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The Husband Is Always Guilty

Ian Rankin has identified three important stages in any good crime novel: the crime, the cover-up, and the investigation.

Obviously, the investigation is the least-sexy part. There's an inevitable let-down once you know who the killer is (which is often before the detectives, so then there's some slogging required). Ruth Rendell solved this problem by saving the resolution for (literally, sometimes) the last sentence. Val McDermid addresses the issue by injecting constant, twisty workplace politics into the investigation.

PD James had a real blindspot with resolutions. She would have a thrilling wrap-up to the hunt for the murderer, but then she would go on and on, for additional pages, about Dalgliesh's love life. Who ever cared about that love life? Who ever cared about those final twenty pages?

Janet Malcolm does not write crime fiction, but she does write a bizarre variant on a standard true crime story. One thing I love about her work is that she chooses cases that don't really have clear resolutions: Joe McGinnis, the Forest Hills murder. So you're left to stare, and stare, and stare, in a state of being tantalized, as if you were looking at Mona Lisa's ambiguous smile. At the same time, Malcolm is still able to deliver a satisfying end to her stories, because the stories aren't explicitly about WHODUNIT. They're always about language, or about flawed systems, or about journalism. So you can provide an ending without actually providing an ending. A neat trick.

Beyond Malcolm, there are two other true crime legends in my book (as of now). They are the two gentlemen who run the "Generation Why" podcast. I know almost nothing about them. But I love them. They are the definition of BROMANCE. They are two straight men who genuinely care for each other. You can hear it in the audio. They have soft, gentle voices, and they use these voices to discuss dead babies born after the murder of the mother, or bombs strapped to mentally-disabled pizza deliverymen, or ladies wielding butcher knives.

The men who run "Generation Why" are like Tina Fey's gold standard for great comics. Fey says, when you are improvising and your partner gives you something outlandish, your job is to say YES, AND....And these two men do that. They are exquisite listeners. They validate each other. They are also well-rehearsed. There are few digressions. They know their facts. Their theories are plausible and compelling.

(I'm starting to think I can sense when one, or the other, has an "off" day. On the "Evil Genius" podcast, for example, the two are a bit less harmonious than they normally are. Had one been caught in awful traffic? This is just speculation.)

If you want to listen to "Generation Why," I have some rules. Skip the opening and closing music, because it's terrifying. It seems to be a saw scratching up against some wood, while nightcrawlers hoot and whisper in the background. If it's after dark and you're listening alone, listen while you cook (and have wine at hand). It's somehow not terrifying if you are active; if you're standing; if your hands are busy. Listening while sitting alone at a desk: That's a bad idea.

The "Generation Why" people generally subscribe to the HUSBAND IS ALWAYS GUILTY philosophy. This is simple: If there's any ambiguousness, any at all, then it's almost certainly a case where someone in the actual family did the deed. (Samantha Bee spoofed false ambiguousness around the time of "The Staircase." Basically, she said: "It's not an intruder. It's not a fucking owl. It's the husband. It's always the husband." Recently, the NYT revealed that the place where a woman is least safe is her own home.)

Someone in the actual family did it: Kathleen Peterson. The Madeleine McCann disappearance. The killing of JonBenet Ramsey. Laci Peterson. At least: If you ask the fellows behind "Generation Why."

To me, the Madeleine McCann story has the juiciest Three Act structure, at present. If "Generation Why" is correct, then this is Act One: The wealthy McCanns give their tiny child sedatives so she'll sleep, but they use too many pills, and the kid croaks. Act Two: The McCanns enlist a cabal of doctor friends to tell a lie. She just went missing! We had this bizarre system where, in a foreign country, we all drank to excess far off from our small kids, who slept in unlocked rooms, and well, YOU take it from there! Meanwhile, the McCanns hire a rental car to move Madeleine's hidden body to a mystery spot somewhere in Portugal. Act Three: Trained corpse-sniffing dogs detect a cadaver scent in the McCann rental car. The entitled McCann mother becomes more and more evasive. Finally: Something cracks. (We'll have to wait and see.)

Anyway, I present all this to suggest (a) "Generation Why" is a useful evening treat, if you feel something is missing in your life, and (b) true crime is helpful because it leads you to think about how *any* genre operates, and about how actual life sometimes refuses to conform to the expectations set up by sturdy bits of fiction. Food for thought. Happy listening! And more later.

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