Making a Killing Off True Crime

Hours after Chuck Stuart splashed into Boston Harbor from the Tobin Bridge last January, the phone at our house began ringing with fierce determination.

Stuart was the hero-turned-villain of Boston’s spiciest murder in years: the man who first insisted that he and his seven-months-pregnant wife had been shot by a black assailant who leaped into the back seat of the Stuarts’ Toyota Cressida, but who later, it seems, turned out to have done the shooting himself.

Our telephone was ringing so insistently because my husband and I both are journalists. Apparently that fact alone--or that plus our Massachusetts residency--qualifies us to be described as true-crime writers. This is at least what one would infer from the telephone calls that came to us from an extraordinary parade of half-frantic agents, publishers, editors and movie producers:

“Hello, is your husband there?”

“No, I’m sorry, he’s not.”

“He’s not. Well, hmmm, would you like to write a book?”

“No, I’m sorry, I think not. Would you like to speak to the dog?”

The calls would have been at least a boost for the ego were it not for the fact that just about anyone with even tangential involvement with any Boston-area newspaper or magazine, or anyone who is based in this area and does any reporting at all, seems to have faced the same flood of solicitations. One reporter at the Boston Globe told me that he received 11 inquiries about possible books or movies--and that was just in the first week after Stuart’s apparent suicide. A reporter at another paper put me on hold while she took another call from still another Hollywood producer.

“It’s not a question of ‘tasteless’ or ‘tacky,’ ” one editor remonstrated when I used those words before referring him to our 73-pound Samoyed. “It’s a question of people wanting to read this story. And it’s a helluva story.”

But of course it is not just this story. More and more, readers and publishers seem to be swimming in the same collective pool of blood and gore. It is hard to say which came first, the supply or the demand. But it is clear that the thirst for real crime--true crime, gory, gross and disgusting crime--appears to be insatiable.

“My theory is that it is somehow connected to the rise of tabloid television,” Neil Nyren, editor-in-chief and publisher of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, said. Putnam’s is the publisher of one of the titans of true-crime writing, Joe McGinnis, of “Blind Faith” and “Fatal Vision” notably.

The reason those two books by McGinnis did so well is the same reason so many people were interested in the Stuart story, Nyren suggested. Chuck and Carol Stuart had worked themselves up from blue-collar beginnings to all the comforts of true yuppiedom. They had a house with a swimming pool and a wreath made out of teddy-bears on the front door. Chuck Stuart, a former dishwasher, wore suits from the fanciest men’s store in Boston and had his prematurely graying temples touched up at a salon overlooking the Boston Public Garden.

“That’s part of the fascination, that this could be the neighbor next door,” Nyren said. “You rarely think, ‘This could happen to me.’ But you do think, ‘This could be my neighbor.’ ”

Harry MacLean, the author of the best-selling “In Broad Daylight” (Harper & Row, cloth; Dell, paper) about the 1981 murder of the town bully in a small town in northwest Missouri, agrees. MacLean was “just another hack lawyer” practicing in Denver when he decided to switch to true-crime writing, in part because of what he saw as the universal appeal of the genre.

In a recent lecture about true-crime writing at the Tattered Sleeve bookstore in his hometown of Denver, MacLean said he turned the question on his audience of nearly 200 people and asked them why they like to read this stuff. Their answer confirmed his suspicions.

“For one thing, they said a lot of these stories involve ordinary people, the people next door,” MacLean said. He noted that he was calling from Foster City, Calif., where he was investigating a case involving “a fireman and a housewife.”

Echoing that motif, Pocket Books Hardcover has been promoting one title as an example of “ordinary people, extraordinary crimes.” The book, “Without Mercy: Obsession and Murder Under the Influence,” by Gary Provost, deals with a waitress at a pancake restaurant who joins her homosexual supervisor in plotting two brutal murders. Carlton Stowers’ “Innocence Lost,” also from Pocket Books Hardcover, recounts the murder of an undercover policeman posing as a high school student in a small Texas town.

The reading public’s appetite for this kind of book truly does seem insatiable. Day after day, press releases come in announcing new books about “shocking deaths,” murders in a pediatric intensive-care unit, matricide, fratricide, patricide, psychopathic killers and crimes of vengeance, jealousy, avarice or old-fashioned passion.

But the flip side of the phenomenon is that not only does the public expect this kind of delicious fodder, so do the subjects. It’s as if anyone with the slightest involvement in a potentially marketable crime of any kind figures that he or she can, pardon the expression, make a killing off it.

MacLean said that one reason he chose to back away from the Charles Stuart case, for example, was that “I heard that the assistant DAs were faxing their stories out to Hollywood.” It was “too bizarre,” he said. It seemed that “the process was going to taint the story.”

Lawyers and crime victims--even friends and relatives of crime victims--now flock to literary agents and true-crime writers on their own. It may be that they actually enjoy the attention, that this is their personal and proverbial 15 minutes of fame. But as MacLean observed, “It feels kind of sick, in a way.”

Conversely, many print journalists, not notoriously among the most overpaid of professionals, have come to see the perfect true-crime story as the vehicle that will vault them out of penury and into the ranks of true-crime giants--writers, they say in wistful tones, such as Truman Capote or Norman Mailer. Words like miniseries or feature film invariably accompany discussions of books about true crimes. The implication is that even the most starving of starving journalists will be able to junk that old Toyota and cruise around in the Mercedes he or she secretly covets.

Covering a story they think might be lucrative, journalists come to feel possessive about the cast of characters. It becomes “my murder” or “my book.” Certainly this has been true in a number of recent well-publicized crimes, such as the Steinberg murder-and-child-and-wife-abuse case in New York City; the preppie murder in New York City; Boston’s Stuart case; the Yom Kippur murders in Los Angeles.

Not every true-crime book is a guaranteed ticket to financial heaven, however. Books that come out as little more than a string of newspaper articles seldom make big waves. As greedy as readers may be for these stories, they do demand writing skills from the authors.

What most captures the public fancy is a book that transcends the facts of a single case and deals with bigger themes. Ideally, the story also should serve as a mirror of some segment of American life as well.

The “sudden burst” in true-crime stories “caught us by surprise,” Neil Nyren said, so much so that “there’s no way to tell where it’s going.”

But as long as there is tabloid television, and as long as there are savory stories to tell, the pace seems unlikely to slow.

In the meantime, my dog would like it known that he is a very good writer and that he is thinking of hiring an agent.

PEN PRIZES: On April 27, PEN USA Center West will present its 1989 literary awards. The winners are: fiction (novel), Maxine Hong Kingston for “Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book” (Alfred A. Knopf); fiction (short story), T. Coraghessan Boyle for “If the River Was Whisky” (Viking); nonfiction, Le Ly Hayslip and Jay Wurts for “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places” (Doubleday); poetry, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge for “Empathy” (Station Hill Press); translation (Elinor D. Randall Award), Suzanne Jill Levine for her translation of “The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata” by Adolfo Bioy Casares (E. P. Dutton); young adult, Louise Moeri for “The Forty-Third War” (Houghton Mifflin); children’s middle grade, Barte de Clements for “The Five-Finger Discount” (Delacorte); screenplay (original), Woody Allen for “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (Orion Pictures); screenplay (adaptation), Gus van Sant and Daniel Yost for “Drugstore Cowboy” (Avenue Pictures); drama, John Steppling for “Teenage Wedding” (Heliogabalus); journalism, David Shaw; body of work, Wallace Stegner; President’s Award, Vaclav Havel.

In connection with its award to David Shaw, PEN will issue a special commendation to The Times “for its unwavering support of uncensored criticism of the print media even when the criticism has faulted The Times itself.”