The Value of Detective Stories

On a recent Sunday morning, The Times-Picayune, a newspaper from New Orleans, carried news that two young people had been arrested for an arson death, that a jury had convicted a man of killing a waitress in a robbery, and that a 15-year-old escapee from a youth detention facility had been recaptured. Those three stories were among the six main stories making up the first two pages of the local section of the newspaper.1 That same day, the main website pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune featured similar police-related coverage. In New York, the Times reported that a suspect in a weekend murder spree had been arrested.2 In Washington, D.C., a highly-placed story focused on the sentencing hearing for the man convicted in the murder of Chandra Levy, a congressional intern murdered by someone who had kidnapped her while she was jogging ten years earlier.3 And in Chicago, all six “breaking news” stories on the Tribune’s website had some connection with a police investigation: charges in a double homicide, charges in a girl’s death, an arrest for animal neglect, a missing girl found, a death in a parking garage, and a house fire.4