True-Crime Stories

Introduction

Accounts of real-life crimes have appeared in literature throughout recorded history. Some of the oldest such accounts can be found in early scriptural writings that many people regard as real history. Both the Torah and the Bible tell the stories of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel by his brother Cain and of the kidnapping and sale of Joseph by his brothers. The births of both Moses and Jesus were followed by the murders of infants. Indeed, the pivotal event of the Christian faith is told in the story of a political crime, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Some of the tragedies and histories of William Shakespeare depict politically motivated crimes such, as the assassination of Julius Caesar and the crimes committed by the Scottish king Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible dramatizes the stories of the late seventeenth century Salem witch trials, which were documented in such works as Cotton Mather’sThe Wonders of the Invisible World (1693).

Modern true-crime stories, however, trace their origins to several developments in the nineteenth century, particularly the establishment of police forces in response to growing urban crime problems, the emergence of the novel as a dominant literary form, the development of the social sciences—especially psychology—and the influence on literature of the philosophy called determinism. The modern true-crime novel, a descendant of the tradition of American literary naturalism, reached its apex in 1966 with the publication of Truman Capote’sIn Cold Blood and has remained among the most popular subgenres of literature.

True Crime vs. Mystery and Detective Fiction

The primary literary subgenres about crime are the true-crime story and the mystery or detective story. Although both depict violent crime and may feature similar characters, true-crime stories and novels differ substantially from mystery and detective fiction. Apart from the factual content of true-crime stories, there is a fundamental difference in point of view. In mystery and detective fiction, protagonists are usually detectives, police officers, or amateur sleuths who attempt to solve crimes or masteries. Readers learn of events as the main characters do. In true-crime stories, the focus is usually on the criminals themselves, and the writers are primarily interested in explaining what caused the criminals to commit their violent acts.

In true-crime novels, writers often identify the suspects or perpetrators early and devote most of their books’ space to exploring the biological, psychological, and sociological circumstances that appear to have influenced the characters’ actions. In mystery and detective novels, writers generally withhold the culprits’ identities from both investigators and readers until the climaxes of their stories. In contrast, the climaxes of true-crime stories are typically the perpetrators’ conviction, sentencing, or executions. The climaxes and denouements of the two forms also differ in tone. Mystery and detective stories generally end with the feeling that the final pieces of puzzles are in place. Details of suspects’ trials and punishment may be handled in a few paragraphs, and the tone may be moralistic. In contrast, conclusions of true-crime stories are likelier to be philosophical, focusing on abstractions such as whether or not justice has been served. If the tone of the true-crime denouement is moralistic at all, it may offer an indictment of society itself, rather than individuals.

The writing style of mystery and detective novels tends to be melodramatic, relying on suspense as a primary plot device. By contrast, the style of true-crime stories tends to be a more detached and objective style of journalism. True-crime writers generally primarily use reporting methods, and many have, in fact, worked as journalists.

Historical Background

The heart of a crime story is the riddle of what happened and why. The riddle motif was common even in ancient times, as in the riddle of King Solomon in the Old Testament and the riddle of the sphinx in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex (c. 426 b.c.e.). The plot of a crime story develops as a revelation of various clues to the riddle’s solution, which is revealed at the end. In the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution drove many people from rural to urban areas in search of manufacturing jobs, and urban crime consequently rose, professional police forces were developed to keep order. In 1841, the American writer Edgar Allan Poe published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” generally acknowledged as the first modern detective story. During the 1880’s, Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes, the prototype of the modern fictional sleuth. The popularity of the type was later extended by such practitioners as Wilkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, and Agatha Christie in the British Isles. By the 1930’s, the genre experienced a “Golden Age” among American writers such as Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald.

True-crime story form developed more than fifty years after Poe’s first detective story. However, some novels before the twentieth century contain elements of real crimes. For example, English novelist George Eliot used the 1801 case of Mary Voce, who poisoned her own infant daughter and confessed on the way to the gallows, for her character Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede (1859). Victorian novelist Charles Dickens wrote few novels without crime and criminals, and several of his books, including Oliver Twist (1837-1838) and Great Expectations (1860-1861), depict murders. His historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) is probably his most direct examination of violence, including mob violence; in the character of Dennis the Hangman, Dickens appears to indict capital punishment as demeaning those who enact it. Dickens’s critique of society and social institutions, particularly prisons and the legal system, is similar to the attitude of major naturalistic novelists, whose works would not appear for nearly a half-century. Dickens’s protégé Wilkie Collins incorporated into his 1868 novel The Moonstone details from two 1860’s murder cases reported in British newspapers. In one case, twenty-one-year-old Constance Kent was suspected of slitting the throat of her four-year-old half brother and hiding his body in an outdoor privy. Kent confessed and served nearly twenty years in prison before being released.

