UTEP Detective Fiction, and True Crime ...

Adapted from "First Things" magazine. October 2008. Joseph Bottum's Ain't Nothing But a Meanness in This World.

"You'll find here the puritanical murders of Cotton Mather's time. and the prairie crimes of Abraham Lincoln's day, and the rapes of young girls in the 1940s, and the clue - ridden corpses scattered like bread crumbs by the serial killers of the 1970s.

"Isn't it a sign that a genre has something wrong at its center, when it makes Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Trillen sound alike?

"[A] selection from Lincoln opens, In the year 1841, there resided, at different points in the State of Illiniois, three brothers by the name of Trailor.

"[A] selection from Trillin begins, On a bright afternoon in September, 1967, a five - man film crew working in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky stopped to take pictures of some people near a place called Jeremiah.

"For that matter, in the genre of true crime, the facts always seem to have a strange, half religious light cast on them, as though, in the end, original sin alone provides much explanation of crime. "

true crime .. a sort of low - rent theology


"If fiction is the great humanistic endeavor, seeking human reasons for human behavior, then true crime is not an art form but a sort of low - rent theology.


"In its American form, at least, it offers little more than a Christian worldview -- or what the Christian worldview would be without the possibility of Christ: sin without redemption; the Fall without the Resurrection; justice, sometimes, but never mercy.

"Ain't nothing, really, but a meanness in this world."

At the very bottom, on page 21, we read this interesting tidbit:

"Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things..."