ON MURDER

De Quincey’s seminal 1827 work was greatly influential to such writers as Poe, Baudelaire, and Borges, and the trace of its impact can still be found today in modern satire, black humor, and crime and detective fiction. In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey’s innovative, idiosyncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, literary criticism, and aesthetic judgments, in a work strewn with examples ranging from antiquity to his own time, including the urban serial-killer John Williams. In addition to this essay’s Swiftian exercise in irony, he investigated the Williams case further in a postscript, resulting in a dramatic suspense-filled narrative that prefigures Capote’s In Cold Blood and the modern true-crime genre.