What struck me most while reading Dominick Dunne’s “Nightmare on Elm Drive” (1990), and Don Moser’s “The Pied Piper of Tucson” (1966), both reprinted in The Library of America’s True Crime: An American Anthology, was their flat, seemingly affectless style. Both essays present accounts of horrifying real murders—of Jose and Kitty Menendez in California, and three teenage girls in Tucson—with the unemotional eye of a camera gliding over surfaces. Although highly readable, they left me wondering what the authors wanted me to take away from those cases, and with the uneasy feeling that—regardless of the authors’ intentions—I was somehow complicit in a sleight of hand that transformed the murders into stylish and extremely well-written versions of infotainment.

The effect of Dunne’s and Moser’s work here stands in contrast to several of the almost 50 other pieces included in the absorbing and wide-ranging anthology. The earliest entry in True Crime dates from the 17^th century, and editor Harold Schechter’s excellent introduction puts the genre into context, while each essay is preceded with introductory information on the piece and its author. Most of the entries left me in no doubt of what the authors wanted me to think about or feel—for instance, James Ellroy’s pain as he delves into the records of his mother’s murder in “My Mother’s Killer” (1994), Cotton Mather’s fire-and-brimstone moralizing in “Pillars of Salt” (1699), or Zora Neale Hurston’s grasp of what’s at stake in “The Trial of Ruby McCollum” (1956), when she describes the proceedings as “mass delusion by unanimous agreement.”

In Celia Thaxter’s “A Memorable Murder” (1875), I could sense the tragedy of the victims’ belief in the essential decency of their world when she writes, “They did not pull down a curtain, nor even try to fasten a house-door. They went to their rest in absolute security and perfect trust.” And Thaxter’s horror at the murderer, who sits to eat in the house after killing its occupants: “Can the human mind conceive of such hideous nonchalance?!” There’s no doubt about the bewilderment in the anonymous “Account of a Murder Committed by Mr. J— Y—, Upon His Family, in December, A.D. 1781” (1796), which concludes: “But what avail our conjectures … the only use we can now make of our knowledge of this affair, is to be humble under a scene of human frailty to renew our petition, ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ ”

The anonymous author understands that sense can’t be made of the family man’s actions, so all that’s left to do is to pray that whatever madness compelled Mr. J— Y— to act as he did isn’t visited upon the rest of society. But in writing about a similarly senseless crime, in which Charles Schmid, “who cannot be dismissed as a freak, an aberrant of no consequence,” murdered three teenage girls, Don Moser ends “Pied Piper” with the words of a song that might, he says, serve as the “macabre reminder of [teenagers in Tucson’s] fallen hero”:

While those lyrics capture the aimless life of Tucson’s youth, their fascination with excitement and danger, they don’t capture the desperation of a single mother looking for her missing daughter, Alleen Rowe, although Moser does describe the actions she takes: “She badgered the police and she badgered the sheriff,” she wrote to the FBI and contacted a mystic. They don’t even touch on the hopes, dreams, or fears of “friendly, lively 13-year-old” Wendy Fritz, who is murdered, along with her older sister, just because her sister had the bad sense to date Schmid. Most of the revelations regarding the crime are presented in the voice of one of Schmid’s accomplices, and that voice is completely amoral and matter-of-fact. I assume that the reader is supposed to draw her own conclusions about what’s at stake, but since the narrative provides minimal information on or insight into those affected by the crimes­­­­—we hear nothing about how the Fritzes feel upon the murder of their two daughters, for instance—there’s not much to work with.

Dunne’s account of the killing of wealthy Kitty and Jose Menendez (their sons were convicted of the crime) also proceeds at a brisk clip in a matter-of-fact tone; you feel you’re hearing the story from a distance, as though recounted by a television reporter with the actual events unfolding somewhere in the background. Even the descriptions of the horrific wounds suffered by the victims seem a bit flat because they’re told in the form of a quote from a retired police detective. Without any editorializing or extra input from Dunne, I felt as though I was reading a coroner’s report. All this is strange because the article ends with a note from Dunne stating that he “became deeply and personally involved in this story,” and that in cases of high crimes, he’s “never made an attempt to paint a balanced picture.” But to me, the article didn’t read like that.

“Nightmare on Elm Drive” presents everyone involved­­—including witnesses and therapists—as more or less despicable (with the possible exception of Kitty Menendez, though it doesn’t dwell on her), which makes it hard to see the sons’ behavior as dramatically more despicable. Or rather, while it was easy to be shocked by what the boys were found to have done, I struggled to grasp why I was reading an account of this particular crime, as opposed to another.  And it’s not just a question of tone. Calvin Trillin’s “A Stranger With a Camera” (1969), which also unfolds in a generally dispassionate style, nevertheless alerts the reader to the moral dilemma at the heart of a shooting in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky when it discusses “the code of the hills.” 

True Crime provides a stunning look at four centuries of crimes that have captured the American imagination. It also provides an overview of four centuries of attempts to capture and convey some aspect of those crimes in writing. This gives readers a unique opportunity to sample different approaches—from the sermons of Mather, to Moser and Dunne, and everyone in between—and decide for themselves what they are looking for and value in accounts of real crimes.

Mystery correspondent Radha Vatsal is the author of Murder Between the Lines and A Front Page Affair. Sign up for her monthly newsletter here.