This book dialogues with a quandary which might well appear banal. Banal because it has crossed many people’s minds, above all in recent times. Nothing academically sophisticated, then, simply: why is contemporary society so fascinated with crime? I am very pleased that my work has been translated into English1 because this is a question which there will almost certainly never be a definitive answer to but it is one which, I believe, merits greater attention from the academic community. We seek constantly to conceal the ambiguous and fundamental bond between crime and all human societies: violence frightens us, we struggle on an everyday basis to keep it at arm’s length but we are seduced and dazzled, sometimes even obsessed by it all the same. What follows are words, one after the other, designed to deal with this subject.