By Carrie-Edmund Laben
True crime as a genre – manifested in books, in film and television, and now in a myriad of podcasts ranging from serious efforts at investigative journalism to jokey chit-chat – has achieved prominence in the last decade. But feverish interest in crime is far from new. And its role as a place to discuss social rules, the people who break them, and how the reader/audience (presumed to be ‘normal’, ‘good’, and essentially in alignment with the law) should act and feel towards those law-breakers is also far from new.
The core of true crime is not the titillation of sex and violence nor the promise of solving a mystery. A work may lack either of these elements, occasionally both, and still be true crime. The element that can’t be omitted and still satisfy the core audience is the invitation to be part of the judging class.
Consider the avidity with which viewers of the first season of Tiger King (the 2020 Netflix series that served as flagship for the current true crime boom) divided themselves into camps based on whether they considered Joe Exotic or Carole Baskin the more plausible villain. Even works that highlight police failures and corruption, and try to stake a place for themselves outside the common run of copaganda, presume that this is a failure of a system that can and should work better with a few tweaks. Specific theories and theorists may go in and out of favor (like John E. Douglas and the FBI method of profiling), and the consensus on the guilt or innocence of specific criminals may shift (as with Adnan Syed, the subject of the Serial podcast, whose conviction for the murder of Hae Min Lee has been vacated and then reinstated in recent years) but the core remains. And this, too, has roots centuries old.
Alexandre Dumas père is remembered widely and well as a fiction writer. His nonfiction – in particular his massive Celebrated Crimes series, published in eight volumes in 1839-40 – is less well-known. But even in those early days of his career, four years before the publication of The Three Musketeers and six years before he completed The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas was a writer with a keen eye for his readership's appetites, sympathies, and inclinations, and a honed ability to pander to them.
In writing true crime Dumas was not acting as a pioneer. A century before, the Lyon lawyer-writer François Gayot de Pitaval had published an even larger collection of causes célèbres and in the process given his name to the Continental version of a genre very roughly equivalent to the true crime television or podcast series. Pitaval covered several of the same cases that Dumas would later recount -- stories like the false Martin Guerre*, the Loudon possessions**, and the murder of the Marquise de Ganges***. These were stories that had the same perennial interest in France in that era as tales of Jack the Ripper and Ed Gein do in the US of our own day. Pitaval and many of his successors maintained at least a facade of writing for legal specialist audiences, but their actual readership reached far beyond, and the cases they wrote about were soon adopted as material for fiction as well.
Between these two poles of legalese and avowed fiction, Dumas stands out as a storyteller of great power working (mostly, broadly, with caveats) within the bounds of fact. Dumas was more interested in a moral than a legal point of view, and that point of view was inseparable from a sense of drama that would be evident in his later work. But moral does not here mean moralizing. The stern injunctions of the Newgate calendar or the confessional ballad are no more for him than Pitival's long lists of witnesses and proceedings. Instead, his lodestar values are the Romantic-era ideals of camaraderie, frankness, physical courage, and passionate emotion, calculated to appeal to the reading public of the day. In this he is much closer to the values of most modern true crime than his predecessors.
In keeping with Romanticism, also, is his fascination with the exceptional individual, whether exceptionally virtuous or exceptionally vicious. Where he does not have a single person to focus on, as in most of the long section devoted to religious warfare in the south of France between 1551 and 1815, his work becomes slack and difficult to follow no matter how violent and historically significant the action on the page. A commonplace murderer who met a miserable end, on the other hand, can become Satan or worse in Dumas’ telling so long as he is a distinct individual.
Antoine Desrues was broken on the wheel and burned alive in 1777 for murdering a Madame de Lamotte and her sixteen-year-old son in an attempt to steal some real estate. Dumas, following accounts printed in the immediate aftermath of Desrues’ death, portrays him as a despicable creature: greedy, craven, vengeful, and habitually wearing a mask of hypocritical piety. In the Dumas version, Desrues’ criminality goes back to childhood. Orphaned at three, he is cast out from not one but two homes with relatives for incorrigible petty theft and (in a passage that brings to mind the monster-child Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed and is almost certainly just as fictional) murders a classmate who threatened to beat him up for snitching. He is morally malformed, if not from birth, then from well before the usual age of accountability.
