Anneli Rufus

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

by Anneli Rufus

(Vol. 17, Aug. 15, 2004)

Who says true crime isn't the best beach-reading? Summer sunshine makes us feel warm and comforted and safe, in which case a crime book provides the same bracing jolt — that high-contrast frisson — as an ice-cold drink. And reading about crimes committed in faraway places deepens their summertime appeal even further: Whether you're actually on vacation or not, reading about an Irish art heist or Bolivian drug trafficking broadens your perspectives and makes you feel as if you've actually been somewhere. Crime and criminals are different elsewhere. Now's as good a time as any to find out how and why.

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

by Anneli Rufus

(Vol. 15, Nov. 5, 2003)

In late October I was fortunate to interview true-crime queen Ann Rule. She was in the Bay Area to promote her latest book, Heart Full of Lies. Rule told me that she "can't stand" mystery fiction: As we true-crime fans know, what's the point of reading about made-up murders when the real ones are more gripping? "When I read mystery novels, I'm always finding things wrong with the police procedures," sighed Rule, whose inability to pass the eyesight portion of the test that would have allowed her to become a cop still stands as "the greatest disappointment of my life." Her college major was creative writing, "but only because it was an easy A," she admits. "I never wanted to be a writer." But "as a young mother about to be divorced with four little kids," she started writing for since defunct True Detective magazine. Some 1,400 articles and many bestsellers later, Rule is working on a book about Washington State's Green River Killer case, about which she has filled an entire closet in her home with files and newspaper clippings. After 20 years and some 49 unsolved murders, a suspect has finally been arrested and tagged as the killer. When Gary Ridgway was first nabbed, "my daughter saw his picture on the news and said, 'Mom, that's the guy who used to come to all your book signings,'" Rule recalled with a shudder. "She said, 'He'd stand there leaning against the wall.'"

 
Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

by Anneli Rufus

(Vol. 9, Oct. 5, 2002)

With international intelligence, infiltration, surveillance and secret weapons making headlines every day, we've come to see a whole new kind of crime as increasingly real, rather than the titillating yet comfortingly remote stuff of spy novels. New books such as Into Tibet, Blood Diamonds, The Hacker Diaries and Spy Dust explore the global scope and terrifyingly high stakes of international intrigue.

Nov. 7, 2011

True-crime books make great cold-weather reading – and great holiday gifts – because they make us feel safe. Reading these accounts of crazed psychopaths who went on rampages and seemingly normal suburbanites with lethal secrets, we shiver and think: At least I'm not trapped in a Cape Cod kitchen with a knife-wielding murderer. At least I'm not on a beach with Joran Van Der Sloot. Wherever we are suddenly feels like a blissful refuge – for a little while, at least. But the further you get into almost any true-crime book, the more you realize that the madness and mayhem leaping from its pages could easily happen to you. A Harvard-educated professor goes postal with a Ruger. A child vanishes from a bus stop. The respected commander of Canada’s largest military base prowls and murders at night. Safety is a relative thing.

by Anneli Rufus

June 20, 2011

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

At their best, true-crime books are character studies — getting languorously, even microscopically up close and personal with criminals, victims, witnesses, law-enforcement personnel, and whomever else gets swept up into the orbit of a crime. Page by page, we follow these people's paths as they race forward, double back, mark time, loop the loop and intersect. This is one of true crime's secret pleasures: Through reading these books and "meeting" these individuals — many of whom are very unlucky indeed — we marvel at how ordinary they appear to the outside world. As revealed in two of the books detailed this month, savage killers can also be suburban housewives, shuttling their kids to playdates and school. How well do we really know what's going on right now, next door?

by Anneli Rufus

May 30, 2011 

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

Identity is a tricky thing. That name, that birthdate, and all those other details allegedly marking you as whom you claim to be are recorded on documents, in files, on cards, and in the archives of every institution from your bank to the church where you were baptized. But we live in a highly mobile society, amid dazzlingly adept technology. In an era when any image can be Photoshopped and even a world leader's birth certificate can be called into question by a large sector of the population, identity becomes a matter of trust. Who are you? Who am I? Why should we believe each other? When it comes to crime, the issue of identity looms large. Countless criminals strive to elude justice under false identities. The subject of one of this column's books, a small-town scammer who passed himself off as a Rockefeller, shifted identities for 30 years before running out of false names and false faces. The killers detailed in another of these books learned hard lessons about identity as their own effluent, left on their victims decades ago, reached out of the past to scream: It was him. It was him.

by Anneli Rufus

March 19, 2011

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

The first two books this time around share a common modus operandi: A young and much-loved son, whose parents had always given him everything, brings about the vicious murders of those very parents in the would-be comfort of their own suburban home. It's an MO so dark, so outrageous, so ironic, such a precise perversion of all that humanity holds sacred as to be almost Shakespearean. Taking the lives of those who gave you life: Murder is murder, but could any other kind of murder be crueler? The coldhearted calculations of Andrew Wamsley and David Legg led to four deaths, but destroyed many more lives than that.

 by Anneli Rufus