Elmore Leonard is great fun and properly acclaimed, but his books are safe and clearly make-believe. True crime is it. The color is black and blue, like a bad bruise. It has the faint whiff of an autopsy. It really happened and there are glossy pictures to prove it, along with coroners' reports that deal with ligatures and rigor mortis and stomach contents.
True crime is to the crime novel as crack cocaine is to marijuana.
The ultimate reading room would be a morgue. Much of the memoir is taken up with a detailed account of the doomed investigation. What he has produced can't be neatly categorized. The year is 1958. She has been strangled with her own nylon stocking after a sexual encounter that may or may not have been consensual.