A Thing I May Actually Do This Time

Richard Sharp, Flickr

Back in late 2004 I started writing a blog about true crime, on a lark. I was unemployed and a gig had fallen through; I needed something to occupy me. As I was angry about the gig, tales of murder--already a long-time fascination--seemed appropriate.

I guess I ended up being pretty good at what I was doing, because by mid-2005 I was writing for truTV's Crime Library. I would go on to do a bunch of true crime-related stuff on TV and write for Radar Magazine, Village Voice Media, the New York Observer and several other pretty damn good publications. Well, good until they took my work. Anyway, I got paid for that stuff, so that's good.

In 2009, about the same time I received the most notice I'd ever had for my crime reporting--an appearance on CBS' 48 Hours Mystery and a couple of articles on their website--I realized that I was really fucking sick of writing about true crime. The reasons were many but overall it was a malaise, I guess. A broad cloak of depression that settled over me like a big, wet, wool blanket that I was sure would never dry or stop smelling like a half-dead dog just in from the rain.

So I kind of just stopped. I didn't stop writing. I wrote even more, in some respects. But I started avoiding crime. I didn't want to deal with it. I didn't want to read about any more dead children or missing women. I have enough trouble maintaining my sanity as it is, I thought, why the fuck am I adding rocks to the steadily smothering Giles Corey of my soul with this stuff?

It may have been a bad decision in some respects (read: money) for the writing career I'd begun, but I guess I figured I'd live with it. So I kept writing, even about crime--but only sometimes. I also wrote about politics and pop culture for The Observer. I did write a crime article for The Daily Beast--and while it was fine, I look back at it now and think my heart wasn't in it.

Thing was, I had no doubts about my decision to commit to being a writer. I just had doubts about the subject to which I'd tethered myself. People like their pigeonholes, they like boxes, and anyone who was aware of me as a writer pegged me as that true crime guy. That was the part I had to tie off, let wither and die, as it were. While there are genres of writing I really love--and true crime is among them--I just couldn't lock myself into any  one genre. What's wrong, really, with just being a fucking writer, and writing shit? Nothing. If a writer can wield words and make their peculiar fascinations and thoughts about those fascinations entertaining for a reader, who cares where that writer wants to go with it? I like to try my hand at writing a lot of things, like humor. I also love horror, and most of the fiction I've written (I've yet to publish any of note) has been at the very least "strange," if not plain old horror.

And when it comes to non-fiction, I'm interested in everything from history and sociology to the peculiar histories of major disasters and odd and eccentric historical figures. And mysteries, whether they're paranormal, crime-related, whatever--I love them all.

(I realized, in fact, during the dish-washing break I took midway through this post, that I could do a whole rant about how sick I am of the way writers who are able to publish anything become slaves to genre. If you like to write, you just like to write about stuff. That might be making up stories. It might be musing on pop culture and or politics. It might be all the above. Whatever, it's all writing, and some of us are stricken with the compulsion to just do it. We'd do it on bark with charcoal if the world went to hell tomorrow. Stop pinning us to one type, one flavor of writing, and let us just fucking write.)

(Whoops, guess I had to let some of that rant out after all. Sorry, because it's delayed my point--this blog right here.)

The one thing established true crime writers like Gregg Olsen and Ann Rule told me when I was contemplating writing a true crime book (about 5 years ago)  was that within the true crime genre, one type of story doesn't often sell as well as others: the unsolved, still open-ended mystery. Epic stories like that of the Zodiac Killer aside, publishers seem to believe readers are children who require a resolution, an ending, preferably one that can at least be spun as reasonably happy.

I clearly remember responding, at least in my head, "But I LOVE unsolved mysteries. I love the show Unsolved Mysteries. And hey, there you go--there's even a whole TV show about unsolved mysteries."

Then I kind of gave up on the idea of writing a book about unsolved stuff. Even a compilation of various unsolved crimes.

But the desire to really write about various unsolved riddles, stories without precise endings, has never left me. It has persisted, hung on like a burr in the sock of my brainflesh.

Hence The Mystery Report.

Here's what this blog will not be:

• True crime blog. Plenty of crime is going to come up when you write about vexing true tales of terror or woe. I'd say a majority of Unsolved.com, the sister site to the legendary show, contains stories about unsolved crimes or possible crimes. But if you've arrived here thinking it's my new true crime blog, please know: it is not.
• Personal blog. Personal notes may creep in, but I will do my best to make each blog post as professional as anything I've submitted to the New York Observer (for example).
• News blog. At least not breaking news.
• Unsolved Mysteries fan blog. I am a huge fan of that show from way back and I'll probably link it plenty, but that's not the purpose of this blog.
• Updated every day. I just have to give myself the option to not do this sometimes because I suspect it will be work and I need to do work that pays too. 
• About fictional mysteries. There are a ton of blogs out there for that, I'm sure.
• Humor, per se. If you've only ever read my true crime writing, that may sound funny, but there's about 3000 or more people on Twitter who might come here expecting jokes. I'll throw them in where possible, sure, but these aren't satirical or parody posts (unless marked). 

OK, this list of what this blog isn't could go on, so that's just the big ones. 

What I will cover here: current (last 10 years) and historic unsolved mysteries. These may include unsolved crime, paranormal events, missing persons and even unanswered questions such as those covered by the show Unsolved Mysteries, such as the question of reincarnation.

The main thing I want to do here is have fun with it. That way, hopefully, anyone who reads it will have fun too. And just write. Write whatever the fuck I want.

And that's enough from me. For now.