Required Watching

If you write crime fiction, want to write crime fiction or have ever entertained even the briefest notion of writing crime fiction, then you must see this interview (followed by parts two, three, four and eventually, five and six.) It is hard to watch. It is even harder to look away. And as Ed put it, "they don’t make television like this anymore."

Comments

[Jennifer Jordan]

Thank you for posting this.

[Steve Allan]

It's incredibly fascinating to watch how Manson's mind works - and extremely disturbing. When I worked for a mental health facility I would see many people with similar afflications, though no where near the extent of Manson's illness, and I have to say that I became jaded to what they said and did - unless they had violent or homicidal tendencies, in which case they were watched quite closely. I was an administrator, but I sat in on a few sessions with the more violent clients, or at least had violent fantasies, as a security measure for the psychiatric nurses, so they wouldn't be alone with these people. Having said all that, I do need to express that a large majority of the mentally ill are not violent. I think that is the main reason that I have such a high expectation for reality in serial killer stories - they either need to be very accurate or so outrageous that their portrayal is nothing but an excercise in absurdity (e.g., The Joker).

Manson is an interesting case for not only his mental illness but for the cult of personality - how he got so many people to follow him and commit such horrible killings. It goes into that whole thought of what is evil? Is Manson evil or incredibly sick? I lean toward the latter. It is far too common in crime fiction that a writer will use a Manson-like character to examine evil, but in doing so they fail to recognize that evil is an easy label that marks such a character as something more than human, a monster, rather than the more chilling thought that the character is quite human, that there is the possibility of such disturbance within all of us.