What Does the True-Crime Writer Owe to the Living?

image: Gerd Altmann for Pixabay

As the author of what you might call “fake-crime” stories (i.e., murder mysteries), I know better than most the universal appeal of violence, literary and otherwise. There’s a frisson attached to the danger, to the horror; a sort of schadenfreude that someone else died, not me; and of course the kind of voyeurism that keeps people rooted to accident scenes until the last ambulance has departed. It’s…