more questions to ask myself, while writing: Why is it that I love to watch and analyze criminal trials, but I do not much care for any courtroom fiction? Same with criminal stories and forensics. I rarely like any fictional representations, but I could get lost in true stories - news reports, trial transcripts, evidence, trials, transcripts of interrogations, even some of the more well-written true crime - for hours and hours? (Although, I confess, I am working on a science fiction story that weaves a murder in with questions about various forms of surveillance and what it means to be missing/found/killed in such a watched, documented, surveilled world.)
I mean, for someone who does not much care for genre boundaries, this preference (bias?) seems strange. I will have to think more about this.
I do read a lot of true crime, but not usually the icky and sometimes exploitive tabloid-esque books (though some of those are better than their appearance suggests.) The cases in my forensics textbooks grip me, too, and I will track down more information, getting to know all the characters, wondering about them, sometimes mourning for them. I have spent whole afternoons crying over someone in a case I read in a textbook. But why?