Book Review: True Crime Story
20.04.2021
Book Review | True Crime Story by Joseph Knox
I read True Crime Story without knowing much about it and I think probably that's useful with this book. So, if you think you'll read it, while I'll attempt as always to be spoiler free, I'm not sure how possible/helpful that is in this specific case and you might perhaps want to stop reading this for now.
Okay, welcome, welcome to all those who are still with me. Disclaimer: I genuinely don't know how to review this book. I finished reading it a few days ago and I'm still not sure what I think of it. It’s sort of fascinating as a writer to take this novel apart but, as a reader, I’m not completely sold. I haven't read a Joseph Knox novel before by the way, so I'd be intrigued to know how this compares with his other work because I'm getting the feeling it's quite different.
When I say I knew nothing about the book, I really mean that. I requested it on NetGalley and, with the information available, a) believed it to be a crime novel and b) knew the title was True Crime Story. I have a complicated relationship with true crime which is naturally part of the reason I picked it up in the first place but is also pertinent to how I feel having read it. Like many people, I have always been drawn to true crime but, through a combination of over consumption and, more recently, experiencing actual crime in real life (albeit peripherally), my appetite has both diminished and altered. I try nowadays to limit the kind of material I read or watch, and I have a particular hatred for TV shows, literature and (let's be honest it's mostly these) podcasts that simply utilise crime as a vehicle for the hosts to bounce off for comedy or to revel in the shock and awe aspect of the crimes. I won't name names, simply because I don't want to offer any free promotion (I say that as though I’m currently drawing in thousands of regular readers! Aim big, right?). What I do still enjoy though are projects where the topic of true crime is genuinely used in an interesting or even educational way. Examples of this would be Sarah Koenig's Serial where she uses a case to explore and educate listeners on the way in which the US justice system functions, Phoebe Judge's Criminal which really steers away from violent crime or Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone In The Dark, which fuses true crime with memoir and an exploration of the way in which online communities come together to assist in police investigations. Even without knowing much about what to expect, from marketing alone, True Crime Story felt like something that would be placed in this sort of territory.
This, I'm afraid, is where I don't think I can avoid spoilers of some kind. True Crime Story is blurbed as being a deft blending of fact and fiction. The story focuses on a central crime, that of the disappearance of 19-year-old Zoe Nolan while at Manchester University back in 2011. Most of the story is told through interviews with various people involved in the case - friends, family, police officers - that are undertaken and collated by writer Evelyn Mitchell. We're told in the foreword (by Knox) that Mitchell is a friend of his, that she's been sending him the book in sections as she's been writing it (these are included in email form throughout the novel) and that sadly, as she reached the conclusion of the murder mystery, was herself killed. Knox then took over writing the piece and published it under his own name. In addition to the emails and interviews, the book contains newspaper clippings, police reports and photographs. It's an intriguing concept, one which is further complicated when Knox hints at suggestions that he himself has been accused of having some involvement in either Zoe or Evelyn's deaths. The format is pretty engaging, if a little heavy on interview transcripts, and really plays into the salacious nature of true crime, how we as readers want to know what happened despite how dismal and depressing the tale is.
In today's society I doubt that Knox expected many people to get through the whole book without googling Zoe Nolan but it's testament to my own patience that I was a few chapters in before I did so and to Knox's skill that, even when I didn't immediately find information about Nolan, I wasn't completely convinced she'd never existed. Knox does a great job of holding up a mirror to human nature, not just in building a believable portrait of a missing girl and those she's left behind, but also in understanding and encouraging a reader's capacity to get to a point where we're actively wishing Zoe into existence just so the sad story of yet another missing girl can be true. Dark, right!?
The thing is though, Zoe Nolan doesn't exist and nor does any other character in the book bar Knox. He's created this false world around him and, in some ways, it's a really cool and effective concept. This method of playing with your audience, making some question what's true and what's not isn't new. It happens a lot in magic shows and, memorably for me because I was on a school trip and nearly peed myself in shock, in the stage play The Woman in Black. In this case though I wasn't really sure what it was supposed to achieve other than being really well plotted and cleverly executed. While I enjoyed the initial play off between fact and fiction, the truth is that in a piece of writing as big as a novel there needs to be a longer term reason for a choice as bold as this. I'm just not really sure what that was. Was Knox simply trying to entertain or was he trying to make a bigger point about our consumption of true crime? This is where my discomfort with utilising true crime as entertainment rears its head again. On one hand this is absolutely not a real story so what does it matter? On the other hand, for a while Knox wants you to believe that it is. I'm not sure if that matters but still, something in that feels worse to me than just happily creating a world that everyone knows is fictional. I don't know if I'm overthinking this.
Despite my mixed feelings on this, I did find myself turning to pick it up again and again. It had much of what I love about a thriller: an intriguing premise, plenty of red herrings and a couple of solid twists plus the added bonus of playing with writing styles. Like I said, Knox is clearly a talented writer and the novel is excellently structured. For me though, at a certain point, the form stopped serving the story and instead became an irritation. So much of the story was told in transcript form which trod a weird line between being so realistic it becomes dull, and markedly not realistic as it gets twisted in order to tell the story. Also, at points when I was getting absorbed into the story through the transcripts, it’d be interrupted be the secondary meta storyline between Knox and Evelyn. Like I said, I have pretty mixed feelings on this novel and the above was an attempt to work through those! With my earlier disclaimer in mind, if you've read this far then you're probably either not intending to read the novel or already have done. If it’s the latter, come discuss it with me!
Thanks to NetGalley for a free advanced galley of the book.
You can purchase a copy on Bookshop.Org using my affiliate link.