True Crime and Literary Naturalism

During the 1890’s, naturalism started becoming a central influence on American literature, which was influenced by French writers such asÉmile Zola. Literary naturalism is the application to literature of the principles of scientific determinism—the notion that every event has a cause. At the end of the twentieth century, when philosophical determinism was influenced by Charles Darwin’sOn the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), a strict naturalist would have argued that humans are, in essence, animals, so all human behavior is determined by natural causes. The influence of naturalism in literature broadens the theory to include sociological, economic, and psychological factors that influence human action. In Stephen Crane’s 1893 novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, for example, the main character’s death is attributed to a variety of circumstances, including her parents’ alcoholism, her family’s poverty, and her mother’s rigid Roman Catholicism.

Authors interested in the effect on human behavior of biological and environmental influences began to turn their attention to the worst instances of human behavior—violent crime. At the same time, many early naturalists apprenticed as writers in newsrooms, where they learned the techniques of journalism and had access to accounts of sensational crimes. This combination of circumstances helped to produce novels such as Frank Norris’sMcTeague (1899) and Theodore Dreiser’sAn American Tragedy (1925), both modeled on actual cases.

Theodore Dreiser’s Groundbreaking Novel

Dreiser’s An American Tragedy is the most significant true-crime novel prior to Capote’s In Cold Blood. Many critics regard its publication as the apex of naturalism in American literature because it is such a clear and mature illustration of the naturalistic perspective. Dreiser was born into a family so destitute that he was probably lucky to survive childhood, and he became particularly interested in how young men of little means achieve any success. During his apprenticeship as a young newspaper reporter, Dreiser encountered numerous cases following this pattern: A young man in an entry-level clerical job becomes involved with a young woman, sees his advancement threatened by the relationship (particularly by an out-of-wedlock pregnancy), and kills the woman, hoping thereby to resolve his predicament. Dreiser was so interested in sensational violent crimes that he kept a file of clippings, and he and other young reporters formed an informal supper club to discuss such cases. A similar group that met in Chicago during the 1890’s was named the Whitechapel Club, after the area in London in which Jack the Ripper had murdered prostitutes during the 1880’s.

The factual basis behind An American Tragedy is well known. In 1905, young Chester Gillette was boating on an upstate New York lake with his pregnant girlfriend, Grace Brown, who fell, or was pushed, out of the boat and disappeared. Gillette was convicted of murder and executed in 1908. Before Dreiser wrote An American Tragedy, he visited the area where Gillette and Brown had lived, the spot where Brown had disappeared, and Auburn Penitentiary, where Gillette had died. His novel changes the characters’ names, but his protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, gets the idea for eliminating Roberta Alden from newspaper accounts of a similar crime. The published novel reads almost as much like the work of a reporter as that of a novelist, as accuracy appears to have been among Dreiser’s primary aims.

In his depiction of the fictional Roberta Alden’s drowning, Dreiser perfectly illustrates the naturalistic view of the murderer as a victim of circumstances and effects. Clyde Griffiths, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s title character in The Great Gatsby (1925), is motivated by the glittering lights of social advancement, not by inborn depravity. His is a crime of personal convenience, rather than malice. In fact, he causes Alden’s death without touching her. Sitting in the rowboat, contemplating how to throw Alden from the boat, Griffiths is paralyzed by indecision. As Alden moves toward him, he shifts to avoid her, accidentally striking her with his camera and causing her to lose her balance and capsize the boat. He then takes advantage of the accident by ignoring Alden’s pleas for help and swimming to shore. Thus, in Dreiser’s novel, Alden is killed by negligence rather than intent. It is a perfect illustration of Dreiser’s belief that humans lack free will or, at best, can exercise it only in an environment severely constrained by circumstances. This depiction of a killer who is a victim of his environment, and perhaps even of himself, is central to the naturalistic true-crime novel, and most subsequent writers of true-crime novels with literary qualities reflect this attitude to some degree.

