True crimes

I just finished reading a collection criminal cases titled The Pinkerton Case Book, by Alan Hynd. Hynd was apparently given significant access to the archive of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the book is a paean to the efficacy of the agency in fighting crime. Missing from the book's foreword and cases are anything to do with the union busting for which the agency is most notorious.

It seems like this book is indicative of one historically popular subgenre of True Crime - ones where the investigators are the heroes, and were able to catch the criminal. The more common subgenre I hear about recently is is more critical of past investigations, or attempts to conduct its own investigation - for example the podcast Serial, or the TV documentary The Jinx. A forbearer of these would be Erle Stanley Gardner's Argosy column, The Court of Last Resort (dramatized in the TV show of the same name), which tried to re-investigate for people who were convicted of a crime and have exhausted their chances at appeal.

It's interesting to look Gardner's Perry Mason, the character and TV series, from this perspective. While the district attorneys and police detectives in the series (whether or not they are the iconic Hamilton Burger and Lt. Arthur Tragg) are shown as ultimately motivated by a sense of justice (more-so than in the novels that I have read so far), they are also repeatedly shown to target the wrong person, in a way that would convince a jury of their peers. It makes you wonder how many people in this fictional universe have been imprisoned and even executed wrongfully, because they didn't happen to have a Perry Mason at their side.