Inside our appetite for true crime

When I was 10 years old, I got gifted The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for Christmas, and it is safe to say that I was captivated. Childishly, I was feeling the stories deeply, as if it were my duty to uncover who the killer was. I had injected myself into these stories and had claimed the role of Sherlock Holmes’ personal assistant. As I grew up and realised the line between fiction and reality, I no longer spent days and nights thinking about the mysteries I was reading; I knew they existed in the world of fiction.

Crime, no matter how daunting, is packaged up into a digestible and ever so forgettable format

Although I am not a true crime aficionado, I find that I have abandoned Holmes’ mysteries and replaced them with the stories that exist in the same world as I. Now, if I hear of a true crime mystery, I know that one quick TikTok search can show me millions of videos of people who have assumed themselves a ‘detective’ and are keen to find the truth. This has become especially visible with the newest batch of Epstein files released. Platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube are overflowing with people who have spent their days and nights going through millions of images and decoding them on their true crime accounts. While for some, these videos offer a genuine call for justice, for others, it is an opportunity to play detective. As kids, we treated fiction seriously, as if the monsters in our books were hiding under our beds. However, nowadays we can’t stop making real-life stories feel fictive, as it only takes a mere scroll to move on from a gruesome true crime deep dive to a ‘get ready with me’. Crime, no matter how daunting, is packaged up into a digestible and ever-so-forgettable format. They are treated like a Stephen King novel. A beach read that grounds you back into reality before you lift your head up and realise that you’re on vacation.

Most of us have an affinity for true crime and mystery media. Reading about these stories, we place ourselves in the heart of the mystery without having to materially experience the terrors that are served with it. We get to be a bystander or a participant without the PTSD. Once these experiences build up, from one true crime documentary to the next, reality blurs into fiction. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes about how a war film like Saving Private Ryan can be confused for an actual war photograph; our brains cannot emotionally tell the difference. When we look at real atrocities, they become a piece of fiction, art. We devolve ourselves from reality. We are fascinated with true crime because its origins are that of a mystery novel, and yet we forget that there is more at stake.

Simply viewing the consequence of crime should make us realise our political impotence

As we uncover disturbingly more abhorrent acts from the very people that control our world, the public exploits this commercialised pain into social media entertainment. There is little care for the victims of these stories, as these narratives foreground the atrocities they have unfortunately faced. It seems as though for us to care about the subjects of a story, they must be actively present in our lives, because if not, they are no more than another piece of media to consume. In his essay Photographs of Agony, John Berger observes that when we see photos of tragedies, they depoliticise in our brains. These tragedies are often ones that indirectly affect us, yet just as a photograph is still, we too are met with a psychological inertia when observing them. Simply viewing the consequence of crime should make us realise our political impotence, yet perpetrators of tragedies are rather turned into AI memes and their crimes are treated as gossip.

Although it is undeniable that true crime media and mystery novels are extremely captivating, we need to make sure that we distinguish the two. Mystery novels are books after all, not only are they fiction, but they can offer deep intellectual introspection. Take My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, for example, a murder mystery is a deeply philosophical novel that makes us think about art in intersectional ways. Even though at times true crime media can offer psychological insights into the minds of perpetrators, more often than not, these podcasts and TikTok videos dehumanise victims and turn tragic real-life stories into short-form entertainment.