Dumas also makes much of Desrues’ small physical stature and supposed physical deformity: at the time of his precocious first murder, he is “small, thin, of a sickly leaden complexion... His skinny arms and legs hung on to his body like the claws of a spider, his fair hair inclined to red, his white skin appeared nearly bloodless, and the consciousness of weakness made him timid, and gave a shifty, uneasy look to his eyes. His whole expression was uncertain, and looking only at his face it was difficult at first sight to decide to which sex he belonged. This confusion of two natures, this indefinable mixture of feminine weakness without grace, and of abortive boyhood, seemed to stamp him as something exceptional, unclassable, and once observed, it was difficult to take one's eyes from him.” (The contemporaneous sources that Dumas drew upon apparently went further, depicting Desrues as intersex.) In addition to the revulsion at gender ambiguity, details like the red hair and short stature hint at the period’s embedded anti-Semitic stereotypes, though Desrues was historically well-attested to be Catholic.
In short, Dumas has in Desrues an actual monster, the sort of character who would delight the Gothic imagination. The author works this angle to the fullest, and if he invents dialogue, incidents, and whole crimes, he nevertheless presents himself as exploring a philosophical and emotional truth, a question of how a person could become this monster, and having become so, could continue to exist undetected among ‘normal’ people until he killed and killed again. In this Dumas is not terribly different from modern practitioners of true crime.
The problem with Dumas’ approach is a problem that still troubles true crime today. The emotional truths that he deploys to such effect are themselves socially mediated, including by other books. He portrays Desrues as a universally despised monster because earlier books, notably Vie Privée et Criminelle de Desrues (1777) by André-Charles Cailleau, do so. It’s possible that they do so because Desrues’ crimes did, in fact, inspire extreme public revulsion at the time of his death. Or possibly, as theorized by the French historian Annie Duprat, Desrues was subject to a deliberate campaign of bad publicity by Parisian authorities. In “The Desrues Affair or the First Tomb of the Ancien Régime,”Duprat posits that the people of Paris, roughly a decade before the Revolution, were not inclined to feel very much outrage over the murder of a pair of minor aristocrats by a social-climbing grocer. Worse, Desrues had maintained his innocence under torture and in the face of a brutal death, a stance which might inspire admiration for his courage or call into question the value of torture in arriving at truth or justice. For these reasons the narrative had to be shifted into a more congenial course by the authorities, who (per Duprat) commissioned a series of pamphlets containing the depiction of Desrues that would make its way into Calleau’s book and thus into Dumas. A man who was well-liked by his neighbors, a good host, a regular at Mass, the loving husband of a wife who would stand by him loyally at trial, and at the end of his life possessed of great physical courage, would be transformed in history into a creeping, cringing, unctuous figure suitable for portrayal by Peter Lorre.
An untruth or two about a murderer 250 years gone is not terribly interesting, and no one now living is materially affected by Desrues’ reputation for good or ill. But the larger issue, of treating crime as a series of stories about the exceptional and not a pattern pervading the ordinary world of ordinary people, remains (for example, human trafficking as a danger to suburban middle-class women rather than as a crime primarily committed against the poor, of all genders and for economic purposes far beyond sexual exploitation). The interpretation of those stories by those with power to depict a certain kind of world remains. As Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out, Jim Jones and William Calley are hardly thought of in the same sentence, though both were central figures in triple-digit mass murders. And the temptation to storytellers to accept this depiction because in doing so they can give the audience what it believes it wants, the power to judge, that remains pervasive wherever crime is written about or discussed.
* most famously retold on film as The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) and in prose as The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) by Natalie Zemon Davis, an historian-consultant on the film
** most famously retold in prose by Aldous Huxley as The Devils of Loudon (1952) and on film as The Devils (1970)
*** retold in prose in between these two writers by the Marquise de Sade, to almost no acclaim even amongst his fans, as The Marquise de Gange (1813)
Carrie-Edmund Laben is the Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of the novels A Hawk in the Woods and the forthcoming Smoke Season (June 2026). Their work has appeared in such venues as Electric Literature, Indiana Review, and Outlook Springs. They hold an MFA from the University of Montana and live in Queens.