A DEVIL’S BARGAIN

COMING SPRING 2026 | Grand Central Publishing

August 9 and 10, 1969: The Manson murders set off a frenzied and grim race for a literary blood-prize unlike any other.

Blume’s new book documents the writers – some famous, like Joan Didion and Truman Capote, and others unknown – who vied to create definitive accounts of the Manson saga, the dangers they faced, and the prices they paid.

A Devil’s Bargain also explores the Manson murders' impact on and acceleration of America’s obsession with true crime.

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A CONVERSATION ABOUT A DEVIL’S BARGAIN BETWEEN

NEW YORKER WRITER ADAM GOPNIK and LESLEY BLUME

ADAM GOPNIK: Give me a broad sense of what A Devil’s Bargain will be. I’m fascinated to know how this new book – this study of Joan Didion particularly and the press more broadly during this horrific and epoch-marking time – what you intend to do with it, and how it relates to your previous books.

LESLEY BLUME: A Devil’s Bargain seems like it would be a departure from my books on Hemingway and Hersey, that the material is more mainstream and commercial. I think this is largely because of how the Manson saga has been treated by studies and in popular culture over the last few decades. But for me, it’s a book of serious intent, in terms of looking at this critical, disturbing moment in America’s media and literary history – and also in how it looks at the private ambitions of the writers and reporters who attempted to leverage historic, landmark literary works from the Manson murders. 

The broad strokes of the narrative being investigated in A Devil’s Bargain: the Manson murders take place in 1969. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood on the 1959 Clutter murders had come out as a serial in the New Yorker four years earlier, and then as an internationally bestselling book, and quite remade the literary landscape. It also elevated what we now call true crime to a high literary level that that genre hadn’t enjoyed before. True crime had often been a very lucrative genre in the past, but after In Cold Blood, it could be high art too.  So, Capote’s work signaled that now there were substantial literary prizes to be gained from covering such subjects, and he also happened to help make it more commercially lucrative than ever. 

When the Manson murders took place, the immediate international public and media reaction to, and obsession with the murders, in part because of their brutality and in part because of the status of some of the victims –

GOPNIK: – the celebrity of those killed.

BLUME: Exactly. It became clear that this was explosive material for yet another major literary prize for the taking, maybe one that could even eclipse In Cold Blood.  Now, Capote had taken the Clutter murders from a newspaper midsection – from editorial flyover country – and made them into a huge, literary true crime literary event. He basically manufactured a global appetite for that story. On the other hand, with the Manson murders, from the first minutes after they were reported, it was obvious that there would be no need to manufacture fanfare around them. The literary blood prize of those murders, by comparison, had the potential to be a thousand times bigger – if it landed in the right hands. 

A Devil’s Bargain – which I’ve already been researching for nearly two years – will document half a dozen writers and reporters who vied to create the definitive inside-track account of the Manson murders, to make their names and – either consciously or unconsciously – to create the successor work to In Cold Blood.  Three of them are relatively unknown writers and reporters, and the other three are extremely well-known writers, including Capote himself. It seems to me that very few people know that he made a run at covering the Manson murders.

GOPNIK: I had no idea at all.

BLUME: That makes me happy, because you know everything about literary history and New Yorker writers. The last years of Truman’s life – the post-In Cold Blood chapter – is often treated very specifically. Most of the accounts focus on the draining away of his serious writing ability; his inability to continue with greater reportorial successes – or any significant post-In Cold Blood reporting at all, seemingly; his Answered Prayers debacle and being cast out of high society; and of course his devolution into alcoholism and drug-taking. I feel like late Capote is played a bit for laughs in some accounts and recreations of his final chapter, and that those depictions can lapse into cliché.

But after In Cold Blood came out – even though he had been so tormented by that project – he also couldn’t let go of the expertise that he had accrued on mass murders, the death penalty, and the American criminal justice system. I relate to that a bit, after researching and writing about nuclear warfare for so many years. It’s extremely dark material, but once you’re an expert, it’s hard to just walk away and cede the territory to other reporters and historians. 

So, in the aftermath of In Cold Blood, Capote traveled across America, interviewing dozens of imprisoned mass murderers for different projects and looking for new material. He said at one point that In Cold Blood had stripped him down to the bones, but apparently he couldn’t entirely extract himself from that subject matter either. To me, his attempt to cover the Manson trial felt like seeing an exhausted heavyweight trying to defend his title.

GOPNIK: This is a side note, but it interests me: did anyone reference In Cold Blood as a true crime novel at the time? Because Capote was trying, with that book, to invent what he called the “nonfiction novel.”  Or did people talk about the genre as true crime?

BLUME: That’s a good question, and it will be interesting to research and parse the language of the era, in terms of how the work was described. I think it was widely acknowledged that Capote was actively elevating, or attempting to elevate the genre of reporting on murder; whether it was described in the press or in literary circles as “true crime,” I will have to research the verbiage to see how widespread use of that term was.  Capote was clear that he had aimed to impose the “nonfiction novel” label on his work, a genre he supposedly invented, as you say. Sometimes critics admiringly gave him credit for achieving that goal. Others regarded Capote’s claim with a bit of an eyeroll, and others still were outright hostile to the idea that he had brokered a new form. I was astonished at some of the critical vitriol directed at him on this score. But it was widely acknowledged that Capote had indeed imbued his particular true crime subject with literary gravitas.

