Crime and Conscience

A body drops in the first chapter of every one of these; what happens after is where the real book lives. Watch the crime novel graduate from psychology to history to something closer to metaphysics.

1. 1
   The Talented Mr. Ripley

   Patricia Highsmith · 1955

   Lvl 4290pp

   Highsmith gives us a murderer with no conscience at all: the crime novel's coldest, most seductive point of view.

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2. 2
   In Cold Blood

   Truman Capote · 1966

   Lvl 5343pp

   Capote's 'nonfiction novel' treats a real quadruple murder with a biographer's patience: true crime before the genre had a name.

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3. 3
   Crime and Punishment

   Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866

   Lvl 6545pp

   Dostoevsky puts the conscience Ripley lacks under a microscope: the murder happens early; the guilt is the whole plot.

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4. 4
   My Name Is Red

   Orhan Pamuk · 1998

   Lvl 7417pp

   Pamuk hides a murder inside a debate about Ottoman miniature painting: every chapter narrated by a different suspect, including the corpse.

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5. 5
   The Name of the Rose

   Umberto Eco · 1980

   Lvl 8536pp

   Eco buries a serial killer inside a medieval abbey and a labyrinth of forbidden books: the whodunit as treatise on knowledge itself.

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6. 6
   2666

   Roberto Bolaño · 2004

   Lvl 8912pp

   Bolaño closes the path with the genre's void: hundreds of unsolved murders in a border town, catalogued with a bureaucrat's horror. No resolution. That's the point.

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