18 June 2006

Thrill kills: turning crime into mass-market pornography

Almost as old as the Bible is the work of the Ancient Greeks: in Oedipus Rex, Sophocles explores the repercussions of one of the most abhorrent crimes, patricide.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare tackled the killing of a king. Crime is the new pornography: people can't get enough of it. Thrill kills: turning crime into mass-market pornography And where would bookshops be without crime?

They're not my preferred reading, but I have fewer problems with detective fiction (which has a longer history than even Sherlock Holmes could fathom) than true crime, the rehashing of real cases.

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