Donald Pizer, the leading scholar on American literary naturalism, identifies Dreiser’s novel as the beginning of a tradition of American social protest novels, largely fictional narratives reflecting how humans are limited by socioeconomic circumstances and indicting society for lack of parity. The best-known example of this tradition is John Steinbeck’sThe Grapes of Wrath (1939). Earlier naturalists had been primarily influenced by biological determinists such as Darwin. In McTeague, for example, Frank Norris portrays McTeague’s violent acts as the manifestation of his more brutal, animalistic tendencies. However, later writers were generally affected more by the social, economic, and psychological theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

The Middle Period, 1925-1965

Novels about crime combining naturalistic ingredients continued to be written from 1925 to 1965. Most examples fall within the literary mainstream and are generally classified as fiction, even though they are typically based on actual murder cases. Examples include William Faulkner’sLight in August (1932), James M. Cain’sThe Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Richard Wright’sNative Son (1940), and Meyer Levin’sCompulsion (1956).

Faulkner’s novel was influenced by a murder, castration, and lynching that occurred near the author’s native Oxford, Mississippi, in 1908. It may also have been influenced by the 1919 murder of an Oxford woman by her husband. Cain’s novel was inspired by a case in which the proprietor of a gas station that Cain frequented in California killed her husband. Cain also said that he developed his interest in the psychodynamics of lovers involved in murders together from the Ruth Snyder/Judd Gray case in New York in 1927. Cain’s novel is significantly shorter than earlier novels of the same type, and its economical journalistic style makes his book an important precursor of true-crime novels such as Capote’s.

In the essay “How Bigger Was Born,” Richard Wright describes how he sketched out his “native son,” Bigger Thomas, and then found him in Chicago newspaper accounts of a 1938 murder case. In a 1973 essay, Wright’s friend Margaret Walker Alexander described how Wright plotted his novel by covering his apartment floor with newspaper clippings. Levin’s Compulsion is a fictionalized account of the notorious Leopold-Loeb murder case, also in Chicago, of 1924. In that case, two rich university students who fancied themselves above the law killed the cousin of one of them, apparently to see whether they could outsmart authorities (they did not). Cain and Levin, writing about homicides perpetrated by two people, are interested in the psychological phenomenon the French call folie à deux (madness of two), or how two people influence each other to commit acts that neither is likely to commit alone. In this respect, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Compulsion are important predecessors of In Cold Blood.

In Cold Blood and New Journalism

In November 1959, when Truman Capote read a New York Times story about the Kansas murder of a low-level Eisenhower administration official, Herbert Clutter, and his wife, daughter, and son, he knew he had found the ideal subject for the “nonfiction novel” he had planned to write for nearly ten years. As Capote saw it, members of a picture-perfect family in the American heartland had been killed in their own home in the middle of the night. There were no suspects and no theories.

The saga of Capote’s journey to Kansas with his childhood friend Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), in search of his story is now famous and was the subject of two feature films, Capote, in 2005, and Infamous, in 2006. Capote and Lee initially spent about three months in Kansas, and Capote worked on the book for nearly five years before the two men eventually convicted of the murders, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were executed. Their deaths gave Capote the ending he had awaited since the killers’ April, 1960, convictions.

Capote’s claims of having created a new literary form were challenged by contemporary writers, most prominently by Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, who charged that Capote’s use of a real homicide case represented a lack of imagination. In Mailer’s case, this was ironic, as he would win a Pulitzer prize for his own true-crime book fifteen years later. Despite the book’s critics, In Cold Blood is widely regarded as the prototype of the true-crime novel and a classic American novel. In a New York Review of Books review, critic F. W. Dupee called the book “the best documentary account of an American crime ever written.” After its appearance, almost every homicide case that garnered major media attention attracted a Capote imitator.

Capote’s desire to write about an actual event using the techniques of fiction illustrates a development called the “ New Journalism,” a phrase generally attributed to writer Tom Wolfe. New Journalists used literary strategies such as plotting, characterization, and symbolism to write about actual events. During the 1960’s, these writers found themselves living in a chaotic society in which events such as assassinations and the Vietnam War seemed to defy explanation. Perhaps paradoxically, they attempted to bring some order to events by imposing meaning on them, at the same time that they valued the detached methods of journalism.

