I spoke recently to Dennis Tafoya the author of last year's amazing crime debut Dope Thief, (if you haven’t heard about this one, do yourself a favor and pick it up now), and this summer’s The Wolves of Fairmount Park, (go ahead and preorder it—yeah, that’s not just a suggestion), about the appeal of writing and reading True Crime books.
Dennis Tafoya: In my experience, criminals are rarely masterminds who make careful plans to avoid detection. They're mostly driven by barely-controlled impulse, and they tend to be immature, self-mythologizing, and unable to own up to their mistakes. They're like terrifying children.
Hit it on the head, didn’t he? I delve into True Crime far too infrequently and the excuse I make to myself when my conscience nags is usually about the quality of the prose—it can be dry, technical, nay clinical, too much like a school book—but enough of that. This is where it gets real, nasty, tragic, and pathetic beyond imagination.
You want the truth? Maybe you can’t handle it, but then again…
I’ll start things off on a light note. Julian Rubinstein wrote Ballad of the Whiskey Robber about Attila Ambrus, who escaped from iron curtain Romania in the late 1980s and went on to become Eastern Europe’s worst professional hockey player, so bad in fact that he had to be the team’s janitor to keep his place on the roster. To support his passion he supplemented his income by becoming the region’s most successful bank robber. Ballad is a chronicle of the fall of communism and the rise of capitalism and the systemic bureaucratic ineptitude one none-too-bright hockey player was able to exploit and become something of a folk hero, buying into his own myth along the way and developing a certain pinache in his MO (he took to delivering roses to tellers he was sticking up), before, of course, he was finally captured. If it had been a movie —I wouldn’t have believed it, so far fetched were the Keystone Kop-esque antics described in this wildly entertaining book.
And speaking of not believing it, Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden tells the story of Pablo Escobar’s rise to and ruthless reign as head of the Medellin Cartel in Colombia. It’s also about the pandemic corruption and stupefying violence that marked his time as the most wanted man in world. The behind the headlines details of his negotiations with his own government and brief imprisonment (in a jail he built himself and didn't have to stay in if he didn't want to) reach levels so absurd they lend the whole narrative a surreal bent.
For those without the time to invest in a book-length treatment, I can recommend the annual Best American Crime series. I am continually impressed at the scope and depth of the content—alternately horrific, comic, tragic, and absurd—contained in them. It's like visiting the 31 flavors with a license to sample.
You wanna know from where sprang Dick Wolf's bottomless fount of ideas? Yeah, ripped from the headlines. And the front lines. And the side lines. Compelling and illuminating stuff. Not to mention entertaining.
Who's got some true crime recommendations for me?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
