‘True crime’ has existed in some guise since the late 19th century, but it got its name in the 1960s. Books in this genre offer detailed accounts of real-life cases, usually of homicide. True crime adopts a character-driven style, resembling fiction. From the 1990s onwards, true crime exploded in popularity. Its tentacles began reaching into documentaries and television series.

In the 21st century, the internet, reality TV, podcasts, streaming and AI have all impacted true crime. New technologies are expanding the genre, changing how stories are told and consumed. This holds democratic potential, allowing ordinary people to involve themselves in investigations and the quest for justice in unsolved cases. But digitisation also contains dangers, including misinformation and bullying. It can produce online mobs baying for retribution against criminals, real or imagined.

Notable 21st-century Indian literary renditions have examined figures such as the ‘Bandit Queen’ Phoolan Devi or Mumbai mobster Dawood Ibrahim. However, till now, there have only been hints of true crime in Pakistan.

A forerunner was Sanam Maher’s Qandeel Baloch book, which I wrote about for Eos in 2019. Yet this book belongs to new journalism or biography more than true crime. Maher is far less interested in the identity or motives of Baloch’s murderer (her brother) than the social media star’s brave but short life.

The gap has now been filled by an electrifying podcast, ‘Notes on a Scandal’, Pakistan’s first true ‘true crime’ output. Using the internet’s interactivity, Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood encouraged their audience to get in touch. Listeners could offer leads or co-create content — for instance, by translating poetry. Maher herself contributed to the last episode of the podcast.

A compelling book, Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies and Scandal, followed the podcast. It was written by the same women journalists who presented the show. Imtiaz and Masood spent years exploring the mysterious death, at the age of 40, of the Urdu poet Mustafa Zaidi in 1970s Karachi.

Zaidi was born in India’s Ahmedabad in 1930. While at university, he had written poems for a Hindu girl, attempting suicide over his doomed love. Moving to Pakistan soon afterwards, he dealt with heartbreak through writing. Zaidi made friends with Faiz Ahmad Faiz and other literary figures, being hailed as a poet to watch.

He went on to nurture a close friendship, probably a sexual relationship, with a young mother of two, Shahnaz Gul. Of Afghan heritage, strikingly beautiful and married to a devoted older husband, Gul would become the subject of several of Zaidi’s poems.

Like Gul, Zaidi seemed to be happily married. Yet, despite being well assimilated in Pakistan, his German wife had recently gone home to Munich with their own two kids. This was intended as temporary relief from the hot water of Zaidi’s work crisis. A senior civil servant, Zaidi had been dismissed from his job and prevented from leaving the country. Gen Yahya Khan had turned against him and other officers.

Zaidi’s plight was also caused by integrity, when he had refused to take a bribe from a regime ally. His financial and familial insecurity left the poet lonely and depressed. Zaidi’s friends got worried about a lack of contact from him, especially given his unsound mind. When they went looking, they found his corpse at his home.

Gul was by his side, heavily unconscious, as an effect of Librium. Whether she had been a willing consumer of the drug, duped into imbibing it by Zaidi, or even administered it by an accomplice, was a detail pored over in the trial that ensued.

The police learnt that, amid a break-up, Zaidi had printed flyers calling Gul “a Pakistani Christine Keeler.” This caption was imprinted over images of her naked body. Did he take the photos himself or have them manipulated? Either way, the authors are right to call Zaidi’s adverts a precursor of revenge porn.

Scandal exploded in West Pakistan’s prurient and misogynistic press. The story had everything: the elite’s decadent lifestyle, a tortured artist, a femme fatale. Gul was accused of his murder, crucified by the media, and spent years trying to clear her name.

The authors wonder if the tale would be treated as salaciously in today’s Pakistan. Or would Zaidi’s loved ones have understood his mental illness, preventing his demise? Zaidi’s story is echoed in the present day by Mustafa Amir’s murder, especially in the search for a femme fatale to pin down. Noor Mukadam’s (and Baloch’s) cases also come to mind, with their similar victim-blaming reports.

An interesting aspect of this page-turner is Imtiaz and Masood’s well-researched portrayal of a Karachi of beehive coiffures, buzzy nightclubs and barely hidden extramarital affairs. Also persuasive is the idea that Gul met a need for distraction journalism. By concerning readers with lurid minutiae about the case, reporters redirected the Pakistani public’s attention away from the contested 1970 general elections and subsequent descent into the Bangladesh War.

A missed opportunity is the authors’ lack of self-reflection on the journalistic form they work in. After such sharp discussion of the 1971 war, it would have been desirable to consider their own tightrope walk of feminist revision and historical voyeurism. They distil the challenges of Covid-era research while offering glimpses of the strengths and limitations of Pakistani archives. This could have been matched by self-awareness of their own complex challenging of, but also complicity in, Gul’s rent reputation.

Research on true crime books indicates they disproportionately stress murder and ‘stranger danger’ compared to the instances of these extreme crimes. In true crime, celebrities and members of elite classes are likely to be the victims. This gives a distorted sense of the actors and motives of everyday felonies in cities like Karachi.

Imtiaz and Masood privilege narrative over neutrality, particularly in their portrayal of Gul. As Ian Punnett shows in Toward a Theory of True Crime Narratives, in order to ensure “multi-platform success”, true crime often blurs fact and fiction to fit a predetermined story.

Society Girl hooks the reader with its rich historical texture and subtle understanding of human behaviour. The book, like its podcast forebear, occasionally toes a thin line between revelation and sensationalism. Yet the book’s greatest power lies in stripping away some key myths that have long shrouded Zaidi’s death, Gul’s life, and the Pakistani nation more broadly. 

The columnist is a Professor of Global Literature at the University of York and author of five books. Bluesky: @clarachambara

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 16th, 2025