Examples of New Journalism are not limited to crime writing. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) is about 1960’s drug culture and his The Right Stuff (1979) is about the early U.S. astronauts. Norman Mailer’sThe Armies of the Night (1968) recounts Mailer’s participation in a 1967 anti-Vietnam War protest at the Pentagon. John Hersey’sThe Algiers Motel Incident (1968) concerns a shooting during riots in Detroit in 1967. The reportorial style of much nonfiction written during the 1960’s and 1970’s profoundly affected true-crime writers and influenced the journalistic aspect of the modern true-crime novel.

The true-crime subgenre acquired new status in 1980, when Norman Mailer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner’s Song (1979), the story of Gary Gilmore, the first man executed in the United States after a long, court-ordered moratorium on the death penalty during the 1970’s. The challenge to booksellers and award committees in classifying literary nonfiction is evident in the Pulitzer committee’s awarding Mailer the prize for fiction, even though a prize for nonfiction existed. This may reveal the committee’s hesitation to accept the novelist’s claims for factuality. The Executioner’s Song also represented a major shift in the philosophical underpinnings of the true-crime novel to a sort of postmodern position about the possibility of accuracy. Whereas Capote was determined to arrive at answers to the questions the Clutter murders raised and was dogmatic in insisting that he had delivered those answers, Mailer realized that such questions sometimes had to remain unanswered, even after he examined reams of evidence. In an interview with William F. Buckley, Jr., after the novel’s publication, Mailer acknowledged his own authorial limitations, admitting that despite months of research, he did not feel he had achieved definitive answers to his questions about Gary Gilmore’s life and crimes. In fact, Mailer admitted, some of those who had known Gilmore might be able to produce better answers than the novelist.

After Capote and Mailer

After around 1980, books about violent crimes have tended to vary more in approach and style than before In Cold Blood. The subgenre also grew to include television and film adaptations of prominent true-crime books, and it developed an Internet presence. Cable and satellite television have contributed to this development; some companies offer channels specifically geared to crime and or true stories. Some true-crime stories have been around long enough to spawn more than a single film adaptation. For example, a black-and-white studio version of In Cold Blood appeared in 1967, and a television miniseries version commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the novel’s publication in 1996.

In a sort of literary reversal, some filmmakers suggest their releases are factual even when they are not. For example, the makers of the wildly successful The Blair Witch Project (1999) constructed a Web site devoted to the fictitious claim that the film’s stars were actually missing. Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 film Fargo opens with the statement “This is a true story,” although Ethan Coen writes in the screenplay’s preface that the story only “pretends to be true.” The desire of makers of fictional films to give their projects the veneer of factuality suggests their awareness that the true-crime subgenre enjoys a wide audience.

After The Executioner’s Song, sensational violent crimes were often described in multiple books. The phenomenon may bear out Norman Mailer’s contention that any case involves multiple perspectives on the facts and answers to pertinent questions. It can also be attributed to the public’s growing appetite for true-crime books. For example, the crimes committed by Ted Bundy in the Pacific Northwest and in Florida during the 1970’s led to at least five books, including two written by Richard Larsen and Ann Rule, both of whom knew Bundy personally. Two decades later, the murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in Colorado on Christmas night 1996 became the subject of more than a dozen books, one of which was written by Lawrence Schiller, Norman Mailer’s primary researcher on the Executioner’s Song project.

More than 150 years after a notorious North Carolina murder case that led to the hanging of Frances (“Frankie”) Stewart Silver in 1833, three books about her appeared suddenly within three years: Sharyn McCrumb’s The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998), Perry Deane Young’s The Untold Story of Frankie Silver (1998), and Daniel Patterson’s A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillan and Stories of Frankie Silver (2000). However, the record for most books about a single criminal is undoubtedly held by the London murderer known only as Jack the Ripper. More than a century and dozens of volumes after the crimes attributed to the “Ripper,” American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell made a rare foray into nonfiction with Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed (2002).

Modern True-Crime Novels

True-crime books published after In Cold Blood can be grouped into several categories. Those written primarily from a law-enforcement perspective affirm the status quo and present murderers as threats to society. Notable examples of this type include Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974), by Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson and his “family” in California, and Fatal Vision (1984), Joe McGinniss’s account of physician Jeffrey Macdonald’s trial for the 1970 murders of his pregnant wife and two daughters at their home on the Fort Bragg Army base in North Carolina. McGinniss later wrote several other true-crime books, but Fatal Vision is particularly interesting, as it became the subject of a lawsuit filed against him by Macdonald that is chronicled in Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). Malcolm’s book provides a rare examination of the relationship between a true-crime writer and his subject. McGinniss, who originally became involved in Jeffrey’s Macdonald’s case as a member of the defense team, became convinced of Macdonald’s guilt. Fatal Vision presents Macdonald unsympathetically, as preoccupied, after the murders, with his own celebrity status.

