Out To Make Killings

By Stefan Kanfer

Criminal trials used to have four main components: defendant, attorneys, judge and jury. Now they have a fifth: writers, eager to make a killing of their own. The more notorious the case nowadays, the longer seems the line of authors in and around the courtroom, armed with notebooks and contracts. Last year's "preppie murder" trial of Robert Chambers for strangling Jennifer Levin in New York City's Central Park, for example, will soon yield Wasted, a book by Linda Wolfe (The Professor and the Prostitute). The Tawana Brawley affair has inspired a team of six New York Times reporters and an editor to collaborate on a volume projected for release in late 1989. Politics and sex were the surefire ingredients of the fraud, bribery and conspiracy trial of former Miss America Bess Myerson, and, sure enough, they are soon to be clothbound in a book by Shana Alexander, whose previous titles chronicled the murders of a diet doctor and a Utah millionaire.

The Joel Steinberg case, decided two weeks ago, dwarfs them all. The Manhattan lawyer was accused of brutalizing his lover Hedda Nussbaum and was convicted of manslaughter in the death of their illegally adopted daughter Lisa. Here was every ingredient of the true-crime blockbuster: cocaine, an S-M relationship, a beautiful six-year-old and a battered woman, all set against the background of Greenwich Village. Most important, in a city afflicted with racial malaise, it starred what Tom Wolfe identified in The Bonfire of the Vanities as the Great White Defendant.

From the trial's opening statements, aspiring authors jockeyed for space on courtroom benches. Joyce Johnson, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, began work on What Lisa Knew. Free-lance writer Maury Terry launched into The Dark Side of 10th Street. Sam Erlich, a fellow free lance, undertook Lisa, Hedda, Joel. Marie Winn, author of a television critique, The Plug-In Drug, jotted notes for an untitled book of her own.

Winner of the race to print is Susan Brownmiller, whose novel Waverly Place (Grove; $18.95), published this week, was completed long before the verdict came in. In this fictive version of events leading to Lisa's death, Nussbaum (thinly masked as Judith Winograd) is programmed for catastrophe. Her childhood begins with abuse: "Whack. Where were you? Whack. Ma, I got lost. Whack. I told you . . . always to come straight home. Whack."

Once she moves in with Barry Kantor (Steinberg), himself a victim of childhood beatings, sadomasochism reigns supreme: "He didn't mean to bang my head against the wall . . . This is a man who cares so deeply, who feels so much pain."

Brownmiller attempts a novelist's overview, tracing the domestic tyrannies that slowly escalate to mutilation and death. But her squabbling adults have little more personality than Punch and Judy, and their maltreated daughter is a mere shadow. Waverly Place takes 294 pages to express what W.H. Auden did in a quatrain: "I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return."

Today that evil is worth millions in hard-cover and paperback sales. "More crime books are being written for larger advances than ever before," says Daphne Merkin, an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Merkin cites the $200,000 she paid to Newsday reporter Steve Wick, who had never written a book before, for Bad Company, an anatomy of the 1983 Hollywood murder of producer Roy Radin. John Baker, editor of Publishers Weekly, estimates that 10% of all nonfiction best sellers are chronicles of true crime. "The number has possibly doubled over the past decade," he claims.

So popular have these books become that two studies of the same crime were selected last year as Literary Guild alternates: Daddy's Girl by Clifford Irving, and Cold Kill by Jack Olsen. Both focused on a teenage Texan who hired a boyfriend to kill her parents. This kind of multiple offering is not unusual. In 1985 two works also focused on a single crime: the murder of Franklin Bradshaw, engineered by his socialite daughter and carried out by her son. Both Alexander's Nutcracker and Jonathan Coleman's At Mother's Request became best sellers; both were made into separate network mini-series. There have been five books about the executed serial killer Ted Bundy.

Analyses of the true-crime phenomenon range from the cosmic to the cruel. Publishers Weekly columnist Paul Nathan believes that readers feel "surrounded by the possibilities of violence and the threat of some kind of nuclear or biological or chemical warfare. So in a way it's a kind of relief to channel your apprehensiveness into something as specific and neatly rounded as a crime story." Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, has a chillier view: "We're in an age of intimate crime. Back in the '70s it would have seemed almost inappropriate to write about a rapist who kills his victim in Utah, when we had people offing the most important figures in the land."

Whatever the reasons for their success, the authors generally have elaborate rationales for their exploitation of human misery. Linda Wolfe uses the Emma Bovary defense: "Many of the writers I admired had treated themselves to the inspiration of current events. Flaubert had been told by a friend about a doctor's dissatisfied wife who had killed herself after having a series of lovers, and invented Madame Bovary . . . It's not a new phenomenon." Olsen takes the educational approach: books about psychopaths, he asserts, make it easier for people to identify them: "The date rapist can be spotted even before he tries to hold your hand, and any book on that subject should help elucidate that." Says Brownmiller: "I hope for a subversive effect, reaching people who would not read a 400-page nonfiction history of a crime and theoretical discussion of child abuse." Alexander deals with the true-crime genre by denying its existence. "I don't recognize it," she says. "I think there are two categories -- fiction and non. And I am unable to do one, so I do the other."

Not all writers and critics are receptive to these arguments. Olsen admits that "there's no field more prone to charlatanism than nonfiction crime writing. There is more crap being written under that guise than any other genre because there are no checks and balances." And Nathan has deep moral concerns. "There's something rather ghoulish about seeing a number of people getting together competitively, each with a project based on somebody's $ death," he says. Steinberg's is a case in point: "It's hard to know where to draw the line between simple sensationalism and something that is socially valid." That line grows a little dimmer every time a new defendant gets measured for a dust jacket.