GOPNIK: Tell me a little bit, if you would, because it will be central to your book: what was Joan Didion’s reputation in 1969? Who knew her, who didn’t – where did she stand when this began?

BLUME: Didion was an established, respected and glamorous reporter and writer and assessor of the zeitgeist. But she was also still seen as “promising,” which we both know is both a great compliment and a damning one. She had been a conservative reporter and commentator during the early part of her career –

GOPNIK: She wrote for the National Review.

BLUME:  Yes. And it’s been well documented that she had conservative political inclinations then. At that point, she had also written for Vogue and other fashionable magazines, something that you and I have both done in our own careers.  She had also published a novel – which, like Capote’s first novel, was semi-autobiographical, but in her case was inspired in part by her California upbringing. Didion had also released Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1968, which was very well regarded and was a shot across the bow. But even though she’s building a national reputation, she’s still teetering on major fame and recognition. 

There’s this moment in any journalist’s or writer’s or novelist’s career at which you’ve shown what you’re capable of, but you haven’t sealed the deal yet. You haven’t taken your place among the pantheons of greats; there are still higher rungs on the ladder that you want to climb. You want to establish yourself as a prominent voice. She was at the point, and like any writer looking to make that leap, needed more material to do so. I’ve studied this moment in other writers’ lives, when they’re on the brink, about to commit to a work that could not only potentially make their reputations but also be a major landmark, such as Ernest Hemingway with The Sun Also Rises and John Hersey with Hiroshima.

Didion had already tasked herself in various projects with telling the story of America in the 1960s, and after the Manson murders, she had in that material the possibility to do a very serious investigation about the culmination of the decade, with all of its upheaval, through this harrowing, revelatory prism. She got her teeth on an exclusive within the Manson Family, and the grave, legato deliberation of her reportorial approach really set her apart from the frenzied, noisy approaches that others were taking to the story.

GOPNIK: At that time – and I don’t know how interested you are in this aspect of it – if I remember it all, there was a kind of sense that somehow the people who had been murdered must be guilty of their own murder, that it was somehow an inward turning thing and nobody understood that, while it was not entirely random, it was certainly not a drug deal gone wrong or something like that. Was Didion aware of this?

BLUME: She definitely was aware of this undercurrent of victim blaming. A lot of A Devil’s Bargain is going to examine our relationship to true crime and why it’s addictive for so many, and how it interplays with less savory aspects of our natures. One of the aspects of that does have to be an examination of this impulse to reflexively blame, or be suspicious of, the victims. The feeling that they somehow deserved to this violence, perhaps because some of them had been glamorous or rich or ambitious or foreign or whatever. People perceived the celebrity aspect of the murders as being both grimly glamorous but also somehow malignant, like it had to have played a role in compelling Manson’s followers to seal their fates. It’s conspiratorial thinking, isn’t it – and that’s something that’s obviously raging in our society again today. So I think that’s important to explore.

GOPNIK: Was Didion, at that point, known as the kind of apostle of California alienation that she would be after the eventual publication of The White Album?

BLUME: I mean, she had already started to lay her claim to that. Even Didion’s debut novel helped establish her credentials as what she would call a “native daughter” of California. Even though she was based in New York for much of the 1960s, she was looking to California as one of her main sources of material, and also as a metaphor for America: the American dream, American destiny, American promise fulfilled and promise squandered or soured, and American catastrophes. She’s already staking the claim on paper. And with Slouching Towards Bethlehem, that work really helped her significantly in solidifying that claim, the reporting on Haight-Ashbury. It was clear that she saw this as prime and extremely telling material when telling the story of this country at a certain juncture in history, and she was making it clear that not only did she have a unique voice on paper, she had a special affinity for that sort of material because of her own personal history. She knew the vernacular; she knew the bloodstream of California; she was positioned to be the cultural expert on the contradictions and currents of the state.

GOPNIK: Let’s talk about the Manson murders within the context of American publishing at the time. What was the place of such true crime narratives in the industry?

BLUME: As with any literary project, it depended on the author. Some writers would be able to command astronomical sums for a true crime project of immense interest, while for others, a Manson project might fall into the category of being more of a salacious B-project. But in the case of the Manson murders, it became immediately obvious, especially among the beat reporters who were in the primary corps covering the investigation and trial, that this was a potential gold mine.

Early on, [Manson family member and convicted murderer] Susan Atkins sold publication rights to her confession for a reported $100,000, which was a shocking sum then and equivalent to nearly $800,000 today. It was obvious that getting an exclusive in the case, written in book form, would be a huge prize in so many grim respects. Didion’s own Manson project garnered international attention before a word of it was even written. It was considered inevitable global bestseller fodder within the publishing industry. And we can only imagine how a Truman Capote version would have been compensated, but given the numbers then being flung at him by his publisher for books that he never wrote, it’s likely that he could have garnered an enormous advance for a Manson work as well.

