SOURCE: "Murder as One of the Liberal Arts," in American Scholar, Vol. 63, Spring, 1994, pp. 277-85.

[In the following essay, Hitchcock examines the history of true-crime writing as well as famous historical murders. Hitchcock argues that the genre, as well as crimes, changed after World War II.]

When, more than 150 years ago, Thomas De Quincey enthroned murder as one of the fine arts, he did not mean the detective stories that would soon become an established genre of popular fiction, but actual crimes of the kind that dominate the popular press for a brief period, then are replaced by new atrocities.

Because they are "news," crime stories (used here to mean accounts of historical events) tend to be ephemeral and seldom attain the status of classics in the way that detective stories (here meaning fiction) sometimes do. Arthur Conan Doyle has a permanent place in the pantheon of famous...