True Crime: Some of my Best Books

The Daily Beast asked me to list what I consider to be the best books in the true crime genre, and I obliged. Many offerings are what you'd expect - IN COLD BLOOD, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, HELTER SKELTER - but there was no way I was going to come up with a list like this and not include one of the formative books of my reading experience, Jurgen Thorwald's CRIME & SCIENCE, published in English in 1967:

I received this book as a birthday gift from my college roommate during my freshman year, and I think it played a huge role in why I pursued a master's degree in forensic science. Thorwald writes with exceptional clarity about cases obscure and famous that were solved through forensic techniques like blood typing and elemental analysis of gunshot residue. They may now seem quaint in the age of DNA and CSI-style glamorization, but current criminalists owe a lot to their chemically-minded pioneers. Both this book and its earlier companion volume, The Century of Detective—which lost the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime to In Cold Blood—ought to be rescued from out-of-print neglect to educate and entertain new readers.

Jurgen Thorwald wasn't his real name, and he wasn't a practicing criminalist or doctor - he was a journalist who studied his chosen subjects in depth and then worked very, very hard to convey complex concepts as concisely as possible to the layman reader. 

And, in THE CENTURY OF THE DETECTIVE, he got the essence of why Sherlock Holmes appealed to millions of readers nearly 100 years after his creation - and still appeals now:

Sherlock Holmes was the harbinger of a kind of criminological investigation which did not fit into any of these special [forensic] disciplines, and which ultimately far surpassed them in range. What Holmes did was to avail himself of all the chemical, biological, physical, and technological methods which were springing up at the turn of the century.

These are two books I'll be rereading again soon; they are well worth anyone's time, especially those looking for a good history of how the fields of forensic science and medicine came to be.

Comments

[Dan]

"Fatal Vision" by Joe McGinnis would head my list. The amazing access that Jeffrey MacDonald gave him let him have a first hand view of an amazingly creepy (and charming) personality at work, and the reader gets to share in the building realization of the man's guilt. You then are rewarded with a brilliant account of MacDonald's riveting trial, when all of the muddled forensic pieces of the puzzle finally come together in a terrifying whole.

[James Watts]

Jurgen Thorwald -- there's a name I haven't heard in years. I came across "The Century of the Detective" as a youngster, and was fascinated by both the stories he told and the very straightforward way he told them.

[Scott Phillips]

One of my favorites (never translated, as far as I know) is "Mes Grandes Enquêtes Criminelles--Mémoires" by Commissaire Guillaume, who was one of Simenon's inspirations for Maigret. He had roles in the Bonnot gang, Landru and Stavisky cases and he writes about all of them.