At the center of John Safran's "God'll Cut You Down" is a killing: The life of one Richard Barrett came to an end at the hands of Vincent McGee, a younger man he'd hired to do some yard work. The fact that Barrett was a well-known, outspoken white supremacist, and that McGee was black, helps explain why this case would attract attention.

Safran, a maker of irreverent documentaries in his native Australia, had filmed Barrett for a segment a year before his death. After learning of the murder, Safran traveled back to Mississippi with his eye on writing something about it. Alternately, as he writes early on, "That's what I learned from 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil': Arrive early and befriend the local yahoos."

As that suggests, there's more than a little commentary here about how true crime books are put together. Safran quickly finds that the territory he's delving into is murkier than he might have liked. Sometimes, that comes in the form of self-awareness, such as when he realizes that he's inadvertently offended McGee's family with a deeply sensationalistic question. He also learns that the white supremacists he's interviewing are a fractious bunch: Barrett seems to have been in feuds with several others, and questions persist about Barrett's actual motivations, whether he was an informant and whether he was gay.

As evidence to that accumulates, suggestions arise that Barrett's relationship with McGee may have been more complex than it first seemed. McGee, too, is an elusive figure, and his relationship with Safran becomes immeasurably tangled. In the end, the story Safran hoped would become a true crime classic is something altogether different: a sometimes absurdist meditation on true crime stories, and on nonfiction in general. But as the book reaches its conclusion, there are genuine surprises to be found, some arising from the most quotidian of actions.

In the last third of the book, Safran invokes Janet Malcolm's classic "The Journalist and the Murderer" on multiple occasions — sometimes as an example of a gripping work, and sometimes as a signpost against which he compares his own ethical foibles. Sometimes Safran stumbles, which might be inevitable: A white Australian author may not be the best choice to parse the South's complex racial and social history. But sometimes he's able to point out jarring and discordant moments in a way only an outsider can. And he's all too aware that, in the crime story he's recounting, he may be the reader's true foil.

Tobias Carroll is managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn.