November 2023 Bonus Review: Closing Time

The crime
The murder of Roseann Quinn by John Wayne Wilson on New Year’s Day (…ish) 1973.

The story
The highest-profile iteration of Quinn’s violent demise is probably 1977’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, starring Diane Keaton as the Quinn character; the film is based on the 1975 novel by the same name, written by Judith Rossner. The Goodbar “branding,” for lack of a better term, proved sufficiently strong that Lacey Fosburgh’s 1977 “interpretive non-fiction” book, Closing Time, likely had no choice but to include “Goodbar” in the subtitle (“The True Story of the ‘Goodbar’ Murder”). I actually didn’t know, prior to processing Closing Time into shop inventory, that there were two distinct books addressing the case. I still don’t know whether to recommend Fosburgh’s. Is it true crime worth your time?

It’s worth my time, because it’s a time capsule of sorts, a window into how these stories got told a half-century ago, before the true-crime genre morphed and expanded into what it is today and demarcated different subgenre/medium “lanes” more clearly. I don’t know how interesting the book is to civilians on that basis, though — how meta the average reader wants to get, contemplating the term “interpretive non-fiction” as it compares to “nonfiction novel,” noting that the exemplar of the former is blurbed by the creator of the latter1. How much time do people want to spend wondering, as I did, if Closing Time would even get written today, given the Quinn family’s decision not to participate, and the subsequent (and at times fetishistically poetic) centering of the killer?