In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey’s innovative, idiosyncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, literary criticism, and aesthetic judgments, in a work strewn with examples ranging from antiquity to his own time, including the urban serial-killer John Williams. In addition to this essay’s Swiftian exercise in irony, he investigated the Williams case further in a postscript, resulting in a dramatic suspense-filled narrative that prefigures Capote’s In Cold Blood and the modern true-crime genre.