Karen Halttunen is Professor of History at the University of California at Davis.

• Introduction 1. The Murderer as Common Sinner 2. The Birth of Horror 3. The Pornography of Violence 4. The Construction of Murder as Mystery 5. Murder in the Family Circle 6. Murdering Medusa 7. The Murderer as Mental Alien Epilogue Notes Index

The invention of [true-crime] detective stories is often ascribed to Edgar Allan Poe, particularly in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen demonstrates that a longer view is required. Her book is a spirited and lively account, generously sprinkled with compelling anecdotes of grisly yet intriguing murders, murder sites and executions, accompanied by explicit contemporary illustrations. Beginning in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, she traces how accounts of murders changed from being seen as evidence of sin and evil to a more imaginatively complex perception of the murderer as a monster of Gothic terror...[Her] argument has a wide and expansive force.

Karen Halttunen is Professor of History at the University of California at Davis.

• Introduction 1. The Murderer as Common Sinner 2. The Birth of Horror 3. The Pornography of Violence 4. The Construction of Murder as Mystery 5. Murder in the Family Circle 6. Murdering Medusa 7. The Murderer as Mental Alien Epilogue Notes Index

The invention of [true-crime] detective stories is often ascribed to Edgar Allan Poe, particularly in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen demonstrates that a longer view is required. Her book is a spirited and lively account, generously sprinkled with compelling anecdotes of grisly yet intriguing murders, murder sites and executions, accompanied by explicit contemporary illustrations. Beginning in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, she traces how accounts of murders changed from being seen as evidence of sin and evil to a more imaginatively complex perception of the murderer as a monster of Gothic terror...[Her] argument has a wide and expansive force.

Karen Halttunen is Professor of History at the University of California at Davis.

• Introduction 1. The Murderer as Common Sinner 2. The Birth of Horror 3. The Pornography of Violence 4. The Construction of Murder as Mystery 5. Murder in the Family Circle 6. Murdering Medusa 7. The Murderer as Mental Alien Epilogue Notes Index

The invention of [true-crime] detective stories is often ascribed to Edgar Allan Poe, particularly in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen demonstrates that a longer view is required. Her book is a spirited and lively account, generously sprinkled with compelling anecdotes of grisly yet intriguing murders, murder sites and executions, accompanied by explicit contemporary illustrations. Beginning in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, she traces how accounts of murders changed from being seen as evidence of sin and evil to a more imaginatively complex perception of the murderer as a monster of Gothic terror...[Her] argument has a wide and expansive force.