The best true crime books

Graeme Sheppard’s account of the 1937 murder of Englishwoman Pamela Werner, A Death in Peking, has been overshadowed by Paul French’s more widely known Midnight in Peking, unfortunately so. Whereas French builds his case on dubious claims and sensationalizes his narrative with gothic embellishments centered around the haunted “Fox Tower” where Werner’s body was supposedly found (a location contradicted by contemporary newspaper accounts), Sheppard sticks to the facts and arrives at a strikingly different and more convincing conclusion regarding the identity of the murderer. And if French’s page-turner is modelled more on the mystery novel genre than true-crime reportage, Sheppard’s starker account is nonetheless equally engrossing in its pursuit of the truth. In the process of his methodical sifting of the evidence, he brings to light an old Beijing grounded in reality. I myself have conducted guided tours of the old Legation neighborhoods and their sheer geography compels… show more.

Jager’s book is an indispensable source for facts about a famous murder that is the inspiration for one of my future Christine de Pizan novels. In 1407 Duke Jean of Burgundy, known as Jean the Fearless, ordered his henchmen to murder Duke Louis of Orléans, who was his cousin as well as the king’s brother. The provost of France was able to identify Jean as the instigator of the crime, and in my novel Jean takes his revenge by having one of his minions kidnap the provost’s daughter.

Jarossi’s debut features deeply moving vignettes of young women with troubled early lives, who, in the West London of the 1960s, fell into the path of a still-unknown serial killer. He was heartlessly dubbed Jack The Stripper by the national newspapers. Jarossi vividly recreates the tawdry workings of the vice trade – the underbelly of Swinging London. He rightly focuses on the victims – and restores to them the dignity of which their killer (and those who covered the case originally) deprived them.

Schecter, a journalist, and Deriabin, a KGB officer who defected to the U.S., tell the inside story of Oleg Penkovsky, the history-changing Soviet GRU colonel who delivered critical information that helped the CIA and President John F. Kennedy avoid nuclear disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The inside account delivers fascinating details about Penkovsky’s motivations, actions, and tragic demise, as well as a gripping narration of how the CIA handled one of the Cold War’s most important intelligence operations.

There are numerous books that seek to prove Oswald was the lone assassin, and Mailer’s is probably the most open-minded and convincing one. Rather than descend into name-calling against authors of more conspiratorial works, Mailer sticks to the topic of Oswald’s mysterious time in Russia. Based on interviews with former acquaintances and research gathered from Russia, the book uncovers fresh details about Oswald’s time there. While Mailer theorized that Oswald executed Kennedy to shake up the world and cement his place in history, he leaves the door open, if just ever so slighty, to other potential gunmen in Dallas.

Like most calm, ordinary, cautious people, I enjoy movies and books by and about reckless, clever criminals.

Myles Connor, rock star and felon, may or may not know all about, or played a role in, the famous art theft from Boston’s Isabella Gardner museum. He talks an extremely good game.

I found this telling of the Shedden massacre of eight Bandidos at the hands of a mix of club mates and deranged wannabes, including a one-time failed police officer who was looking to reinvent himself as an outlaw biker player, very affecting, reading as it does like an almost Shakespearian real-life tragedy.

Edwards, along with Jerry Langton one of the key chroniclers of the Canadian outlaw biker scene, tells the stories of the dead men, introducing a group ranging from established bikers to probationers, loners to family men, and petty criminals to ordinary working stiffs; laying out how they all came to be facing their death one after another in a Nazi fantasist’s barn.

The tagline for this book is Spying and Crown from Victoria to Diana. It is a massive book, the fruit of in-depth research, and opens up a fascinating field of enquiry. It details how the secret services grew out of attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria and reveals how the pro-Nazi sympathies of Edward Vlll and his abdication triggered a massive security alert. Most intriguing of all is the story of how King George Vl came to cooperate with SOE in a massive deception in the run-up to D-Day.

So few books give me chills, but I could feel my temperature downright drop the deeper into this graphic novel I went. Certainly not for the weak-hearted, or stomached for that matter, Powell and Schechter plunge into one of the most depraved characters of the Midwest… none other than Ed Gein himself. There is an odd beauty to the madness at display here. It just goes to show you never know what’s going on behind the closed doors of your next-door neighbors.

The first time I read this book, I had the whole-body sensation of having my mind simultaneously read and fed. Nelson put words to fantasies and fears I’d never thought to vocalize, while also functioning as an educator, leaving me with an entirely new understanding of true crime as a media sensation. This is a memoir about the process of writing her book of poems, Jane. Jane chronicles the story of her aunt, who was murdered as a young college student, while The Red Parts goes into Nelson's personal process and how the investigation of a murdered family member can become all-consuming. I highly recommend reading both in succession because the dialogue between them is astounding.

