Word: mcginniss
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...controversial New Yorker articles published last month, Malcom sharply criticized author Joe McGinniss for the methods he used to write Fatal Vision, a book about a military doctor who brutally murdered his pregnant wife and two children one night 20 years...
...fertile ground for what the publishing business calls a "true crime" book. Such a product should feature a victim and killer, preferably related to each other, who share the same demographics and conventions as the middle-class readership. The appeal of this sort of thing is obvious, as Joe McGinniss proved in Fatal Vision (1983), the best seller about U.S. Army Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician convicted in 1979 of murdering his wife and children...
...McGinniss now moves from the heinous to the despicable. Blind Faith is a highly stylized account of an upscale murder case in a small town on the edge of the Pine Barrens that, like so many New Jersey backwaters, has gone from quiet ruburb to bustling suburb in the past two decades. On the night of Sept. 7, 1984, Maria Marshall, 42, was shot to death while sitting in the family Cadillac. Husband Robert O. Marshall claimed he had parked the vehicle in a dark picnic area off the Garden State Parkway to inspect a tire. He further maintained that...
...hard to imagine more odious citizens than some of those portrayed in Blind Faith. The villain of Fatal Vision had a perverse stature and a demonic intelligence that are totally lacking in McGinniss's Robert Marshall. His fabrications and the entreaties recorded on love cassettes to his mistress suggest a ludicrous absence of self-awareness. Marshall's low animal cunning hits bottom when he exploits his sons' conflict between filial loyalty and the truth about their mother's death. McGinniss makes the Marshall boys' loss of innocence the emotional center of an otherwise lurid and coldhearted book...
...gained from reading an overheated version of this "true crime"? Not much. In fact, a few things are lost. For example, the real names of some people who were central to the case. Even though these names are matters of public record and appeared often in newspapers, McGinniss changes them to, as he says, "preserve privacy." A more probable reason for fictitious identifications is to prevent libel suits. Because the impact of true crime depends on melodrama, the scenes and dialogue are liberally re-created by the author. Some of the dialogue seems too good to be true -- unless...