The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
Published 1990 · 163 pages · 48,055 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, Mystery & Crime, Nonfiction, Philosophy
How hard is The Journalist and the Murderer to read?
The Journalist and the Murderer scores 28 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Precise vocabulary. Legal and journalistic terms used with clarity.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Ethical argument embedded in a specific case study.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Dense with legal detail, ethical argument, and psychological observation.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Malcolm interweaves the MacDonald case with broader reflections on journalism.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The journalist-subject relationship as allegory for all human confidence games.
- Ironic distance: 28 out of 100
- Malcolm's cool, devastating irony is the book's defining quality.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- Malcolm offers no absolution. The ethical problem is permanent.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Two-part structure. Originally published as two New Yorker articles.
How The Journalist and the Murderer is regarded
The Journalist and the Murderer holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.