Truly Devious

The most famous literary detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes, was first introduced to the public eye by Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1892. In Truly Devious, Johnson introduces two characters born a century apart: Dottie Epstein and Stevie Bell. Despite the 100-year gap between them, they both have a deep love for Sherlock and the spirit of the detective genre. While Truly Devious is an homage to this classical style of detective fiction, the novel also highlights the modern-day subgenre of true crime and how the two styles blend and influence one another over time. Truly Devious is a story written not only for modern lovers of true crime but for those who crave the same mystery and riddle-inspired tales of 100 years ago.

With the introduction of American author Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot in 1920, the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction” arrived in America and lasted until 1939. Maureen Johnson uses this time in history as the backdrop for her 1936 flashbacks in Truly Devious. Detective fiction like Christie’s featured a wide cast of characters and a puzzle to be solved to bring the criminal to justice, and during a time of low morale country-wide, mysteries offered a chance to lose oneself in a compelling riddle. Characters like Dottie Epstein and her fellow students at Ellingham Academy devour detective fiction, but when Dottie is murdered in the opening chapter with a copy of Sherlock Holmes in her hands, the worlds of crime fiction and true crime come crashing together. Crime is no longer a phenomenon that is observed from afar, but it is experienced up close for both Dottie and Stevie.

In Truly Devious, Dottie Epstein believes that her dreams have come true when she is invited to attend Ellingham Academy. In 1936, the Great Depression was still impacting the American people, and free schooling of this caliber was an uncommon occurrence that couldn’t be passed up. However, in the wake of the Great Depression, anti-industrialism surged across the American populace, and even penniless bystanders like Dottie were endangered by their proximity to men like Albert Ellingham. Industrialists represented the greed and cruelty of capitalism, and detective fiction of the 1930s often highlighted the death of someone wealthy and powerful. Criminals in these stories don’t kill because they are simply evil: There is always a motive, a complicated backstory, and some means of justifying their crime. The clear lines between good and evil are blurred in murder mysteries. Albert Ellingham may be depicted as a jovial, eccentric man with a generous heart, but in the context of 1936, Ellingham’s wealth positions him as an easy target, especially on a mountaintop in rural Vermont.

Stevie Bell might feel alone in her love for crime stories, but there are more Stevies among us than ever before. As the saying goes, “Crime doesn’t pay,” but it certainly sells. Throughout the remainder of the 20th century, crime as a genre continued to grow in popularity, and at the dawn of the new century, true crime documentaries and movies experienced a massive boom in interest. According to “YouTube Cultures & Trends,” between 2015 and 2019, the number of views for videos in the true crime community multiplied by a factor of 10, with approximately 250 million views in 2015 and 2.5 billion views in 2019. Whether it is through podcasts, television series, or documentaries, crime content is being ingested at a much higher rate than at any other time in modern history.