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Murder in Mississippi

John Safran

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Aug 30, 2020 Tony rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: crime, nonfiction

This true-crime story is bound to frustrate quite a lot of its readers -- the murder and people it revolves around is fascinating, but the author isn't the person most people would pick to tell it. Safran isn't a journalist, he's an Australian comedian-prankster-TV content producer more in the vein of Sasha Baron Cohen than Truman Capote. The story begins with his 2008 trip to Mississippi to prank a white supremacist at an annual event for his Australian TV"Race Relations" show. That prank is en This true-crime story is bound to frustrate quite a lot of its readers -- the murder and people it revolves around is fascinating, but the author isn't the person most people would pick to tell it. Safran isn't a journalist, he's an Australian comedian-prankster-TV content producer more in the vein of Sasha Baron Cohen than Truman Capote. The story begins with his 2008 trip to Mississippi to prank a white supremacist at an annual event for his Australian TV"Race Relations" show. That prank is entirely dishonest and lame, and lands kind of flatly.

Several years later, Safran discovers that the middle-aged white supremacist he pranked was murdered by a young African-American man who lived nearby. As he learned more, the situation sounded very strange, so Safran decided to travel to Mississippi to investigate and try and write this book. To be sure -- it is a very bizarre story with lots of outsized characters and unexplained threads. The problem is that Safran isn't a journalist, he's a TV personality, and so the story is told in TV-segment-length snippets, with him in the forefront throughout. And while there's some interesting aspects to his "fish-out-of-water" status as an Australian Jew in the American deep south, a lot of it is pretty condescending and played for laughs. So -- one's enjoyment of the book is going to depend very heavily on whether or not you find him good company.

There are so many interesting aspects to the story: race, class, sexuality (a key question in the case is whether or not one or both parties was bi or homosexual), history, politics, media, etc... Safran engages with all this, but not in a particularly structured or comprehensive way, and his cos-play version of investigative reporting is pretty tepid (notably dubious is his paying the murderer for his side of the story). At the end of it all, I just wanted an actual journalist or team to do the research and tell the full story. True-crime fans should definitely pick it up and give it a try -- you'll know in the first twenty pages whether or not you're going to want to stick with it. ...more

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