“Ripped from the headlines!”
“Inspired by a real story.”
“Some of what follows is true…”
These are all familiar phrases that many mystery authors – including myself – have used to describe the murderous plots we write about in our books.
On the face of it, this sure seems like a pretty nifty concept. Find a sensational crime in the news (how hard is that to do these days!), write the story as fiction and it becomes a best-selling novel.
Seems easy, right?
Except it doesn’t really work that way.
Most “ripped from the headlines” mystery novels wind up being much different than the stories they were originally based on. There’s a couple of reasons for this. One, of course, is legal considerations—it’s tricky to make stuff up about a real person. But, even more than that, writing a mystery novel that mirrors the original crime too closely wouldn’t be that interesting as a mystery novel. It would basically be a true crime book. So the job of the mystery author is to create a whole new fictional crime – even if it was originally inspired by real-life news events.
In the end, I guess you could say what we’re talking about here is the ultimate in fake news.
I recently interviewed best-selling author Michael Koryta about his new thriller How It Happened— which is inspired in part by a true crime Koryta vividly remembers while he was growing up in Indiana, the disappearance of a young woman named Jill Behrman. A suspect confessed to the murder and told authorities where the body was buried. But the information turned out to be false, and— bizarrely enough— another person was later convicted for the crime.
Koryta’s novel is about a similar type of crime— but he pointed out to me that he waited 20 years to write it and then dramatically changed many of the facts from the real-life story.
“I think it took me this long to figure out how to get the right level of emotional distance from it,” he explained. “Changing the location to Maine and making it a contemporary story, all that allowed the novel to exist on its own to me. I did not feel that I was attempting to write a novelization of Jill’s story. I didn’t feel like I was fictionalizing anyone’s tragedy.”
One of the most well-known novels inspired by real life front page crime is To Die For, written by Joyce Maynard (and later adapted into a hit movie starring Nicole Kidman) which is based on the case of Pamela Smart, the New Hampshire school teacher who went to prison for seducing a teenage boy to murder her husband. But even that book and movie changed some of the facts to make the case more dramatic as fiction. “This is not my movie… nothing in here is my story,” Smart herself complained about the To Die For movie after it was released.
I’ve always done the same thing when writing my own “ripped from the headlines” mystery novels. My book Shooting for the Stars—about the celebrity murder of a movie starlet gunned down on the streets of Manhattan by a stalker—was inspired by the John Lennon murder in 1980. But there is no mystery about Lennon’s death, it clearly was the work of a deranged killer for no apparent reason. So I created a whole new fictional story in my novel where the stalker didn’t really commit the murder, and a complex murder conspiracy unfolds instead.
My latest mystery Yesterday’s News has a plot about a missing child in Manhattan— and a reporter obsessed with finding out the answers. Some people think about the legendary Etan Patz case when they hear about it—the tragic case of the 6-year-old boy who disappeared in New York City back in 1979. And yes, I did cover the Patz case as a journalist. But my story is really a completely different one. The Patz disappearance was eventually solved when a man was convicted of the little boy’s murder. In my book, there are no answers or closure to the case— which is why the reporter has to uncover long-buried secrets to discover what really happened to the child.
The bottom line here is that the “fake news” we mystery authors create from real life crimes is almost always more interesting than the actual news event it’s based on.
Hey, that’s why people love to read mysteries and thrillers – fiction is always stranger (and more exciting!) than the truth.
Well, almost always..
The one exception to that rule was a story I covered at the New York Post which led to the Post’s legendary “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline. It involved a man who held up a topless bar, shot the owner to death—then cut off the owner’s head and took it with him as he fled. The details of the crime made no sense whatsoever, but they led to the most famous tabloid headline and story of all time.
No fiction writer could ever make up a “ripped from the headlines” story better than that!
R.G. Belsky is a journalist and crime fiction author. He has been a top editor at the New York Post, New York Daily News, Star magazine and NBC News. His most recent mystery is Yesterday’s News, published on May 1.