OhOpening shot: Young woman on a crowded subway. AirPods in her ears. Loud music isolating her from the ambient noise. She exits the subway, boards an escalator, and slowly ascends into daylight. Now the camera zooms out. The woman becomes first one of many crowded heads, then a drop in a sea of people, anonymous, invisible. Next scene: The woman is in the service elevator. Behind her: two colleagues, laughing and chatting. On the fifth floor. pings The elevator opens. The woman pushes a cleaning cart over the thick carpet of what can only be the hallway of a posh hotel. Her colleagues follow her persistently. The woman stops in front of the suite door, knocks without thinking, and holds her employee card in front of the digital lock.
And then the title: The soup was still hot..
That’s how I imagine it, the premiere of the inevitable movie about the multiple-poison murder discovered Tuesday night in a suite at Bangkok’s Grand Hyatt Erawan. Every news source in the world covered it, with revealing details strewn everywhere: six lifeless bodies in the suite, traces of cyanide in cups and thermoses, and six untouched meals on the table (shrimp soup, fried rice, and stir-fried vegetables). Details like breadcrumbs that draw you ever deeper into the fairy-tale forest of true crime. The most popular podcast genre (aside from the one about celebrities complaining) is digging into old murders. A teenager can’t go a night without Netflix serving up a six-course binge-watching bacchanal. And journalistic crime books naturally make the best-seller lists.
About the Author
Frank Heinen is a writer and columnist for of VolkskrantColumnists are free to express their opinions and do not have to adhere to journalistic rules of objectivity. Read our guidelines here.
This exceptional popularity has puzzled countless writers and researchers in recent years. How could true crime have moved so quickly from the margins of culture into the mainstream? One possible cause was often cited as the possibility of continuing to puzzle: the possibility that, as an amateur, you might get stuck in the investigation and be Hercule Poirot or Lisbet Salander yourself, if you just persevere. For those who want to know how such detective work can go wrong, I highly recommend the miniseries. I will leave in the dark For interesting insights into the nature of true crime and its appeal: Cassandraby Niña Weijers.
The true crimes on last week’s newscast were of a more classic detective nature, a measured, safe, old-fashioned but also unbreakable genre: the cyanide murder in Thailand, the murder of a London couple by (apparently) a friend on holiday, and the story of a serial killer in Kenya who killed 42 women in two years. The latter was arrested – another detail – while watching the Euro final in a café. There was little to worry about, the alleged perpetrator always turned himself in ready, including a confession or a possible motive: for example, the hotel poisoning murder was said to have to do with a million-dollar investment gone wrong.
Georges Simenon said that the beauty of any (crime) story, whether it’s a detective novel, a true crime novel, or a family novel, is that you can look through the keyhole to see if other people have the same feelings and instincts as you do. You want to know what motivates the other person, because you want to know what motivates you. Me too…? Really…? Oh, no…? And how…? Because the real enigma, the mystery that will never be fully explained, is, of course, ourselves.
