~from The Weekly Lizard, "Why We Love to Read True Crime"
I think that people feel extraordinarily vulnerable in this society and this culture. And one of the reasons that people are so interested in crime true and imagined is they're - it's something they're worried about. It's something they're thinking about. It's something that they want to solve. They want to know: Could that happen to me? And they want to know: How can I make it so it doesn't happen to me?
~Walter Mosley, in an interview with NPR
Why do we read true crime? Here at abcreads, we're not sure. But true crime's enduring popularity has not abated since the days of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (considered by many critics to be a pioneering work of the true crime genre). Here's a list of some popular true crime titles that you might want to check out, or let us know in the comments your favorite true crime reads.
Psycho USA by Harold Schechter
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession by David Grenn
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo-- and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry
Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham
Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors and Other True Cases by Ann Rule
For more true crime titles, try a keyword search of "True crime", or a subject search using "Crime", "Serial murders", or "Forensic Science".
Links
"10 True Crime Books You Won't Be Able to Put Down"
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