When I started writing mysteries, beginning with St. Martin’s Malice Award-winning Southern Fried,I wanted to get the medical, investigative, and courtroom details right. What better resource than good first-hand accounts from professionals who do those things every day? I must admit that, over several decades now, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. Real life is full of stories that, if told as fiction, would leave readers rolling their eyes in disbelief. The gruesome and cruel don’t interest me. I’m drawn to the storytellers who can capture the worst moments and turn them into finely written, compelling, accurate stories, showing us the complexity of life.
I wrote
Charlotte True Crime Stories: Notorious Cases from Fraud to Serial Killing
In 1987, the year I first got serious about writing mystery fiction, Pulitizer prize-winning Miami Heraldcrime-reporter Edna Buchanan published this book on some of the 5,000 cases she’d covered. I’m a lawyer by training and knew the importance of getting the details right, and Edna’s book was my first training ground in real crime. Her wry humor made even tragic daily news readable and memorable—and she was a fierce lady who wrote not about cops or crime, but about people.
Now in trade paperback, Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Buchanan’s classic nonfiction masterpiece detailing events from her eighteen years writing for The Miami Herald.
Nobody covered love and lunacy, life and death on Miami’s mean streets better than legendary Miami Herald police reporter Edna Buchanan. Winner of a 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Edna has seen it all, including more than 5,000 corpses. Many of them had familiar faces.
Edna Buchanan doesn’t write about cops—she writes about people: the father who murdered his comatose toddler in her hospital crib; fifteen-year-old Charles Cobb—a lethal killer; Gary Robinson, who "died hungry"; the Haitian who was…
Roughead wrote leisurely, almost Dickensian accounts of UK criminal trials in the 1920s and 1930s. He brought a sharp lawyer’s eye, a flair for the unusual, and a witty, knowledgeable voice to the trials and to the people involved. Madeleine Smith, Constance Kent, and Donald Merritt are among the 12 cases in this sampling from his many collections. Roughead set the bar for literate crime writers who followed.
Dorothy Sayers called William Roughead "the best showman who ever stood before the door of the chamber of horrors," and his true crime stories, written in the early 1900s, are among the glories of the genre. Displaying a meticulous command of evidence and unerring dramatic flair, Roughead brings to life some of the most notorious crimes and extraordinary trials of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Scotland. Utterly engrossing, these accounts of pre-meditated mayhem and miscarried justice also cast a powerful light on the evil that human beings, and human institutions, find both tempting to contemplate and all too easy to…
Journalist and award-winning crime writer Val McDermid is known for her gritty novels. In Forensics, she draws on her connections to introduce us to forensic crime fighting around the world. The best part for me: she introduced behind-the-scenes elements to cases I thought I already knew. And she is a novelist. She knows how to tell a good story.
In the course of researching her best-selling books, McDermid has become familiar with many branches of forensics, and now she uncovers the history of this science and the people who make sure that for murderers, there is no hiding place. Forensic scientists can unlock the mysteries of the past and help serve justice using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene, or the faintest of human traces. Now available in paperback, Forensics goes behind the scenes with some of these top-level professionals and their groundbreaking research, drawing on original interviews and firsthand experience on scene with top forensic…
I discovered Texas Monthlymagazine and its in-depth crime reporting when one of my sisters lived in Fort Worth. I was hooked. Writers Skip Hollandsworth, Mimi Swartz, Mark Seal, Gary Cartwright, and others dig into each story. This isn’t “just the facts, ma’am” reporting. It’s whyit happened and how it affected people. Some made international headlines (the military school cadets convicted of an odd love-triangle murder or the cheerleader’s mom who plotted to kill her daughter’s rival). Some could only happen in Texas. All are memorable, well-told tales.
Nobody does it bigger than the state of Texas, whether it is a matter of cattle ranches, pro linebackers...or true crime. From EL Paso, from Dallas from tiny Channelview come tales of murder, mischief, and malice - complete with new epilogues on their dramatic final chapters - that have been torn out of the pages of the award - winning Texas Monthly magazine and still succeed in rocking an almost shockproof nation. Included are true tales of: * Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower sniper who blew away sixteen lives. * The Cheerleader mum who planned to thwart her…
This collection features a range of stories, a range of time and places, written by many of the best true-crime writers. Goodman, himself a master storyteller, has pulled together a wide sampling of all manner of crimes stories, all well-told. Goodman wisely included his own likely solution to one of my favorite unsolved crimes, the Liverpool case of Julia Wallace, which has fascinated novelists from Raymond Chandler to Dorothy L. Sayers and P.D. James.
More than 32 accounts of murder by crime historians and fiction writers as well as analyses of how criminals are brought to justice, of how others get away with it, a section on executions and executioners, the perils of eye-witness evidence and a discussion of what makes a good murder.
Crimes that captivated the Charlotte area over the years run the gamut from missing people to the wrongly accused. This collection of headline stories features a little woman who got away with murder, violent motorcycle gangs, crusading mothers, a fraudster who claimed a president was poisoned by his wife, a serial killer who broke all the rules, and even the man who made Bigfoot. With a mystery novelist's ear for a good tale, Cathy Pickens presents more than a century of sensational sinister deeds that marked this diverse and dynamic city.
