Obsessed with True Crime discussion

Do you think adding the history of a location adds to the True Crime story? The book I was reading today went back to when the town was first settled. One observation I made was that the pioneers came to the area and ran off the Indians, then later when towns sprung up they gave the towns Indian names. What was wrong with people back then?

Koren, that is awful when that situation happens. I don't know how people can live with themselves.

Probably in a lot of cases giving a bit of background on location helps the story but there have been times when it's been too much and I got bored. There is a balance authors need to keep in mind. When I sense the background will help put the crime in context, I am good with it. Beyond that and it gets irritating.

You can lay this at the door of Truman Capote; he completely rebooted the genre with In Cold Blood, and ever since he wrote it -- even though he considered it a novel -- people have been writing TC according to the same pattern, starting out with a description of the area and some of its history, then zeroing in on the murder case itself.

I think a lot of books go overboard in area history. I don't need more than a few paragraphs, and that should be recent history or history that is absolutely directly related to the crime. I don't care who settled the area or when. The only reason I might care about historical families is if one of them contained the victim or perpetrator and that history affected the crime.

I also don't care about the biological information of the perpetrator's great-grandparents, grandparents, and usually parents, unless there is some DIRECT connection to the crime. Who cares that great-aunt So-and-so got married at ago 20 and had three kids? Does it matter that they immigrated from Ireland in the late 1800s? If it's related, it better have some direct influence on the criminal behavior, or I'm going to skip it.

I'm sure not everybody feels that way, but I don't read true crime in most cases for extensive local history (there are exceptions). Gimme the salient facts and the investigative details and shut up!

K.A.: Agree!

It's sometimes very important to the story and it STILL slows the book down unconscionably. I was not at all sure why the author of Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion 1917 told me so incredibly much about this one vast and spreading family in Halifax, B.C., including discussions of all the different branches and who lived where. But ultimately, it gave me a much better understanding of how the town was devastated, because 22 people in this family were killed in the space of about 1 minute, and they were intermarried with almost all the other families in town. But I felt as if we got to that part of the story by way of Timbuktu.

I probably wouldn't mind that so much, since it does ultimately have a purpose, but I've read some that are just presenting a history of the area in general - maybe as way of filler.

Sometimes the history is interesting but sometimes I feel it is just filler- something to make the book a little longer. The book I just finished was a little jarring because the author would segue into the history in the middle of a chapter with no warning.

Or just because the author happens to be interested in it. Has anyone here but me read A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer? I came away with the unmistakable impression that the author was a railroads buff who wanted me to know every detail of the way the S-Bahn system sold tickets and seated their passengers and worked their signals -- oh, and by the way, they had a serial killer problem -- but wait, I forgot to tell you all about the conductors' uniforms!

Fishface wrote: "Or just because the author happens to be interested in it. Has anyone here but me read A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer? I came away wi..."

I started and never finished that book probably because of that very thing. I just remember being bored.

I didn't mind it in Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, which actually has the word 'history' in the title.

but I remember being bugged by historical tangents in In the Name of God: The True Story of the Fight to Save Children from Faith-Healing Homicide

I feel exactly the same about both of those books, K.A. even though I felt the historical tangents were important to the latter title.