Obsessed with True Crime discussion

I decided to start this discussion after stumbling across the fact that Stephen King's A Good Marriage happens to be based on the BTK case. Can't believe that won't be a good read!

There are many, many others, of course: The Slaughter: An American Atrocity is mostly a romance (!?) novel built around a true hate crime, with a short account of the true facts tucked in the front. Many people think In Cold Blood is TC, but it's a novel, with large swaths of the true story trimmed away and real people collapsed into composite characters to create what Capote called the first nonfiction novel. Joseph Wambaugh followed directly in his footsteps, playing fast and loose with the facts of cases like the one in Echoes in the Darkness to create novels with real people in them.

And then there's Jack the Ripper! Any number of fictional works have solved this ugly series of crimes, often with a super-detective like Sherlock Holmes pitted against the killer (who is also fictional, but also based on a real person). Some are frankly fantasy, like Time After Time. Some of these works have been published as straight-faced true crime. My absolute favorite is Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.

The Manson family has some fictional spin-offs, too, including The Girls and Chuckin' Chuck: The Astonishing Tale of Charles Manson Pitching in the Major Leagues.

We have a Fictionalized shelf for these titles that you should feel free to peruse, and add to.

Just wondering what some of your favorites might be.

This is a great idea.

I just read The Lost and just a few pages in realized that it was a horror novel based on the exploits of Charles Schmid. The antihero is very obviously Smitty but his adventures in this story are far removed from reality. It really works as a horror novel although I didn't need to know THAT much about everyone's sex lives. I wonder what the families of the victims would have said about Jack Ketchum's fantasies about the crimes...