Mike Adamick

Mike Adamick is a former crime reporter, an NPR and New York Times contributor, a stay-at-home dad, a best-selling author, and now the host of Crime Adjacent.

Describe Crime Adjacent in ten words or less. 
Your favorite book – as a podcast that never ends.

What inspired you to take true crime and make it into something so speculative and boundary-pushing?
True crime gets a lot of knocks for being too sensational or too valorizing of the worst among us. And yet, it’s also a space of survival and community and ideals of justice and the kind of society we want to build. I wanted to explore that contradiction—not just by talking about it, but by building an immersive world that forces listeners to live inside it and consider great big questions along the way: why are we drawn to true crime? Is it entertainment? Is it real? Do you have some role, however small, in perpetuating the horrors we listen to on our commutes? I wanted to play with the form because I think the form itself is part of our larger social story. Representation theory says we don’t just consume or make inert media with no messages or larger social impacts – we shape and are indeed shaped by the stories we tell. I think there’s room to tell interesting stories but to also engage with deeper issues about why we’re so obsessed with these stories in the first place. I hope listeners learn one interesting thing from each episode, while at the same time just be entertained – that’s sort of my own gold standard for good podcasts and I wanted to create that myself for others. 

Your background as a crime reporter and author gives the show a lot of depth. How do you balance real investigative storytelling with your fictional elements?
I always feel a little vulnerable about questions like this because, as a crime reporter, I messed up early on and feel, to this day, just an incredible amount of shame. I was writing a story about the anniversary of the murder of a sheriff’s officer and I was definitely trying to sensationalize it. I was 19. I dropped out of college to take this job. This was my first big story. I really wanted to prove that I could write, and I didn’t take into account that his entire family would read this story and that it would bring back such horrible, horrible memories – the worst day of their lives. I got a call from his granddaughter the next day and it haunts me, even now. I went on to write about all sorts of horrible crimes and serial killers and I hope I carried forward a better idea that there is real suffering and anguish behind even the smallest crimes. This is, honestly, one of the reasons I wanted to fictionalize the main storylines for each season, because I just didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of profiting off of anyone else’s misery. I listen to true crime all the time and I think the best of the genre really tell stories from the perspective of victims and survivors. I wanted to fictionalize these stories because I really wanted to dive deep into larger social issues and explore how these issues leave traces on our bodies, but I also did not want to use someone’s deepest pain or the heartache of entire families to do so.

The show asks big questions about what true crime says about us as a culture. What have you learned about our cultural obsession?
I love this question! The show’s motto is quite literally “go deep or go home” because I like to embrace these larger cultural questions, as you might be able to tell by now! What I’ve found during my years of research into true crime – I wrote a college thesis on it! – is that most media explanations about our obsession with the genre dates back to Truman Capote and “In Cold Blood” – or maybe sometimes Jack the Ripper and the rise of Yellow Journalism. Academics, however, go back much, much further. Joy Wiltenberg tells us that basically as soon as the printing press was invented, true crime narratives entered the picture to help delineate right from wrong in society. This idea goes back even further with biblical stories about Cain and Abel, the “first murder.” I think, as humans, we are indeed drawn to sensationalism – like, ooh a car crash! – but also I think we’re constantly striving to make sense of the senseless, and stories have helped us do that for ages. Cave paintings, the poetic tradition, early Renaissance folios, New Journalism thrillers, and now, in this age, podcasts. When people harp on about the gory sensationalism of true crime podcasts and wonder why we’re drawn to tales of misery and darkness, I like to remind them it’s almost a human drive, this desire to tell dark tales so that we might understand them ourselves, or perhaps even survive them.

Crime Adjacent blurs the line between fiction and true crime, how does your Patreon help you keep pushing that boundary?
YAs you might be able to tell by now, I like to go full nerd every now and then. I can’t help it. I like to think I’m cool, but deep down, nothing makes me more excited than finding a new paper on true crime and its convergence with pop culture. That’s sort of why I wanted to build a Patreon community, in the hopes I might be able to find an audience of like-minded people who just like to dig into deeper social questions around all these topics, but like, in a fun way. With drinks and banter. It’s why I started the monthly reading group. I returned to college as a much older adult and I absolutely loved it. People think young students are cloistered little snowflakes, but that’s not the case. At all. We had deep, meaningful, engaging and incredibly respectful conversations around all sorts of touchy topics, and I basically wanted to replicate that for everyone who is interested in learning more about true crime. Think of it as returning to college with an adult brain and no pressure or homework or grades or expectations – just a gathering of cool friends eager to grow and learn together. I’m excited to build that community on Patreon.

Fill in the blank: You’ll love Crime Adjacent if you’re into________.
true crime as if it’s read by David Sedaris, or at least that’s what my daughter said the first time she heard my voice. I actually had to change the main character because of this, but it still cracks me up.

Thanks, Mike!