Ann Rule May Be a More Important Cultural Icon than Truman Capote

With the publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote famously claimed to have invented a new genre, "the nonfiction novel." As with much Capote said, this was not exactly true. When In Cold Blood came out in 1965, it was riding the crest of an almost twenty-year wave of book-length creative nonfiction, much of it generated at The New Yorker, including Capote's own The Muses are Heard. What Capote did do was move the nonfiction novel on to the terrain of what was, at the time, a very, very lowbrow genre: true crime. In so doing, Capote in one fell-swoop elevated true crime to the cultural level of The New Yorker and extended it to a book-length genre rather than the stuff of pulp magazines. These were significant accomplishments.

After that, though, Capote bailed. Capote never again returned to true crime (but for a kind of late self-parody entitled "Hand-Carved Coffins"). Indeed, In Cold Blood represents more less the end of Capote's nonfiction career rather than the beginning of it.

The person who did do the heavy lifting to establish true crime as a major genre was Ann Rule, who died in July at the age of 83. Rule was a tireless author and promoter of true crime whose The Stranger Beside Me is perhaps the most important example of true crime as a mass-market genre rather than as the self-consciously literary texts of Capote and, later, Norman Mailer. Capote will certainly be remembered as a great prose stylist. Rule, however, may ultimately be seen as the more important cultural figure. Rule's version of true crime exists at the intersection of a new conservative movement and the women's movement, two things that go a long way to defining late twentieth-century American history. In light of Rule's understanding of contemporary politics and culture, Capote's foray into true crime seems surprisingly divorced from its time and place.

Rule's true crime, as with most true crime, is in many ways very conservative, often an unabashed cheerleader for the tough-on-crime rhetoric of the New Right. As I argued in my dissertation, true crime creates something of a conservative fantasy about what America and American crime look like:

         "First, true crime skews America’s demographics.  In a nation in which people of colour and the poor are far more likely to be the victims of crime, true crime presents a world in which victims, criminals, and police are almost exclusively white and middle class.  Moreover, the victims are almost always women, thus often turning misogynistic violence into a kind of entertainment.  As Jean Murley argues, the demographics of true crime represent 'a countercurrent to the social progress and cultural changes—feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness—that have transformed American life in the past four decades' (3).
          Second, true crime is almost always about the restoration of the status quo.  By definition, the genre describes a person or people who subvert society’s norms and, if they are murderers, violate its most sacred taboo.  In the end, however, the police get their man: 'In true crime, the killers are usually incarcerated or executed at the end of the story, reassuring us with a good old-fashioned reordering of the chaos wrought by crime' (Murley 3).  While there may have been a psychopath on the loose, true crime assures the reader that order has been restored, usually by brave and earnest officers of the law.
            Third, true crime’s means of production tends to underscore its close affiliation with law-and-order ideology.  As Laura Browder points out, 'True crime writers are often affiliated with victims’ rights groups, and some, like former policewoman Ann Rule [arguably True Crime’s most successful writer], work with law enforcement agencies' (936).  In the case of televised true crime, the link between text and law enforcement is even more pronounced.  Shows like America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries actively solicit the viewer’s participation in restoring the social order; by calling in tips, viewers become an arm of the state, assisting in the capture and incarceration of wrongdoers."

At the same time that is a very conservative genre, however, true crime as Rule produced it is also in some ways a female-dominated, even feminist genre: (quoting my dissertation again)

           "Browder argues that, while they may be overtly reactionary in their stated aims, some true crime texts 'are also subversive, in that they tend to question the very foundations of patriarchal culture—the family in true crime is often a poisonous unit' (Browder 936).  Moreover, in her interviews with female true crime readers (by all accounts, the genre’s readers are overwhelming women), Browder discovered something other than the passive consumption of misogynistic violence: 'Many [fans] read true crime to help themselves cope with the patriarchal violence they have encountered in the past, and fear in the present' (Browder 928).  'As read actively by female fans, what seems…to be anti-feminist can be read as feminist, and what is often perceived as sick, warping material can become a form of therapy, however flawed' (949).  Thus it is possible to see True Crime’s depictions of violence not as a normalization of that violence, but as a critique of a society in which that violence is normalized."

Thus true crime in general, and Rule's books in particular, sits right in the tangled intersection of the two biggest American cultural shifts in the last third of the twentieth century: the shift away from the New Deal consensus and toward Reaganism, on the one hand, and the rapid cultural successes of the women's movement, on the other. And to drive the point home, Rule demonstrates the tangled ways in which these movements over lap. The women's movement was a progressive, liberatory movement--except when it wasn't: for example, when empowered female voters favoured Phyllis Schlafly over the ERA. And the New Right was a regressive, reactionary movement except when, as Rule makes clear, its concerns about rising violent crime actually served the cause of greater daily freedoms for women. (Perhaps these political contradictions go someway to explaining the riddle posed by Amanda Marcotte at Slate, why Rule initially had to publish under a male nom de plume.) 

This is not the place to sort out the precise relationship between the women's movement and the New Right. It is only the place to say that Rule captured the tensions between these cultural poles in ways far beyond anything Capote ever did. And, in the end, crystallising cultural history into specific narratives might be what great writers do.