SOURCE: "Making a Killing Off True Crime," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, Vol. 237, April 8, 1990, p. 9.

[In the essay below, Mehren suggests why the true-crime genre is so profitable, noting that there is no shortage of supply or demand.]

Hours after Chuck Stuart splashed into Boston Harbor from the Tobin Bridge last January, the phone at our house began ringing with fierce determination.

Stuart was the hero-turned-villain of Boston's spiciest murder in years: the man who first insisted that he and his seven-months-pregnant wife had been shot by a black assailant who leaped into the back seat of the Stuarts' Toyota Cressida, but who later, it seems, turned out to have done the shooting himself.

Our telephone was ringing so insistently because my husband and I both are journalists. Apparently that fact alone—or that plus our Massachusetts residency—qualifies us to be described as true-crime writers. This...