Although the true crime genre has existed in literature for hundreds of years, it regained prominence, and became more mainstream, with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1965. With this work, which he called a “nonfiction novel,” Capote pushed the genre into a new space that combined non-fiction with fictional features, relating the compelling tale of the murder of four family members on a remote farm in Kansas. In 1974, Vincent Bugliosi published Helter Skelter, a true crime book about Charles Manson, which cemented the mainstream success of the genre and remains the best-selling true crime book to date.

With the recent advent of the podcast, the true crime genre gained new momentum. True-crime podcasts exploded in popularity during the 2000s and spawned a corresponding growth of the true-crime documentary. Netflix in particular capitalized on this popularity by rushing to offer a wide range of true crime documentaries, and Jewell’s novel wryly acknowledges this trend by using the premise of a fictional Netflix true-crime documentary (what the fictional advertisement refers to as a “podumentary”) to frame her primary plotline about the making of a podcast gone wrong.