'The Jolly Roger Social Club' book review: proof that there's no rule book for true crime stories

True crime is the flavour of the moment. A new season of the successful 'Serial' podcast is due soon and its creators have just set up a production company to deliver more true crime stories. Meanwhile, season two of the Netflix documentary 'Making a Murderer' is in the pipeline.

There are two sides to true crime's coin. It's usually captivating - but can also be the target of accusations of storytelling malpractice. I discovered the flip side for myself when I got a book deal to write The Jolly Roger Social Club: A True Story of a Killer in Paradise.

I'd come across an intriguing serial killer story when I was doing research for a newspaper piece on Panama. A young American man, William Dathan Holbert, known locally as ''Wild Bill", and his partner, Laura Michelle Reese, had been arrested after fleeing their home in Bocas del Toro, a superficially idyllic place popular with expats.

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Acting on a tip-off, police unearthed five corpses from shallow graves behind their house - the remains of Americans whom Holbert had befriended and murdered, according to what Holbert himself told Panamanian investigators.

The Jolly Roger Social Club actually existed. It was a drinking den that Holbert and Reese had been running, with Holbert a larger-than-life presence, bulked up on steroids and wearing a horned Viking hat on party nights. The club's tagline was: ''Over 90% of our members survive".

I finished my newspaper piece, but just couldn't get ''Wild Bill" and his Caribbean house of horrors out of my mind.

I'd been looking for the perfect true story to tell and I knew that this was it.

The first thing you realise is that there's no rule book in true crime. True crime writers and producers operate in a perfectly unregulated world. Your goal may be to advance the argument of a miscarriage of justice, and this can be a noble thing to do - but you're also making entertainment.

It's a difficult and uneasy line to draw, since entertainment requires you to make characters out of the players in your story, have these characters develop, create suspense by withholding information from the viewer or reader, and exploit the twists and turns inherent in real-life crime.

This lack of a rule book was a big advantage. Bound by no jurisdiction, I was able to do something the Panamanian prosecutor couldn't: I followed Holbert and Reese's trail through Costa Rica, where they'd spent time before arriving in Panama (and where they were also wanted for murder), and back to the start of their life of crime in North Carolina in the US .

Not all true crime stories glamorise violence, but there's a risk. We're interested in serial killers and their deeds because many of us are interested in stories of extreme behaviour - both good and bad.

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It follows that the genre demands that the writer tries to get an interview with the killer in jail. This can be easier to arrange than you imagine: prisoners are bored and some see interviews with writers as a kind of warped challenge.

And so I flew to Panama to meet ''Wild Bill".

I was led into the prison's administrative area. The guards set out a couple of chairs, plus another for Holbert's lawyer. Holbert arrived with a smile and a brisk ''Hey, I'm Bill" and offered me his hand. He was polite and soft-spoken. I wondered if it was a trick to fool me. I think it was.

I was expecting a difficult interview and that's what I got. I started by asking Holbert about conditions at the jail, feigning interest in his replies. I figured he'd feel that I was mildly concerned - and it might loosen his tongue.

It worked. Holbert assumed ''Wild Bill" mode, the popular bartender, spinning yarns about growing up in North Carolina. He insisted that his murders were a kind of collateral damage in his scheme of stealing his victims' homes and assets.

I questioned him about the people he'd killed. One of his victims, Watson Brown, had been a 17-year-old boy. As someone with two young sons, I left questions about Brown to last. I knew my blood would boil when asking them.

Wild Bill's parting shot was to tell me: ''I am your worst nightmare."

After the book came out, he came across an excerpt on the internet, and passed a message to me through his lawyer.

''You made me out to be a monster," he complained.

Then that's good, I thought. I did my job. - ©The Daily Telegraph

'The Jolly Roger Social Club: A True Story of a Killer in Paradise' is published by Duckworth and is available from Exclusive Books for R427, thejollyrogersocialclub.com.

• This article was first published in The Times.