The Tragedy of True Crime

“A fascinating blend of journalism and memoir… Lennon paints meticulous portraits of each man’s personal lives before and during prison, successfully humanizing his subjects and contextualizing their crimes. In the process, he poses provocative questions about the flattening effects of true crime-as-entertainment and makes forceful arguments for empathy. It’s both a sobering glimpse of life behind bars and a stinging rebuttal to the public’s appetite for tragedy.”–Publishers Weekly

“This searing exploration of what it means to be both a long-ago purveyor of pain as well as a most gifted present-day narrator of it, to be a writer both sensationalized and silenced, will haunt and it will inspire. At once a true crime page turner and a powerful memoir, The Tragedy of True Crime reminds us all that to be flawed is still to be human.”–Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy.

“In terms of serious nonfiction writing, this book feels miraculous. The Tragedy of True Crime is a finely textured, captivating account of three individuals and the high-profile murders they committed that moves seamlessly into cultural criticism and personal memoir–all of it reported and written from inside prison. Lennon, a journalist behind bars, examines his struggles not only with craft but also with guilt, shame, decades of imprisonment, and the yearning all humans share for reinvention. It’s a wrenchingly honest portrait of the artist as an incarcerated man.”–Ben Austen, award-winning author of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change

I’ve read hundreds of books about prisons and the people inside of them, but I’ve never read anything like The Tragedy of True Crime. With compassion, nuance, and relentless honesty, John Lennon explores why people commit violent crime and how prison harms us all. The result is simply astonishing: a profound, brave account that I couldn’t put down.”–James Forman, Jr., Professor at Yale Law and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own

“In this remarkable book, John J. Lennon knits together intimate, richly reported stories of four imprisoned killers - one of them Lennon himself. He renders his subjects human without excusing or sensationalizing their crimes. But his real subject is us, the audience, the millions of viewers who have made the “true crime” genre an entertainment that strips crime of its context and consequences. This is first-rate journalism, practiced up close in a high-risk environment.”–Bill Keller, former editor of the New York Times and founding editor of The Marshall Project

”[Lennon] turns the true-crime genre inside out…Thoughtful, enlightening, and truth-seeking personal journalism.”–Kirkus

“Incarcerated journalist John J. Lennon is one of our most incisive writers on crime, incarceration, and the human lives behind statistics. A two-time finalist for National Magazine Awards, Lennon has written widely about his life in prison, and his first book tells the stories, in full color, of four men who have killed, and in doing so, naturally “challenges our obsession with true crime.”–LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025

John J. Lennon is now serving his twenty-fourth year behind bars, currently in Sing Sing Correctional Facility. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Esquire, and New York magazine. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing, and he’s twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, in feature writing and reviews and criticism. His feature essay “The Apology Letter” was part of the Washington Post Magazine’s special issue that won the National Magazine Award.