More alive than dead

True Crime

An American Anthology

Edited by Harold Schechter

Library of America: 816 pp., $40

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The TITLE of this massive anthology, "True Crime," is misleading. Within these pages the reader will find nothing of the rich American literature of the confidence trick and no stories of bank heists or gangland slayings, be they rub-outs from 1920s Chicago or drive-bys from 1990s Los Angeles. The offing of presidents receives scant due. Abraham Lincoln gets the nod, but only as a contributor.

Instead, editor Harold Schechter tightens the focus of his selection to murder, and not just any old murder, but, as he writes, "those peculiarly horrific and unsettling crimes that have, in the words of pioneer newspaperman James Gordon Bennett, 'some of the sublime of horror' about them" -- crimes that erupt into otherwise ordinary lives and stick in the minds of the public. Narrowness brings rich rewards here, as Schechter follows the development of a genre from the Puritan sermons and broadsides of Cotton Mather -- "In the year, 1698. Was executed at Springfield, one Sara Smith. Her despising the continual Counsils and Warnings of Her Godly Father-in-Law laid the foundation of her destruction" -- to Truman Capote and Gay Talese, who brought overt forms of literary experiment to psychopathology.

Along the way, Schechter introduces ballads and now-forgotten writers such as Thomas Byrnes and Susan Glaspell together with a host of familiar names such as Herbert Asbury, Edmund Pearson, H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, James Ellroy and Ann Rule, showing how writing about murder has changed and yet remained, in some fundamental way, the same. Cain killed Abel, and murder, like love, is a human ground-rule. Reports of murder, however written, constitute news that, at some basic psychological level, we need to hear. As readers of this stuff, we long for the shuddering thrill and some moral or artistic instruction.