The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty

While visual true-crime media in the form of documentaries and television series is a modern phenomenon, public interest in stories about real criminal activities dates back to the 16th century, when the development of the printing press and rapidly growing literacy rates contributed to the mass publication of legal news pamphlets that appealed to the public’s morbid fascination with gruesome crimes. These early sensationalist narratives evolved into more analytical investigations of the psychology of criminality in the 19th century. At the same time, some of English literature’s most famous writers crafted imagined stories about crime; prime examples include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (Burger, Pamela. “The Bloody History of the True Crime Genre.” Daily from JSTOR, 24 Aug. 2016).

In the 20th century, true crime stories appeared in popular magazines like True Detective, and authors began to write full-length books about notorious crimes, sharing details of key events, evidence, suspects, and law enforcement procedures. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) became a seminal work in the true crime genre because it employed literary devices to discuss a real crime. This “nonfiction novel” style became the new hallmark of the true crime genre, blending the specificity of crime reporting with the symbols, universal themes, character archetypes, and narrative arcs of fiction. Other popular texts in the genre that followed this shift include Helter Skelter, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Columbine. The authors of such texts usually had a close connection to the cases they described; they were often journalists, investigators, or even victims themselves. Valerie Bauerlein’s The Devil at His Elbow follows this tradition, as the author refers to the minutiae of Alex Murdaugh’s criminal case and also forms an emotional narrative about his victims.