The Tragedy of True Crime
Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us
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The Tragedy of True Crime
Pre-order for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Will Damron
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By:
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John J. Lennon
About this listen
In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a Brooklyn Street. Now he’s a journalist, working from behind bars, trying to make sense of it all.
The Tragedy of True Crime is a first-person journalistic account of the lives of four men who have killed, written by a man who has killed. Lennon entered the New York prison system with a sentence of 28 years to life but after he stepped into a writing workshop at Attica Correctional Facility, his whole life changed. Reporting from the cell block and the prison yard, Lennon challenges our obsession with true crime by telling the full life stories of men now serving time for the lives they took.
These men have completely different backgrounds—Robert Chambers, a preppy Manhattanite turned true crime celebrity; Milton E. Jones, a seventeen-year-old coaxed from burglary into something far darker; and Michael Shane Hale, a gay man caught in a crime of passion—and all are searching to find meaning and redemption behind bars. Lennon’s reporting is intertwined with his own story, from a young man seduced by the infamous gangster culture of New York City to a celebrated prison journalist. The same desire echoes throughout the lives of these four men: to become more than murderers.
A first-of-its-kind book of immersive prison journalism, The Tragedy of True Crime poses fundamental questions about the stories we tell and who gets to tell them. What essential truth do we lose when we don’t consider all that comes before an act of unthinkable violence? And what happens to the convicted after the cell gate locks?
A Macmillan Audio production from Celadon Books
©2025 John J. Lennon (P)2025 Macmillan AudioCritic Reviews
"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