What does the Pacific Northwest produce in the 1970s? Well, among other things, serial killers and serial amounts of deadly pollution. In Murderland, Caroline Fraser suggests that these two facts are not unrelated. “Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage and neglect…but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma?” As the pollution hits a peak so does violent crime, neither of which provoke a particularly committed response. Life is cheap and as long as the profits keep rolling in, America’s ruling class are doing very nicely, thank you very much. “It takes two great American fortunes to build a city of serial killers: the Rockefellers and Guggenheims”. Murderland is as grim as you’d expect but it’s brilliantly and compellingly written by a writer suddenly occupying the ground people like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer at one time called their own. Is Murderland ‘true crime’? Well, yes, but it’s a bit more than that, as memoir, time and place, and murder collide to create a modern classic that’s desperate for answers. “Criminologists reach for explanations, each less convincing than the last…”, and yet maybe the obvious solution is in the air, in food bought from the supermarket, in the water supply. ‘Traditional’ true crime writers aren’t supposed to take left turns, aren’t supposed to poke a big stick in the doings of male politicians and how a country is run by them, for them, and why. Then again Caroline Fraser, as I argue, isn’t a great true crime writer, she’s just a great writer period, whose anger and elegant style lay to rest the hypocrisy and horror of the American Dream. “I have an incantation…I curse you, you corporate scribes and pharisees, you hypocrites, rubbing your hands over white sepulchres full of dead women’s bones. You think you’re getting away with it. Just you wait”. Murderland is stunning. Nothing will come close to eclipsing this as paperback of the year.

Murderland – Caroline Fraser – Publ. by Fleet £14.99

Steven Long