I confess, my guilty pleasure is truly criminal

Guilty pleasures? I'll go first.

I love a good murder. Slow poisoning is my preferred method. Call me a snob. But guns, knives, axes and blunt instruments cheaply obtained from a hardware store just don't measure up.

Too messy. Too noisy. Too common. Strangling? Murder shouldn't require that much effort.

No, poison it must be. As Shakespeare wrote when killing off Hamlet: "Then, venom, to thy work!" Poisonings demand imagination, forethought and patience. Skill, too. Fatal toxins delivered by professionals at the peak of their craft can take months to complete their work, leaving few traces and even fewer suspicions.

Crime - preferably the fictional kind but I'll happily settle for a real-life case - ranks high among my guilty pleasures. Singing along in the car to songs by the Backstreet Boys is another. But let's confess our crimes against good taste some other time.

I'm not alone in my passion for murder, mayhem and mystery. Australians are among the world's biggest consumers of true crime television, movies, podcasts and books, with one recent study placing us ahead of British and American audiences when it comes to being obsessed with the dark side of human nature.

The biggest fans of true crime consume almost four hours a week of their favourite subject, with women more than twice as likely as men to be immersed in the genre.

A literary event last weekend on the theme "Truly Criminal" resulted in a typically packed house. More than 90 per cent of the audience were women. When asked why they found crime so compelling, many theories were put forward until a woman at the back silenced the room with an irrefutable explanation. "We tend to be the victims, don't we?" she said.

Domestic violence statistics prove that. And women accounted for more than 70 per cent of the victims of serial killers in the US between 1985 and 2010 (perhaps not so coincidentally, more than three quarters of America's forensic scientists are women).

Psychologists who study our attraction to crime say it reflects our need for justice to be served. Women, they conclude, have higher levels of empathy with victims and may also experience a form of "second-hand relief" that they were not the target.

Our fascination with the macabre and the recent explosion in popularity of crime stories is hardly surprising. We're swamped in crime clickbait. The numbers don't lie.

While editing The Daily Telegraph I discovered that putting a shark attack story on the front page lifted newsstand sales by thousands of copies. Articles about bikie gangs and underworld figures boosted circulation even higher. I soon entertained a recurring fantasy: A gang of leather-clad Hells Angels plunge into the ocean for a relaxing swim (or, in my version, a rare bath), only to become involved in a bloody showdown with a Great White.

Shark wins. Justice is served. Newspaper nirvana ensues.

You may be one of those who find the public's appetite for dark deeds offensive and the publishing world's complicit role in publicising them distasteful. But surely our obsession with crime proves that, despite living in a rapidly changing world, basic human nature hasn't altered that much since the days of the Roman Coliseum.

Enormous crowds celebrated public hangings here and overseas until they were banned in the second half of the 19th century. Now our craving for punishment and justice has turned us into an army of amateur sleuths, crowding around television sets, poring through books and glued to podcasts. "I'm fascinated by crime because I love to work out whodunnit," confided one woman, a self-confessed crime aficionado, at last weekend's event.

I'm with her. Crime might be one of my guilty pleasures but I shy away from shows and movies that are too violent and bloody. It's why I prefer a good poisoning. Agatha Christie finished off more than 30 victims with poison in her 66 novels. Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary creation, was an expert in toxicology and could detect poisoned darts placed in victim's shaving brushes.

Yet for all the varying theories about why we are attracted to the underbelly of our society, perhaps we should all be honest and admit that stories about crime undeniably entertain us.

I'm currently watching The Gentlemen on Netflix. It's a typical Guy Ritchie production, with Cockney ne'er-do-wells spitting profanities and mumbling away in poetic slang. Subtitles are obviously required. But it's also brutally violent, thanks to the usual predictable array of weaponry. Time you stepped up a notch, Mr Ritchie. We snobs prefer poison.

HAVE YOUR SAY: Are you a crime aficionado? How do you account for its enormous popularity? And what guilty pleasures do you have in life that you're willing to share? Email your response to echidna@theechidna.com.au.

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