What’s that show with the murder cops? “The First 48”? Yeah, that one. You call that true crime — a bunch of guys in Dacron shirts driving around Minneapolis in Crown Vics? Please. They knew something about true crime in the 18th and 19th centuries, let me tell you, and they had their own little niche of the penny press to show it off in. “Murder pamphlets” were cheap, lurid little rags detailing violent crime in all its many colors, from the case of the unhappy servant who tried to dispatch her employer with arsenic-laced dumplings to the handyman who murdered his boss and the boss’s family with an axe. (Workplace dissatisfaction seems to have been a big thing in the murder pamphlets.) The National Library of Medicine shows off its collection of murder pamphlets here. Have a great weekend, and sleep tight!