New RN series set to uncover human fascination with crime and punishment.

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 Radio National (RN) series, starting this Sunday 1st September.

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.

Safran said: “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. 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.

He said about this: “I realised this was my ‘Truman Capote moment’ 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.

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.

More details are available on the RN website here.