Crime literature gives us a satisfaction that we are often denied in life. In life, we never do know who really killed Nicole and Ron; we only suspect there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll; we are left to wonder about Dr. Shepherd’s wife and Jeffrey MacDonald’s capacity for truth or self-delusion. The Green River killer disappears into the primordial slime from which he rose, the Zodiac killer joins him there, and we are left with only the questions themselves: who were these people and why did they murder? But in crime fiction, the killers face justice. It can be real justice, poetic justice, or psychological justice. But face it they do. They are un-masked and normalcy is restored. There is vast satisfaction for the reader in that, certainly more satisfaction than is garnered from the investigation into and punishment for an actual crime.

For the writer who wishes to explore characters, there is nothing so catastrophically catalytic as the intrusion of a crime into an otherwise peaceful landscape. A crime places everyone into a crucible: the investigators, the perpetrator, the victims, and those in relationship to the investigators, the perpetrator, and the victims. Within this crucible of life’s most monstrous acts the mettle of the characters is tested. It is when characters confront the most serious challenges to their beliefs, their peace, their sanity, and their way of life that their pathology is triggered. And it is the pathology of the individual character clashing with the pathology of all the other characters that is the stuff of drama and catharsis.

Some of our most enduring pieces of literature have a heinous crime as their backdrop. Hamlet’s monumental mental struggle to overcome his conscience and act the part of Nemesis could not occur had the poisoning of his father not happened in a brutal act of frat-ricide.