CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author Gil Reavill

“Morbidly fascinating,” “stimulating and brainy” – that’s the early word on a new true crime book coming out in May from Gotham Books (Penguin) that’s sure to grab the attention – if not the throats and stomachs – of true crime devotees. The book is Aftermath: Cleaning Up After CSI Goes Home. The author, Gil Reavill, guides a bloody tour of true crime scenes in an intelligent and respectful manner.

After the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, the unfortunate Emma Borden was the one who had to deal with the mess her sister left behind. She didn’t do a thorough job; luminol tests in the basement of the house, conducted only a few years ago, revealed the presence of century-old blood that had leaked through the floorboards. Today, thankfully, it’s somebody else’s job.

Author Reavill promises to introduce us to those who clean up the Devil’s dirty work. Reavill, who has years of journalism experience, has several interesting writing credits; for years he was the true crime correspondent for Maxim magazine. He also wrote a well-known book called Smut. His screenplay, Dirty, was recently made into a movie starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Intrigued by the subject of his new book (and curious about why the author is handing out a music compilation highlighting songs mentioned in the book), Clews recently had a chance to catch up to him, and he was kind enough to reply. Here’s our Q&A.

Did you hold anything back when you wrote this book?

Not in terms of description or detail. Personally, perhaps. But it was difficult for me to hold anything back, since the experience turned out to be so crushing emotionally (and to some degree, physically) that it lent itself to a total unburdening. Writing was therapy.

I had written about crime from one remove, and the first-hand, tactile, sensory feel of the crime scenes I encountered kept coming at me in ways I didn’t expect. For example, there were times when I was as much affected by a dead man’s left-behind possessions as by his left-behind blood and body fluids. I guess I did keep to myself a basic worry, surprising to me in its own way: not that I would be affected by dealing daily with death, but that I would NOT be affected. That death would somehow be rendered mundane, and I would be rendered heartless to the misery of its victims.

So it turns out that I held back my main anxiety, that the whole experience would turn out not to change me at all.

What is the CD compilation all about? A soundtrack for true crime? (If so, I'll request a few songs.)

The CD was something of a lark. I wrote this book in a reference-heavy manner, lots of quotes, citations, pop-culture asides — including song lyrics. As a present to my editor, I burned a disk with many of the songs I had referenced (some of them were brief, tangential mentions, others more integral to the text). She suggested I copy the CD as a gift to the sales reps. They would be the ones, after all, who would be selling my book to the people who would be selling my book. The shock troops of Penguin USA. I never did hear from a single one of them whether they liked the mix.

I’m still trying to track down a Betty Hutton number called “Murder, He Says,” which I think was the reference that the Angela Lansbury TV show played off of.

Did you have any particularly interesting experiences on your journey from true crime correspondent for a men's magazine to the hardcover end of the genre?

I have always done books. My first major true crime work was the David Smith book, Beyond All Reason (credited to “Carol Calef” and written by me, Gilbert Calef Reavill, and my wife, Jean Carol Zimmerman). My experience at Maxim helped immensely in sharpening my crime writing. These were 4,000-word stories, usually edited down to 3,500 words. At that length, you barely have time to turn around before you’re finished. It helped me cut fat. I learned to leave out what Elmore Leonard calls “the parts that the reader skips.”

Do you have any favorite authors in true crime? Favorite books? How old were you when you first read a true murder story?

Capote, of course. His book was a seminal influence, and the first one I read, a terrifying experience at age eleven. Ann Rule. I was in Aspen during Bundy’s Colorado phase, and her The Stranger Beside Me is one of the most amazing stories in the genre. Tim Cahill’s Buried Dreams is among the best in serial killer territory.

That calls to mind another “buried” book, Buried Secrets by Edward Humes.The modern classics, like Mindhunter and Helter Skelter and Patricia Cornwell’s Jack the Ripper: Case Closed.

I like Gus Russo’s mob stuff a lot. I usually tend toward the literary, such as Under the Banner of Heaven and The Devil in the White City. I came up via an academic English course load, and Hamlet is true crime. Gilgamesh. The Bible. My recent favorites are Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, by Julian Rubinstein (superlative and really, really funny), and Never Suck on a Dead Man’s Hand by a Baltimore CSI named Dana Kollmann.

What's your next project going to be about?

I do film work, and my screenwriting partner and I have a true-crime zombie story in the works. I’ve been working on a non-fiction book called Every Murder Tells a Story: The Narrative Strategies of Serial Killers. And a thriller about dark doings in Washington, D.C. -- sometimes I wonder if there are any other kind of doings in Washington, other than dark.

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For more on this interesting author and his many projects, visit Gil Reavill’s writing blog, http://dirtywriters.blogspot.com/, and the website of Aftermath: http://www.aftermaththebook.com/.