Journalism: This is a murky business. Michael Finkel was a journalist working for the New York Times Magazine, until he made up a part of a story he was writing about cocoa farming in Africa, and was fired.
Soon after, Finkel discovered that a man called Chris Longo, who'd been arrested and accused of murdering his wife, MaryJane Longo, and their three children, Sadie, Zachery and Madison, in the town of Waldport, Oregon, had adopted Finkel's name while on the run in Mexico. So, naturally, Finkel contacted the suspected multiple-murderer and began a correspondence with him, which Finkel has now turned into a book. True Story is a nasty, weird, utterly compelling tale of two pathological liars.
The book is brisk and pacy, in that way that all true-crime books are brisk and pacy, which certainly gets the reader going but which can also leave you feeling a little strained and exhausted: "The next day - Thursday, December 27 - FBI agents got the break they were hoping for"; "The very day that Christian Michael Longo was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list - January 11, 2002 - a Canadian woman contacted the bureau and said she'd just returned from Cancun and believed she had seen Longo there".
It's all dashes and dates. There's also that characteristic true-crime omniscient narration, which makes you feel anxious and queasy: "Several officers burst through the cabana's door and brought Longo out, handcuffed"; "When he entered the condo, his family was asleep". True-crime writing is properly neither fact nor fiction: it's voyeurism.
When Finkel asks Longo why he used his name while on the run, instead of someone more anonymous or more famous, Longo replies that there was something about Finkel's adventurous assignments for Skiing magazine, and for the New York Times and National Geographic Adventure - crossing the Sahara, skiing in the Canadian Rockies, visiting Haiti - that excited his "jealousy bone" and also that "You have a writing style . . . that I wasn't embarrassed to call my own". Apart from this being extremely creepy, one can only conclude that Finkel's is the kind of prose that appeals to psychopathic killers (Longo, we learn, was eventually convicted of the murders) - but then you can hardly blame Finkel for his readers. Longo, we are told, is also a great admirer of the New Yorker magazine and, interestingly, of the vast introspections and derangements of cult American writer David Foster Wallace.
Finkel explains that in order to write his book he's worked from the transcripts of his long pre-trial telephone calls with Longo, transcripts which fill seven volumes, and from their vast correspondence (more than 1,000 pages of letters from Longo, and a similar amount of - photocopied - replies from Finkel). The book clearly wishes it was Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, or John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - indeed, the jacket blurb explicitly makes the comparison - and in his own mind Finkel doubtless justifies the publication of the book because it reveals the mind of a killer. It does no such thing, of course, any more than, say, Michael Holroyd's three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw reveals the mind of George Bernard Shaw, although it certainly does mount up to something: a lot of interesting incidental details. There are always interesting incidental details. Longo, for example, calculates that he had been a decent person for 92.88 per cent of his life; he admits to once having paid "for a PG movie but sneaking into an R (Tango and Cash )" and also "removing a jarful of vodka from his parents' liquor cabinet".
Finkel draws few conclusions from his intense and disturbing relationship with Longo, except that it helps him to sort out a few issues in his own life. "As much as I'd like to deny it, the truth is that I saw some of myself in Longo. The flawed parts of my own character - the runaway egotism, the capacity to deceive - were mirrored and magnified in him," Finkel writes. This seems banal, to say the least. The deeper truth, which the book clearly implies and demonstrates when it charts the truly shocking course of Longo's trial, is that an admission of guilt is also often a means of self-exculpation. Mea culpa? Mea virtute me involve.
Ian Sansom is the author of Ring Road (Fourth Estate, 2004), and The Truth About Babies (Granta, 2002)
True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa By Michael Finkel Chatto & Windus, 312pp. £15.99