FERRUM, VA, December 8, 2020—English professor Lana Whited’s latest book began over 35 years ago, with a search for a book in a Greensboro bookstore. In 1984, as a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Whited went looking for Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences.” She came up empty-handed after visiting the crime and nonfiction sections.
Puzzled to eventually find the true crime book in the fiction section, Whited began a decades-long study of murder narratives, attempting to define a literary species within mainstream American literature. Her research extended beyond the writing of her Ph.D. dissertation at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, which was completed in 1993. The current result of her investigation is “Murder, In Fact: Disillusionment and Death in the American True Crime Novel,” released in November 2020 and now available from most booksellers.
Whited’s study turned into an examination of literary Naturalism, which she says involves “the application of deterministic principles to literary works.” Whereas newspaper reporters covering violent crime strive for objectivity, the Naturalists depict their protagonists in a more subjective way and in a manner that suggests a lack of free agency in their lives; what these characters do is generally a reaction to their environment. Themes in Naturalistic writing include violence, pessimism, and pitting social environments against one another. For example, those who had rough childhoods would inevitably inflict pain on higher class residents with a predictable result of jail time or worse.
“A journalist writing about a murder case or trial is relaying information that the reader can process and shape into a theory of the crime,” explained Whited. “The authors of the novels in my study shape the material to offer their own theory, presenting the reader with an argument about why the crime occurred. Reporting is objective; Naturalism is subjective.”
Whited says she connects novels written from the 1890s to the present with Naturalism based on three characteristics: “the authors’ use of reporting skills borrowed from journalism, and, in many cases, from work as journalists early in their careers; the authors’ focus on the murderer, not the victim as a protagonist, attempting to account for his psychopathology (this is where Naturalism enters in); and the authors’ writing about crimes having basis in fact.”
Whited loves the book’s cover design. “That is an aspect of the publishing process over which authors have almost zero control,” she said.
She is relieved to finally hold the book that took 35 years to write, but she also has “a sense of a lost limb or not seeing an old friend anymore,” she explained. Her work was not without trials. “At certain points, I have had to put the project aside for periods of time because the material became too traumatic. I have had nightmares about Capote’s book in particular. When the nightmares increased, I knew it was time to back off or focus differently. But I don’t think I will ever have true crime fatigue.”
Learn more about Whited’s book at McFarland Books, here.
Or use your Amazon Smile account to purchase her book while supporting Ferrum College. Learn more here.
