Why do we want to read about murder? Most of us do not want to kill people, and most of us would feel a little squeamish if we discovered that one of our friends had done somebody in. Part of the reason must be simple ghoulishness, if it can ever be entirely simple to take pleasure in imagining how people kill each other. In most murder fictions these dark pleasures are overlaid by other, superficially more respectable, kinds of interest. Murder fictions let us test our hypotheses about how and why people act. They may also suggest that the things we do when we read most narratives - forming inferences, seeking intelligibility, constructing hypotheses that fit the plot - might be serious kinds of human activity: they might finally uncover why someone made someone else become a corpse.

LRB 22 September 2005 | PDF Download