Take a look at the entertainment landscape today—the most popular books, movies, and television shows all revolve around murder and its dissection by brilliant investigators. Renowned British essayist Thomas de Quincey stumbled on this truth early in the nineteenth century, prompting him to pen the satirical piece On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. In it, de Quincey gets to the very heart of our ongoing obsession with the finer points of killing.