Best of 2023: Flashback Discoveries
What older true crime property was your greatest discovery this year?
the true crime that's worth your time
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! We’re continuing our year-end wrap-up with five more issues every day this week, starting off with recommendations for older properties that our panel discovered this year.
Then, as we noted Friday, we’ll start the work to migrate to a platform that doesn’t actively market itself as a safe haven for hate speech. We’ll keep you posted on what that means for you, including where we’re going, how to find us, and what details we’ll all need to update. Thanks again for your support during this poorly-timed situation — your patience as we move this operation is the greatest gift we could ever receive (that, or a couple billion dollars). — Sarah and Eve
I spent far too much time this year watching The First 48. Is it a good show? No. But it might be the best, truest representation of murders on TV, in that it’s entirely unglamorous, with most cases solved by detectives in Enid who look like human thumbs telling suspects that they’ll feel better if they just admit to what they did, getting them to agree to being at the scene, and that they did bring a gun, and maybe they didn’t mean to do it, and it works just about every time (or, at least, they don’t show the episodes where it doesn’t).
It almost doesn’t feel like the copaganda it is because the police are so hapless, so incapable of finding any suspect who isn’t on camera or posts on social media about how they totally did a murder. It doesn’t require anything approaching anyone’s full attention: most episodes are 18 minutes of content in a 42 minute sack, and the recap strategy implies that the viewership consists largely of head trauma patients, but for second screening while grading papers or running numbers, it works wonderfully. — Professor and Best Evidence contrib Dan Cassino
I suppose it's This House of Grief by Helen Garner, originally published in 2014. I wrote the introduction. — Author Sarah Weinman, aka The Crime Lady
Thanks to Best Evidence contributor Sarah Weinman for her recommendation of Australian writer Helen Garner’s This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial. Initially published in 2014 and re-issued in the U.S. this year, this first-hand account of the trial of a father for the drowning of his three children is mesmerizing. The comparisons to Janet Malcolm are inevitable, but Garner is no copycat. I haven’t been wowed by writing this good in a long time. — Best Evidence contributor Susan Howard
The 2020 podcast Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? It's an actual event investigated by the two brides and their admittedly "extremely underqualified" fake detective friend. It certainly pokes fun at true-crime, but also becomes a riveting investigation on its own, despite the extreme silliness of the subject matter. — Andy Dehnart, TV critic and creator of reality blurred
Following a trail of links around Aston Kutcher’s problematic support of convicted rapist Danny Masterson, I ended up with a YouTube algorithm that kept insisting on feeding me former Masterson/Kutcher co-star Topher Grace’s portrayal of David Duke in Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman. I lost interest in Lee a decade ago when he brought Mike Tyson’s one man show—in which the convicted rapist and admitted domestic abuser “comedically” mimes kicking and hitting ex-wife Robin Givens—to the stage and HBO, but Grace suckered me in, dammit.
And dammit some more, because I had a fantastic time with this movie, which I know y’all saw and think I’m a ding-dong for just “discovering.” (Next up, did you hear that bread comes pre-sliced these days?) I’d read Ron Stallworth’s (the titular Black klansman) book and liked it, but the kinetic energy and sharp wit on this movie made me remember why Lee is one of the greats—albeit, a great with real shortcomings when it comes to the rights of and respect for women. — EB
Stretching our genre definitions a touch here, especially given the very literary production the recent reissue got - the dreamy cover is a million miles away from red block writing on a black background- but White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin by Michael W. Clune isn't just an examination of Clune's life of addiction, although that in itself is astonishing, it also digs into the uncomfortable truths of his experience as a white guy copping in Baltimore, and how race, class, and gender helped draw the lines of his journey to recovery. — Margaret Howie is a marketing drone by day, co-founder of spacefruitpress.com by night.
Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire. The Australian docu-series (three parts and be warned they are 90 minutes each) was made in 2021. It has just landed on Netflix. This is a meticulous investigation of the 1979 fire in the Ghost Train ride at Luna Park in Sydney, which killed six young boys and one man. Watch it, then listen to Best Evidence's own Sarah D. Bunting discuss it on the December 26th episode of Crime Seen on RHAP. — writer and Crime Seen co-host Sarah Carradine
Not *too* much older but I read Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2020) this year. By coincidence I was finishing the book as I was watching the last season of Derry Girls, and I think my greatest discovery was how well the two work together. The TV show covers the final years leading up to the Good Friday accords, and follows a group of three (Catholic) Northern Irish girls and an English boy as they live their lives surrounded by the sectarian violence that Say Nothing details so carefully and compellingly. But the thing about Derry Girls is it's really, really funny. Though the reality of the political situation is omnipresent, and one of the girl's brothers is in jail for killing a loyalist, the series insists on how teenage life--crushes and drinking and dances and music and intra-group spats--is the defining paradigm for these girls. — True Crime Fiction author Tracy Bealer
Anatomy of a Murder, for sure. Honorable mention to the audiobook of Poisoned Blood. — Best Evidence co-author Sarah D. Bunting