A second variety of modern true-crime novel focuses on victims, rather than the perpetrators. A notable example is John Hersey’sThe Algiers Motel Incident (1968), an account of how three young black men killed during a sniper incident at a Detroit motel fell victim to the racism of the era. Joseph Wambaugh’sThe Onion Field (1973) is the story of a Los Angeles police officer devastated by his own guilt at having escaped a shooting that left his partner dead. Judith Rossner’sLooking for Mr. Goodbar (1975) is a thinly fictionalized account of a woman killed by a drifter she picked up in a bar on New Year’s Eve. In a larger sense, the woman is a victim of her own sexual appetite and the effect on her self-image of a physical deformity.

A third category of modern true-crime book focuses on communities in which violence occurs. The first half of Capote’sIn Cold Blood illustrates this aspect, but the best examples of this type are Gerald Frank’s The Boston Strangler (1966), Calvin Trillin’sKillings (1984), and Alec Wilkinson’sA Violent Act (1993).

Frank’s The Boston Strangler depicts how a series of stranglings terrified the Boston area between June, 1962, and January, 1964. Frank explores the background of the eventual prime suspect, Albert DeSalvo, but DeSalvo himself does not appear until the last quarter of the book’s narrative. The focus of the book is instead on Boston. Frank seems to argue that a serial killer victimizes far more people than those whom he murders.

Trillin’s Killings is a collection of true-crime stories originally published in The New Yorker. Trillin’s focus is also on the communities that are the settings for his stories, as he states in his book’s preface. Critics have argued that Trillin’s true interest is in the eccentricities of American life and that he chose accounts of violent crimes as a means of depicting those eccentricities.

Wilkinson’sA Violent Act chronicles the search in Wright City, Missouri, for the killer of a local probation officer and two other people in September, 1986. The perpetrator, Mike Wayne Jackson, whose identity is never in question, is absent through most of the narrative, showing up only in occasional sections about his background and in the book’s climax. Wilkinson’s primary focus is, instead, on how the community is nearly paralyzed by the fugitive’s presence in its midst and on the psychological devastation of the probation officer’s family.

Another category of true-crime book that became popular during the last decades of the twentieth century encompasses books whose authors seek to exonerate their subjects. Whereas the perspective of the naturalistic true-crime novels is “He did it, but there is a long list of mitigating circumstances,” the perspective of the exoneration true-crime book is “He didn’t do it.” One of the best-known examples of the latter approach is the case of Randall Adams, who, along with two cowriters, offered his account of his victimization by the criminal justice system, in the book Adams v. Texas (1991). After running out of gas one night in 1977, Adams accepted a ride from a juvenile delinquent who, a few weeks later, shot and killed a Dallas police officer in an incident that Adams had nothing to do with. Nevertheless, the false testimony of the true killer helped convict Adams, who spent twelve years on Texas’s death row. He was eventually exonerated and pardoned. His story is also the subject of the acclaimed documentary film The Thin Blue Line (1988).

In 2005, after publishing eighteen thrillers, novelist John Grisham turned to true-crime writing with The Innocent Man, an account of two murder investigations in Oklahoma focusing on a mentally ill man who, by all accounts, was innocent. Grisham acknowledged in interviews that he had studied In Cold Blood and Capote’s methodology.

A final category encompasses true-crime stories featuring women as perpetrators. Books about women who committed acts of violence began to appear in greater numbers toward the end of the twentieth century. Notable examples include Faith McNulty, The Burning Bed (1980) about Francine Hughes, a woman who burned her husband to death as he slept and was acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity. Hughes’s husband, Mickey, was an abusive alcoholic, and McNulty’s book is naturalistic in its approach to social problems.

Other accounts focus on three of the eleven women executed in the United States since 1976, when a U.S. Supreme Court decision permitted reinstatement of the death penalty: Velma Barfield in North Carolina, Karla Faye Tucker in Texas, and Aileen Wuornos in Florida. Barfield confessed to poisoning four people, including her mother, in ten years. Put to death by lethal injection in 1984, she became the first woman executed in the United States since 1962. Karla Faye Tucker was executed in 1998 as an accomplice in the 1983 murders of two people in Houston. She was the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. Tucker said she became a born-again Christian during her incarceration, and her clemency petition was one of George W. Bush’s toughest decisions as governor of Texas. Aileen Wuornos is perhaps the only female sexually motivated serial killer to work alone in the United States. Other known female serial killers worked as accomplices of men. She was executed in Florida in 2002 for the murders of seven men whom she lured with sexual solicitations and shot.

