Dark places: true crime writing in Australia

This article outlines a brief textual and critical history of true crime writing in Australia, before addressing some of the methodological problems attached to a genre that relies simultaneously upon a rhetoric of truth claims and the activation of myth, superstition, gossip and story as its narrative strategies. It concludes by examining John Bryson’s Evil Angels, a seminal text in the history of Australian true crime, as an exemplar of the genre’s dual investment in history and storytelling, information and imagination.