Why true crime isn't real

As a writer of murder mysteries, I often joke that making these stories believable requires making them profoundly unrealistic — simply because actual crimes and the investigation thereof have a way of being offensively uninspired. Readers want complex murder plots, twisted motives, a tough and passionate detective in dogged pursuit of a killer who is as brilliant as he is depraved. They do not want acts of impulsive violence committed by a guy with a room temperature IQ, one whose misdeeds are the product not of months of detail-oriented planning and plotting, but a single inauspicious moment in which he had a) a really bad idea and b) access to a gun. We think we want true stories; we don’t. We want good stories that just happen also to be true. This thought occurred to me repeatedly whi