The best books on crime exploring more than the crime

Convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald sues Joe McGinniss, who wrote a best-selling book about MacDonald’s 1970 trial for brutally killing his family.

Author Janet Malcolm asks, How is the journalist like the murderer? When are they lying to each other and when do they conspire to deceive the world? Malcolm had me from the get-go (despite the unfortunate sexism of the book’s first sentence): “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

Malcolm’s unflinching examination of sociopathy and masquerade proved an indispensable guide through the true crime space. And, as one summary said, The Journalist and the Murderer has “particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.”

Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon practically lived with the Baltimore City police to produce Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

I love the writing, which is clean but descriptive. In the thirty years since it came out, this book has often been imitated but is still without rival. He wasn’t reporting stories I’d heard before (good guys chasing bad guys), and the social forces that the book explored (individual and institutional) were palpably real and never drawn in one dimension.

The contents inspired decades of television, from network TV’s Homicide: Life on the Street to The Wire, arguably the best police procedural ever produced. As a fan of both shows, I was drawn to this source material, which was layered with cynicism, hope, and dark humor.

I thought Love & Terror was a book about a killing in Chadron, Nebraska, which was correct. . . sort of. Ballantine’s sparkling prose and grim compassion hooked me immediately. The book does examine a death—suicide? murder?—but we don’t meet the victim, Steven Haataja, until page 62. 

Ballantine drives past the shuffling Haataja the night before his death and tells us Haataja “limped slightly from a recently broken hip. If I’d known what was going to happen to him, I would have run him over . . . hard enough to break his other hip, put him back in his wheelchair,” in order to prevent his death. 

When I first read Love & Terror, I learned crime doesn’t need to be the center of a true crime.

Somehow, I’d never heard of the crime The Burglary details: the 1971 burglary of FBI field offices. And somehow, the burglars remained anonymous for decades.

A reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer at the time, Medsger was one of journalists who received copies of the FBI files stolen by three professors, a daycare worker, a social worker, and others who called themselves The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. The stolen files exposed COINTELPRO and other illegal FBI investigations, and fundamentally altered the FBI.

The Burglary told me the value of detailed research, especially relating a 50-year-old crime, and showed me the essential importance of understanding the society surrounding the crime in order to fully comprehend the crime.

I’ve long admired Sebastian Junger, who writes with precision, empathy, and intelligence.

He’s best known for A Perfect Storm, but in A Death in Belmont, a 1962 photograph shows him as an infant in his mother’s lap, posing with the two carpenters who’d just added an art studio to the Jungers’ home: The younger man is Albert DeSalvo, later known as The Boston Strangler.

Junger argues, convincingly but not definitively, that DeSalvo may have been responsible for the rape-murder of Bessie Goldberg, who lived near the Jungers, despite the conviction, based on circumstantial evidence, of Roy Smith, an African-American man seen walking the neighborhood,

My copy is feathered with Post-it notes marking passages that speak to the nature of murder and the difficult process of investigating a wrongful conviction.