John Safran’s True Crime series to launch on ABC Radio National
Media broadcaster John Safron will interview crime writers and perform a bloody autopsy in his new ABC series True Crime scheduled to debut on Radio National on Sunday afternoon.
The announcement:
Media provocateur and occasional ABC broadcaster John Safran is set to perform a bloody autopsy on the literary genre True Crime in a new six-part ABC RN series John Safran’s True Crime, commencing this Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 3.05pm.
Join Safran as he asks some of the genre’s most respected authors about what draws them into these often horrific stories; the ethics of withholding information from the authorities; and how far they will stray from the facts to make a better story.
“I drag the genre’s most famous authors into the witness box and demand they tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” Safran said. “This series is all killer, no filler.”
Safran’s unexpected foray into True Crime came after a notorious leader of a Mississippi white supremacist group was shot dead by a young black yardman. John had met and pranked the group’s leader Richard Barrett for his ABC TV series Race Relations.
“I realised this was my ‘Truman Capote moment’,” Safran said. “I abandoned everything in Melbourne, jumped on a plane and got lost in Mississippi for half a year, to write a True Crime book about the murder.”
Safran’s new book Murder in Mississippi: The True Story of How I Met a White Supremacist, Befriended His Black Killer and Wrote This Book is set to be released in September 2013.
“While writing the book, I discovered that as well as confronting a murder, I was confronted by dilemmas with the genre, both creative and ethical,” said Safran.
John Safran’s True Crime series on RN explores these dilemmas and our fascination with real-life murder, serial killers, violence, passion and betrayal. In the first episode Safran interrogates John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the 1994 best-seller that opened up the lurid secrets of the town of Savannah, Georgia.
Other authors interviewed in the series include Joe McGinnis (Fatal Vision); Ann Rule (The Stranger Beside Me); Harold Schechter (Psycho USA); Victoria Redstall (Up Close and Very Personal: My Death Row Interviews with the Most Dangerous Men on Death Row); Jeff Jensen (Green River Killer); and Dan Zupansky (Trophy Kill).
John Safran’s True Crime: Sundays at 3.05pm and repeated on Wednesdays at 9.05pm.
Find more details log onto the RN website: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/programs/truecrime.
Source: ABC press release.
That’s ABC RN, not ABC1. It’s a radio show.
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Apologies, Che – now fixed