Blood and Ink

Albert Borowitz provides a guide to "fact-based crime literature" focusing on two principal groups of works: nonfictional accounts of crimes and criminal trials, including essays, monographs, journalism, editions of court transcripts, prison histories, and criminal and police biographies and memoirs; and works of imaginative literature, such as novels, stories, or stage works, based on or inspired by actual crimes or criminals. The interplay between crime fact and fiction can be detected back to literature's earliest beginnings. True crime has long been the basis of many plots of memorable literature from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Jean Genet's play The Maids, there has often been blood on the page. With entries as diverse as Bruce Springsteen's American Skin, a song about the killing of Amadou Diallo by four New York police officers, to Mark Twain's references to the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Roughing It To Death and the King's Horseman, Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's account of the confrontation of British criminal laws and the ritual suicide mandated by Nigerian religion, Borowitz's work is truly comprehensive. Eminent historian Jacques Barzun agrees, stating that "the variety of literary genres and languages is unique and should both instruct and entertain the large contingent of criminous minds." Blood and Ink, with forewords by Barzun and true-crime writer/historian Jonathan Goodman, will prove to be an invaluable resource to true-crime afficionados as well as to students and scholars of literature, cultural studies, and social history.