witness. "I’ll Be Gone in the Dark" by McNamara is an instant classic, a book about a brutal killer in which she also put the superhero origin story of her obsession right there on the page. A girl killed in her neighborhood when she was a child. A killer who got away. When the Golden State Killer was finally arrested earlier this year, I spent the last half hour before bed every night googling for the day’s updates, reading the latest from the Sacramento papers, and thinking of McNamara and hoping, somehow, she knew, despite having tragically died before he was caught. True crime is disturbing, but there’s a comfort there too. It’s impossible to pretend a world in which such terrible things happen makes sense.
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For those of us into stories about the dark things people are capable of, and those who (sometimes) bring them to justice (or injustice), the past few years have proven a golden age of listening, reading and viewing material. “Serial” didn’t just kick off the true crime podcast trend, it created a level of audience involvement that raised fascinating questions about the ethics of certain reporting tactics. There’s a specific variety of nonfiction I’ve never been able to resist, in which the storyteller's obsession becomes part of the story. With “Serial,” the audience’s obsession became part of the phenomenon in an unprecedented way. That shared experience of deep investment has sparked the desire to tell a thousand more stories of murder and mayhem. The results are everywhere, in our late-night Netflix scroll, the bestseller list and of course in our earbuds.
I became interested in the ways we’re consuming these stories, in what happens when the teller becomes part of a tale like this and in the unexpected light they can shine on not just the bad but the good in human nature. And so "Dead Air" was born, a fictional story about a true crime obsessive in Kentucky named Mackenzie Walker who — for reasons of her own — starts a radio show and then ends up investigating a murder long believed to have been solved already.
Because so much of the true crime craze has played out in an episodic format, I thought serializing the novel would be a uniquely well-suited way to tell this story. A few years ago, I’d have had zero idea how to go about tackling an unusual format like this. Enter the publisher Serial Box, which brings together teams of writers to create serial stories in ebook and audio. I asked two writers I admired to join me and prayed they’d be interested. And so New York Times bestselling authors Rachel Caine ("Stillhouse Lake") and Carrie Ryan ("The Forest of Hands and Teeth") joined the team, because of course they turned out to be obsessed with true crime too.
With "Dead Air," we all wanted to explore the same questions. What happens when an amateur takes on a murder? The good, the bad and the unexpected. The behind-the-scenes chronicle of Mackenzie's investigations forms a novel released in 10 weekly episodes, with a corresponding episode of her podcast released each week, as a means of digging into the space between the public and the private. We wanted to create that obsessive, immersive feeling that the best true crime storytelling provides.
Only once in my life did my grandmother refuse to buy me a book. We were shopping together and I picked out a book called "Bad Girls Do It! An Encyclopedia of Female Murderers." I made a case for it, but the answer was firm and boiled down to: “This book is not ladylike.”
I’ve since decided part of the embrace of true crime by women, specifically — and in particular the murderinos out there, thank you, "MFM" goddesses Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff — is a rejection of just this. Maybe interest in true crime isn’t ladylike. Maybe that’s part of the appeal. What is ladylike, anyway? I think we get to decide that, but even better, what we’ve decided is we don’t care. We’re going to keep talking about the darkness you wish we wouldn’t. We’re going to unpack the failings of good and triumphs of evil that so often stalk us and our families. We’re going to continue to remember and bear witness.
We will not be quiet. And, ultimately, that’s what "Dead Air" is, too — the story of a young woman deciding not to be quiet anymore.
Listen to episode one of Mackenzie's podcast, "The Murder," here:
You can subscribe to "Dead Air" on iTunes, RadioPublic or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also subscribe to the 10-part novel, released in weekly audio and ebook installments, through Serial Box. Here's how Serial Box works. The first installment of the "Dead Air" novel is free, and Salon subscribers get a special discount for the series.
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