On Following A Murder And Being Annoyed

When The Music calls John Safran, he is having lunch at The European, a restaurant on Spring Street in Melbourne, across the road from Parliament. He told us to write that: "I was actually going to walk out of the restaurant when I saw the phone call come through but then I thought maybe it gives atmosphere or something, you know what I mean? Maybe you'll be able to write 'John Safran was in a restaurant,' you know what I mean? I'm always thinking that way: 'How can I help a fellow writer?'" Thanks, John.

While filming ABC's Race Relations in 2008, Safran met Richard Barrett in Mississippi, a prominent American white supremacist. An unaired episode of the series features Safran's conversations with Barrett, and a stunt Safran pulled at Barrett's whites-only sports awards, the Spirit Of America Day banquet. Safran had covertly tested Barrett's saliva at a DNA clinic, and revealed to the audience at the event that Barrett had African DNA. The next day Barrett sent a letter to the ABC, threatening legal action, alleging fraud — the network canned the episode.

In 2009, Barrett was murdered by Vincent McGee, a 22-year-old African American man, who had been doing yard work for Barrett. Safran returned to Mississippi to cover the case, and ended up writing his first true crime novel, Murder In Mississippi, released in 2013. The novel went on to win Best True Crime Award at the 2014 Ned Kelly Awards.

"I think the way you make a story with no loose ends is when you've got a political agenda so you fudge things so things fit with whatever story you're trying to tell."

"I was really thrown off because nothing like that had ever happened to me before," says Safran. "I wasn't like, 'Oh, cool story!' It actually took a while to put the pieces together that I should go back and try to find out what happened. For months and months and months and months I wasn't like, 'How do I turn this murder to my advantage?' It was more suddenly I started thinking that, 'Oh there's something here, to bear witness, and tell a story.'

"I've had this unique experience already where I have interviews with the guy who got murdered less than a year before he got murdered, so most people wouldn't have that. Something that motivates whatever project I'm working on is that I like to think that I'm doing something that if I didn't do it no one would do it... [I thought] I'm sort of in this weird way invested in this murder so I should go and write about it."

Safran says that the intervening years have meant that he's "become a bit more empathetic, because you have distance to things".

"When I came back, I was so close to these characters that I was kind of like really emotionally involved, and I was kind of a bit shitty at some of them, because they'd been annoying me. I'm sure I was annoying them when I was in Mississippi."

Did he ever feel like he was too involved in the story? "Everything I do I end up being a part of the story, on new things I work with, and it's like a double-edged sword because on the one hand it can really annoy me — 'Ergh, why are you putting yourself in there?' — but on the other hand that's why people like my stuff... It's a real complicated relationship I have with my reader or my listener or my watcher. I'm kind of annoying them by putting myself in everything but that's kind of what they find funny. I'm not sure anyone wanted to buy Murder In Mississippi when I wasn't a character in the book myself with me writing it. I don't think anyone wanted a book written by me where I wasn't a clumsy character trying to figure it out and a presence in the book."

Looking back, there are no loose ends Safran wished he'd explored — mainly because he doesn't believe it's possible for everything to be tied up.

"When you're a writer, so you put things out in public, your view on life is just going to be out there, and I think ultimately I have doubt all the time, no matter what it is. The fact that I'm not a religious fundamentalist but I'm kind of interested in religion, it kind of shows that I just have doubt about things. I think that's sort of an interesting way to live. Sometimes I kind of find that stories are kind of annoying when the writer has no doubt, when they're like, 'And this is what happened...' whatever that may be... I don't really mind that there were loose ends, I think there would always be loose ends. I'd just have to be a different person for there to be no loose ends.

"I think the way you make a story with no loose ends is when you've got a political agenda so you fudge things so things fit with whatever story you're trying to tell. So maybe in the case of Murder In Mississippi, if someone else was like, 'I want to talk about how unjust the prison system is in Mississippi,' you'd sort of make sure you didn't cover any of the loose ends that go against that. Also if you wanted to say I want to prove that 'young people or black people are like more violent' or something like that then you'd tell the story that way and not put in any of the loose ends that don't reach that conclusion. That's the way you have a story with no loose ends, when you have a kind of cult-like commitment to some political agenda."

In 2013 Safran then took the story on a live tour as what he calls a "bookselling ploy" — except the ploy soon became so much more than that. "When I first did it, we didn't realise people would like it... It was a very colourful and well thought out and dramatic book reading." The show started selling out, extra shows were added, and then those would sell out too. "It started working on its own as a self-contained show." The show returns to Sydney this month, "because people in Sydney were whining because they'd missed the one sole show I'd ever done in Sydney".

So what is it about true crime, and Murder In Mississippi in particular, that appeals to Australian audiences?

"I find in true crime you just sort of get to discuss another issue through something that's not directly the issue — so maybe poverty or isolation or alienation or race, all those sorts of things. I think it's just a less literal way of discussing some important issue that we all feel.

"In the case of this story, there's so many ways to look at why people were interested in it. One way definitely I've noticed is Australians are really apprehensive about talking about these sorts of issues in their own culture, at least in the way I talk about them, so there's a little bit of distance. So in the Deep South, suddenly, for an Australian audience, I have this permission to talk about this event or an event like this in a way that I'm allowed to clown around a little bit and I'm allowed to make my points in slightly unconventional or transgressive or funny ways. I think Australians like that because I guess if it was about this sort of crime in Australia, maybe readers would feel culpable themselves, whilst over there you can kind of offload it onto those wacky Americans."