GOPNIK: Talk, if you will, about the relationship between Didion and her own primary Manson source.

BLUME: I can’t say too much about it right now, but it is, in several ways, the quiet heartbeat in what will otherwise be a very high-volume book. I can say that that relationship is really what drew me to this whole subject initially for a variety of reasons. So much of what I write about has involved studies of reportorial integrity, and I was always interested in Didion’s role as a journalist within the Manson saga. So much of A Devil’s Bargain is about what one is willing to do to get a huge story. What are you willing to do, to sacrifice, at what personal cost? At what cost to society? Didion wrote later about how agonizing this project was for her.

GOPNIK: Would it be fair to say that this is the moment – 1969, 1970 – that nonfiction work was beginning to do the work that fiction had done before? Hemingway had to write a novel in the 1920s, but were Didion and her contemporaries looking to nonfiction to do that same work?

BLUME: I think that nonfiction is having a major ascent in the 1960s with the rise of New Journalism and how highly individualized voices of authors of nonfiction had become. To a certain extent, the responsibility for that partly lies with the protagonist of my second book Fallout, John Hersey. His “Hiroshima” reporting in 1946 in the New Yorker was seen as a forerunner work to New Journalism, with its deep immersiveness in its subject and how much it revealed about the postwar world. And it was so unbelievably successful: “Hiroshima” investigated some of the most horrific material but made it compulsive, essential reading, and was an international bestseller when it became a book. It helped show the power of nonfiction. And then Truman, when he began reporting, first in Russia and then for In Cold Blood, he said at one point during that time that he didn’t think he could go back to fiction. He was seeing that the nonfiction world was, for him, filled with such literary potential. But these writers and others from the New Journalism gang found ways to imbue nonfiction storytelling – for better or worse, in some cases – with literary devices and their own voices as a way to make their reporting into compulsive reading.

GOPNIK: Talk a bit, Lesley, about working on a female protagonist as a female protagonist.  Your previous books were about male writers, and both writers of a certain kind of macho turn. Hemingway, more self consciously than Hersey – but Hersey was of that Robert Capa / James Agee 1940s moment of a certain kind of heroic male writer. Is it welcome work for you to be writing about a woman writer for once?

BLUME: I’m so happy.  I mean, in Hersey’s saga, there’s hardly a female character to be found, for God’s sake, with the exception of several of the bombing victims he profiled in “Hiroshima.” He did that beautifully and sensitively, but it’s still not the same thing, as you say. And now, to be studying and writing about the outsized impact not just of Didion, but several other female protagonists in this new book project, is extraordinary. And two of these women were considered to be quiet and diminutive to a fault, and yet they played outsized roles in this story. Another female protagonist in the story was in that Manson press scrum, elbows out and fighting with everything she had for the same prizes as the male reporters and writers. The prospect of documenting this moment in these women’s lives is very welcome.

GOPNIK: What does the title A Devil’s Bargain mean to you?

BLUME: For me, again, this book is really at heart going to be an examination of ambition. What are we willing to do to get what we want? It’s about the devil’s bargains that each of the protagonists were willing to cut with themselves, what are they willing to do to tell the Manson story, in exchange for whatever they envisioned the prize to be.

And in this case, anyone who is interfacing with this material, and trying to turn it into a literary and financial prize for themselves – even if there are noble intentions, in terms of explaining the murders as a historical event with profound cultural implications – you’re still cutting a devil’s bargain. Let’s not forget that Manson was an unrepentantly publicity-seeking, waywardly charismatic monster. And anything you do to publicize his crimes is going to help exalt him and his followers, which Helter Skelter certainly did in part, even though its author – prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi – got Manson convicted. Also, it was incredibly dangerous to be interfacing with Manson family members to get material. Family members were at the courthouse carrying knives. Some of the reporters remember putting deadbolts on the doors of their homes. One of the defense attorneys was found dead at one point during the trial. Bugliosi had security 24/7. At one point, Manson leaped over a table in the courtroom and tried to attack the judge, after which he reportedly carried a gun in his robes in both the courtroom and in chambers.

So you can see maybe, why someone like Joan Didion, who’s tiny and physically vulnerable –by her own admission she’d often relied on those characteristics as assets to get sources to trust or even underestimate her – you can see why, in this context, how that supposed vulnerability and small stature might not feel like such an asset. She also had a young child at the time, as I do. And I have to say, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to vie for this bloody reporting prize, because of the staggering security threats all the time and also the emotional toll of living with that material. Some former Manson reporters really have painted a picture of how unbelievably stressful and demoralizing it was.

So again, we come back to the title of my book: vying for the Manson story, the In Cold Blood account of the Manson’s murders, really amounted to a devil’s bargain.

This is a transcript of a conversation that took place in April 2024. It has been edited for brevity.