Killers of the Flower Moon: Genre 1 key example

Truman Capote popularized novelistic true crime in the 1960s with his book In Cold Blood. Both In Cold Blood and Killers of the Flower Moon use suspense and other storytelling techniques to weave true events into a plot that is compelling for readers. Both turn real people into characters with arcs the reader can invest in. One key difference between Capote's book and Grann's is that Capote kept himself out of the story he was telling. Grann, on the other hand, uses more modern journalistic conventions, acknowledging his own bias.

In fact, Grann treats himself as a flawed character in his own right. More than just the story of the Osage murders, Grann's book is the story of his and others' investigations into the murders. In this respect, Grann plays with the genre of the detective story. Detective stories such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books and Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" center not on the victims or perpetrators of crimes, but rather on the detectives solving them. They raise questions about deductive and inductive reasoning, and they are generally concerned with how we can ever know what happened when we did not see it happening. Grann raises these same questions. Even as he tells the story of the Osage murders during the Reign of Terror, he ponders the role, techniques, and ethics of investigative journalism in such an investigation.