If You Tell reads like a fiction mystery novel. I wasn’t paying attention when I started reading this, and I thought it was fiction. When I realized this book was based on a true story it bewildered me. You hear stories about people, how horrible they can be, but this mother had to be a fictional character – she’s not. She will give you nightmares.

I grew up with lots of stories and books about WWII because my father was a veteran. What is different about this book’s narrative is Portugal’s position of neutrality during the Second World War and the resulting web of political intrigue. Salazar, Portugal’s dictator at the time, played both sides, aligning with the British, all the while selling off Portugal’s Tungsten, a metal used to produce armor-piercing projectiles (which apparently melted the British tanks), to the Germans for gold that the Nazi’s looted. And at the end of the war, all that gold helped Portugal emerge economically intact. 

In one of my very favorite books of the past twenty years, Tim Tyson describes the brutal racist murder of a Black man in small-town North Carolina in 1970. He also goes into the aftermath, which Tim personally observed with the eyes of the ten-year-old son of the town’s Methodist minister. His father tried sincerely, with little success, to bridge the town’s racial divide as militant young Blacks took to the streets, burning warehouses. Tim is a remarkably poignant storyteller, and every page is stamped with his compassion, his wit, his keen eye for human nature. And most especially, with the wisdom that he learned from his father over the years. Some folks have compared it with To Kill a Mockingbird, and I definitely agree. And on a personal note, Tim’s father, Reverend Dr. Vernon Tyson, was a friend of my family for many years.

Talk about dark academia—what about a lecturer at Harvard Medical College murdering a Harvard graduate? Dr. George Parkman disappeared one day and was only found later, in pieces, and some of those pieces were in the medical school furnace. This book follows the case before CSI could help identify a man’s remains. It explores why, exactly, a man with such a promising future would decide to throw it all away—and how a janitor unlocked the solution made more complex by questions of class and new vs. old money.

An exploration of the suspected murder of an Italian child in London that along with the murders of Burke and Hare, changed how bodies are supplied for medical teaching. Set in London in the 1830s it is a factual look at the way cadavers were supplied for medical teaching at that point in history.

Noah Charney is an art historian and has written several interesting books that I have read. Even though this book, Stealing the Mystic Lamb, came out too late for my novel, the “altarpiece” of my book is in fact the “Mystic Lamb” otherwise known as the Ghent Altarpiece. My quasi-obsession with this monumental piece of art is matched by Charney and he describes how often it has been stolen and nearly destroyed. No other piece of art has had a history quite like this one. 

Award-winning author Patricia Pearson has a no-nonsense knack for finding and reporting truths, no matter how unsettling these are. Pearson doesn’t hesitate to express her own viewpoints but does so from the wealth of evidence she carefully collects. And she doesn’t care if this flies the face of “popular” opinion! I appreciate that she avoids sensationalism. She is dedicated and bright. I respect her enormously. She’s also been a kind and supportive colleague! When talking about Pearson’s work in my book, I noted it interesting that many efforts underscoring that women can do just as horrible things as men can have largely come from women, like Patricia, myself, Debra Schurman-Kauflin (mentioned below), and sociobiologist Amanda Farrell from Old Dominion University. 

Edna Buchanan moved from New Jersey to Miami on a whim in 1965 and found her calling in the journalistic life.

Calvin Trillin would later write, “In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna.”

She had a nose for the bizarre and the macabre—as well as for a good lead: “A man wandering along a Miami Beach street in his undershorts and carrying a blood-stained knife Sunday morning led police to the scene of a murder.”

In this memoir she recalls zipping around South Florida from Hollywood to Homestead in her yellow Triumph Spitfire to produce her almost-daily cataloguing of gruesome crime. The “polite” killer who abducted couples on dates, raped the woman, and then allowed her to dress before shooting both.

The hand grenade thrown… show more.

This is a gritty, riveting look at the Irish Mob on New York’s West Side in the 1980s.

The author grabs you by the arm and propels you at breakneck speed through the blood-stained streets and barrooms of Hell’s Kitchen. Along the way, he introduces the reader to a crew of crazy characters that you definitely wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

The parts about the Irish mob’s connections to the Mafia were especially enlightening. It’s a very atmospheric look at a part of the city where I worked as a newspaperman in the decade the book came out (and downed pints in some of those bars.)

A veteran Texas journalist who started teaching a course on the assassination at UT-Arlington in 1976, Marrs saw his comprehensive work published a year after Garrison’s book. Stone also used Marrs’ book as a prime source for his movie. Unlike Garrison, Marrs steered clear of pinning the assassination on mostly one group, covering the alleged roles of organized crime, anti-Castro Cubans, the military-industrial complex, oilmen, bankers, political opponents, and more. Some 25 major publishers turn down Marrs’ manuscript, which became a best-seller, before Carroll & Graf accepted it. The work was one of the first to tie together the various alleged conspiratorial groups.