Browse a bookstore and you will find a healthy shelf labeled "Crime." Beside it may be a smaller, seedier shelf labeled "True Crime." The first is popular crime fiction, the second crime fact. Fictional crime has taken over, writes Mark Seltzer, and the confusion of reality and event has saturated-and even defined-contemporary American culture.
In his widely read Serial Killers, American studies scholar Mark Seltzer analyzed the American obsession with violent accident-vehicular homicide, serial murders, and other spectacularly awful events.