Granta 46

Crime - why does it fascinate us so?

It is both our greatest possible horror and our greatest possible entertainment. We fear it - it threatens our families, our privacy, our peace - and are pleasured by it: it is the stuff of our bestsellers, our movies, our Saturday night television. Crime thrills.

This special edition of Granta is devoted exclusively to criminal behaviour, to the excesses of human conduct: a testimony to social deviance.

It features James Ellroy - the most sophisticated member of a new generation of American crime writers: gifted, startling and very disturbed.

And the extraordinary stories of two murderers - told by the murderers themselves: both born in the same city, in the same year and of the same religion (but such different endings).