True Crime Story - Joseph Knox

 True Crime Story is post-modernist crime fiction.  It does what Truman Capote tried in In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer developed in The Executioner's Song - but goes one stage further.  Where they novelised on real world crimes and criminals, Joseph Knox has made fictional crime seem real.  He uses the tropes of true crime documentaries - first person narratives, intercut and conflicting; expert commentary; even the making-of narrative - to persuade us, as we read, that this really happened.  Someone had to do it and Joseph Knox, who broke through with Sirens and The Smiling Man (both reviewed on this blog) is as good a candidate as any.

Knox is the best practitioner of contemporary Manc noir, thus True Crime Story is set in and around Manchester University at the end of the autumn term 2012.  Fresher Zoe Nolan disappears from a student tower block party.  At first, naturally, it is assumed she's just wandered off.  But her parents arrive and join her flat-mates (who include Zoe's twin, Kim) in raising the alarm.  Zoe is not the type to disappear - Kim is the 'bad' twin.  A sex tape is produced, apparently seen at the party itself, in which Zoe is having sex with the sleazy posh boy Andrew Flowers.  Flowers has been seen with dropout drug-dealer Jai Mahmood.  Liu Wai, who was obsessed with Zoe, stirs the pot along with Fintan Murphy, who claims to have been close to Zoe.  But most insistent of all is the twins' father, Robert, who had invested all his hopes in Zoe and her singing career.  He drives the press coverage, makes Zoe's disappearance a national obsession.  A charitable trust is founded in her name, to financially assist other young women of talent and to keep Zoe's name in the public eye.

Over the next seven years the lives of those around Zoe move on, not necessarily in a good way.  A young writer, Evelyn Mitchell, starts interviewing them in the hope of securing a deal for a book.  She turns for guidance to none other than Joseph Knox who, before he became the breakout author of modern Manc noir was peripherally involved in the Nolan case.  We see some of the email interchange between them as Evelyn develops her theories.  Evelyn ultimately solves the mystery but it is Knox who completes the book and does the additional interviews for this, the second edition.

It is very clever, very well done, and though I finally guessed who was responsible, I didn't work out how that person had fixed their alibi.  The book is full of such twists and turns as it should be.  You can't do a mystery with a small circle of suspects without parading each in turn as Suspect Number One.  Some twists work better than others, which again is inevitable.

I enjoyed it.  I really appreciated the craft and skill on display.  But I don't particularly want to read anything else like it.  It's in effect a literary conjuring trick.  Very impressive - until you start to deconstruct how it was done.