Beyond the Page - When Authors Collide with Crime and Consequence

Content note: This series discusses real-world crime, violence, abuse, and other forms of harm as they relate to authors and literary culture. Some readers may find certain themes difficult. Please take care while reading.

True crime has become spectacle. The lives of victims and perpetrators are dissected, replayed, and reassembled into documentaries, podcasts, and “based on a true story” narratives that promise revelation while often offering very little restraint. Every moment is examined, every motive theorized, every detail rendered consumable. But far less attention is paid to the people who imagine crime for a living.

The writers who give us stories of murder, greed, obsession, and power don't exist outside the knowledge of their works. Many of them have their own proximity to real violence; as victims, witnesses, accused parties, or participants in systems that obscure harm. Sometimes those experiences shape the work. Sometimes they haunt it. And sometimes they disappear from public memory altogether.

Beyond the Page is a series that looks at what happens when fiction and true crime intersect. Drawing on publicly available information, each installment examines one or two authors whose lives collided with crime in ways that complicate how their work is read and remembered. This is not a true crime project, and it is not an exercise in moral verdicts. It is an attempt to sit with context, to notice silence, to trace patterns of protection and erasure, and to ask how stories survive even when the circumstances around them are deeply uncomfortable.

Some of these cases are well known. Others were quietly ignored, misidentified, or absorbed into myth. Not all of them end with answers. What they share is their impact, on the authors themselves, their writing, and the culture that continues to celebrate their work.

This series does not ask readers to stop reading. It asks them to read more attentively. To be more aware of what remains on the page, and what was left out. That attention, who receives it, who is denied it, and what disappears as a result, is where this series begins.

Next month, the first installment of Beyond the Page will examine two women whose lives became defined by absence, though in profoundly different ways. Agatha Christie disappeared and returned, only to refuse explanation. Barbara Newhall Follett disappeared and never came back. For a long time, she barely registered as missing at all.

Placed side by side, their stories illuminate how disappearance can function as narrative, how silence can operate as power or erasure, and how literary culture responds very differently to mysteries it can romanticize versus those it quietly allows to fade. Christie’s vanishing became legend. Follett’s became a footnote, resurfacing only decades later through the work of readers and scholars willing to look for those that had been overlooked.

That installment will open the series not by attempting to solve either mystery, but by asking what their absences reveal; about authorship, attention, and what we decide is worth remembering.

Beyond the Pages is published on the second Tuesday of each month. If you’d like a reminder when a new installment goes live, consider subscribing to my newsletter.