As a tragic for the popular music of the 1960s and 70s, I have never been an easy sell for talk radio or spoken-word journalism. I’d always rather listen to greatest hits and golden memories. Yet I have been unable to resist the allure of the true-crime podcast.
It started for me, as for so many others, with the first series of Serial, which was produced by the team behind This American Life, a weekly program on public radio in the US. Released in 2014, it investigated the 1999 murder of Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee.
A well-trod path then led me to S-Town, which is also from the This American Life team and was released in March. S-Town starts as a true-crime podcast, when journalist Brian Reed in New York receives a tip-off about a murder that may have happened in the tiny town of Woodstock, Alabama.
It turns…
