Diary: Michael Robbins on the Uses of Bad Writing
The flimsiness of the book’s thesis gives it a crazy energy, mirrored in its over-the-top prose
Caroline Fraser’s Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers might be the most overwrought book I have ever read. I mean, just look at that subtitle. Crime and bloodlust! This is an author who will end a paragraph, without irony, with the words “Cry havoc.” One chapter begins, “Of arms and the murderer I sing.” It’s impossible to convey the scope of overwriting in the book—sentences include “It’s three-card monte, poison edition” and “He would have, but for his wife and family hanging around his neck like albatrosses” and “For the love of all that’s holy, strew their path with daffodils” and “Let us assume the form of sad angels hovering in the chilly air of the Lund ward, looking down upon the consequence of Louise’s tryst” and “It’s the fault line we cannot see, but we know it’s there. It’s the knife at the neck. It’s the clean cut.”
This is not good writing. It shouldn’t work, and it doesn’t. But it kind of does. I ate this book up in a night, like a thriller. It’s completely bats: Fraser’s thesis, based entirely on correlation, is that there were so many serial killers in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, because of their proximity to smelters contaminating the air and soil with lead, arsenic, and other toxic metals. There are two stories here, equally shocking: the criminal environmental pollution of industrial centers after World War II and the proliferation of almost inconceivably violent serial murder beginning in the 1960s. (There’s actually a third, interstitial story, about the many lives lost on the Mercer Island Floating Bridge engineering disaster in Lake Washington, which serves as a kind of allegory for the book’s equation of death with leaded gas. I think.) These are not the same story; any connection between them is conjectural. What they have in common is wanton cost in human lives. The threads alternate, never quite brought into anything resembling an argument. There was so much lead. There were so many serial killers. Don’t you see?
I want to believe, as the poster says. In a way it would be a comfort: nature doesn’t just produce Ted Bundys; something has to pour leaded gasoline on the fire. Perhaps the book is actually better for the flimsiness of its thesis, which gives it a crazy energy, mirrored in Fraser’s over-the-top prose, as we ping-pong from the most horrible things humans can do to the most horrible things humans can breathe. And, as Fraser makes explicit in what is convincing research, the companies burning those toxic metals, in full knowledge of the effects, were also engaged in a kind of serial murder. Their CEOs and other executives are as guilty as Bundy—more so, really, given their murderous scale and the impunity conferred by the riches on offer.
I wondered if excessively wrought language might be characteristic of a genre whose defining quality is fidelity to the real. I remember I first heard the phrase “true crime” in the early nineties, when a friend confessed he couldn’t stop reading about serial killers. Flipping through the cheap paperbacks he had amassed—Helter Skelter, The Stranger beside Me—I was bemused that my friend, a self-described anarchist, was scarfing down books often written by prosecutors and cops. The incarcerated writer John J. Lennon wrote, in a fine piece for The New York Review of Books in 2023, that true crime “increases a reader’s thirst for punishment.” “The liberal true crime writer … warns us about the terrible state of our criminal justice system while producing the kind of work that seems only to justify its existence.”
Read Michael Robbins in Book Post on unserious reading, trash, “Nancy,” apocaplypse by fire, and the destruction of animals, as well as Rilke, Ovid, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Manuel Mujica Lainez, Paul Muldoon, and Allen Ginsberg.
Lacking a thirst for punishment, I’ve avoided the genre, except for a few off-the-wall outliers, like Ed Sanders’s The Family, about Charles Manson, which I love mostly because it’s full of sentences like “The gun collector in the band was on an LSD Spirit of Nonviolence trip and decided to throw away his machine gun so he gave it to Donkey Dan” (Sanders founded the journal Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts). I checked out a couple of recent true crime books—Tom O’Neill’s Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls: An American Mystery—to test the thesis. If you haven’t read Chaos, you know much less than you think you do about the Manson murders. Kolker occasionally indulges a hokey lyricism, but both books are for the most part composed in the default workmanlike prose peculiar to popular nonfiction. So it’s not just a genre thing (but I won’t be returning to true crime often; for one thing, there’s too much cat torture).
What is Murderland doing? I couldn’t decide if Fraser was just a purple, melodramatic writer, like H. P. Lovecraft or Cormac McCarthy (I know, he’s your hero, go ahead and leave an angry comment). I asked friends for examples of overwrought writers who were also, somehow, good writers, but their responses were unhelpful. Whitman, e.g., doesn’t fit the description—he’s a good writer who often wrote quite badly, but it’s not his bad writing that’s interesting. One friend came up with a useful formulation of the kind of writing I mean: “things I get a lot out of, even though I would have to append a big caveat or explanation, if I were showing it to someone else.”
Putting it that way led me to two examples: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which hardly matters to me now but had a significant effect on me in college, and J. K. Huysmans’s Against Nature. Of course, what unites these works beyond their overblown rhetoric is irony. The reader who takes the narrators of these books at face value misses the point. The melodrama winks at the reader. There is something of this too in Fraser, though she is working on a much smaller scale: “The true crime lies in what we’ve done with the place”—true crime, wink, wink.
Perhaps my “without irony” in the opening paragraph was off the mark. Fraser may be working with more registers than one can quite hear through the cries of havoc. I can’t quite dismiss the book. It lingers, like the smell of decomposition, like lead in the soil, like the niggling worry that you forgot to lock the door.
Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music.
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