MURDER ON MIDDLE BEACH AFTERMATH SERIAL

Nevertheless, one effect of Rule’s choice to play down the gore and delve deeper into personality and relationships was to make the book more appealing to women readers than the True Detective–style stories she’d been writing.

Perhaps this decision was strategic: If you tell your reader about Bundy having sex with corpses and keeping his victims’ severed heads as souvenirs, they’re going to care less about the emotional fluctuations in your friendship with him-in fact, they’re going to start wondering how you failed to notice what a gargantuan freak he was. In The Stranger Beside Me, however, the most revolting of Bundy’s activities go undescribed. In The I-5 Killer, for example-about a former football player turned armed robber, rapist, and murderer-Rule recounts the abuse Randall Woodfield inflicted on his victims in considerable and nauseating detail. The three serial-killer books Rule wrote as Stack mostly follow this formula. Today true crime is widely viewed as a genre appealing to women, who make up the majority of true-crime podcast listeners and fan convention attendees. So, presumably, did its editors, seeing as they asked Rule to pretend to be a man. Browsing through back issues turns up ads for baldness cures, Charles Atlas bodybuilding programs, and assistance for “men past 40 who are troubled with getting up nights.” In short, although demographic data about True Detective’s readers isn’t (and probably never was) available, the magazine’s advertisers clearly believed its audience to be male. While the design style changed with the times, the basic motif remained constant: Nearly every issue featured a pinup beauty, often scantily clad, being menaced by a sinister attacker. And who were those 2 million people? The cover art offers a clue. At the magazine’s peak in the 1940s, it sold 2 million copies each month. True Detective began its storied run in 1924 as a pulp magazine focusing at first on mystery fiction but soon shifting to meet its readership’s demand for true crime. Rule changed who read true crime-and sowed the seeds for the new generation of real-life tales of investigation.

Hers may be the standard that high-minded true-crime storytellers now aim to rise above, but today’s murder podcasts and documentaries nevertheless owe a huge debt to Rule for the way she transformed the genre, from exploitative newsstand fare to the bookshelves of America’s well-appointed living rooms. She was fantastically successful and widely read, but she published books with titles like A Rose for Her Grave that screamed their lurid, foil-stamped premises (“A Woman’s Fury, A Mother’s Sacrifice”) from the mass-market paperback racks in drugstores. But if In Cold Blood served as the genre’s aspirational pinnacle, the books Rule cranked out represented its seedier, densely populated, highly profitable valley. In 1979 Norman Mailer’s The Executioner ’ s Song further demonstrated the legitimacy a marquee literary name could bring to an otherwise lowbrow genre. In Rule’s day, sure, people could point to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a moody tale of senseless butchery and sublimated homoeroticism in the sere light of the Kansas prairie.

MURDER ON MIDDLE BEACH AFTERMATH SERIAL

Rule died in 2015, just as the podcast Serial was ushering in a new, more prestigious era of true crime. Send me updates about Slate special offers.

Murder on middle beach aftermath