All these women have been subjects of books about their crimes. Barfield is also the author of a book about her own case, Woman on Death Row (1985). However, the most comprehensive account of her case is Death Sentence (1999) by Jerry Bledsoe. Tucker’s story is the subject of two books, Karla Faye Tucker Set Free (2000) by Linda Strom, and Crossed Over (1992) by Beverly Lowry. The latter is as much about the relationship Lowry formed with Tucker after as it is about Tucker’s case. Within just a few weeks of her arrest, Wuornos and her attorney sold film rights to her story, and the resulting film, Monster, (2002) won a best-acting Academy Award for Charlize Theron, who played Wuornos. The film is based on a book of the same title by Wuornos and Christopher Berry-Dee. Wuornos is also the focus of about a half-dozen other books.

Enduring Popularity of True Crime

As the true-crime subgenre has become more popular, some writers have built careers on it. Ann Rule, a former Seattle police officer and the author of about twenty books, is a case in point. Other well-known true-crime authors include Edna Buchanan, a former crime reporter for the Miami Herald; Jerry Bledsoe, a former reporter for the Greensboro News and Record, and Joe McGinniss, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who has written at least three best-selling true-crime books. These writers generally have official Web sites through which readers can engage them in discussions of their work. Many other sites, such as that sponsored by the cable channel Court TV, sponsor online archives about criminal cases.

Crime drama was also among the most popular television subgenres at the turn of the twenty-first century, with the series Law and Order, which first appeared in 1990 and inspired at least two related franchises, becoming the longest-running prime-time drama on American television. During the same period, several other crime programs were routinely in the top ten in television ratings, including shows focusing on forensic medicine.

Bibliography

Algeo, Ann M. The Courtroom as Forum: Homicide Trials by Dreiser, Wright, Capote, and Mailer. Edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Discusses how courtroom scenes are portrayed in An American Tragedy, Native Son, In Cold Blood, and The Executioner’s Song. Algeo argues that a trial reveals important aspects of the time period in which it occurs and that each book reveals the author’s attitude about social issues, particularly crime.

Biressi, Anita. Crime, Fear, and the Law in True Crime Stories. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2001. Argues that accounts of crime reflect the attitudes and beliefs of society. Includes chapters on crime magazines.

Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods. www.crimelibrary.com. Web site sponsored by the CourtTV cable network that archives many criminal cases. Includes true-crime news that is updated daily.

Gaute, J. H. H., and Robin Odell. The New Murderers’ Who’s Who. Rev. ed. New York: Dorset, 1991. Most recent edition of a classic true-crime reference book. More than 150 criminal cases, most from the United States or the United Kingdom, are summarized. Includes a bibliography of true-crime books containing 1,032 entries and an index of cases.

Guest, David. Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Argues that whether the death penalty is handed down in U.S. criminal cases depends more on who the criminals are than what the crimes are. Discusses McTeague, An American Tragedy, Native Son, In Cold Blood, and The Executioner’s Song.

Malin, Irving. Truman Capote’s“In Cold Blood”: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968. Study companion for Capote’s novel that could serve as a casebook for anyone constructing a handbook for another work. Contains background material, reviews of the novel, essays about Capote, four short stories with murder as theme, a bibliography, and questions for study and discussion.

Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. Solid study and introduction to Dreiser’s eight published novels that examines each work as a separate unit and points out their merits and flaws. Pizer also edited the very useful collection Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981).

Whited, Lana. “Naturalism’s Middle Ages: The Evolution of the American True-Crime Novel, 1930-1960.” In Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism, edited by Mary E. Papke. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Essay outlining the continuation of the naturalistic true-crime novel after the publication of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and before Capote’s In Cold Blood. Includes discussion of Light in August, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Native Son, and Compulsion.

Wiltenburg, Joy. “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism.” American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (2004). Explores the introduction of sensationalism into true-crime literature, tracing its impact from sixteenth century Germany, when the invention of the printing press made it easy to distribute pamphlets and broadsheets describing crimes. Argues that circulation of such material played an important role in public awareness of social mores, especially at a time when criminal justice systems were emerging and needed public support.