When Chinese author Liu Yongbiao was convicted earlier this week of bludgeoning four people to death in a guesthouse in 1995, it might not have come as such a surprise to his readers.

In a preface to his 2010 novel, itself titled The Guilty Secret, Liu said he was already at work on a follow-up about a female author who’s committed a series of gruesome murders and evaded capture. In the end he never wrote it, though he already had a title in mind: The Beautiful Writer Who Killed. Following his arrest, he reportedly told Chinese TV station CCTV that some of his works were indeed inspired by his thoughts about the murders, whose victims included the guesthouse owners’ 13-year-old grandson.

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Liu is not the first author to have committed a grisly crime and fed it into his fiction. In 1991, Dutch writer Richard Klinkhamer murdered his wife and then delivered a macabre manuscript to his agent whose title translated as ‘Wednesday, Mince Day’, and which might have been subtitled Seven Ways to Kill Your Spouse.

Real-life crimes have found other routes into fiction, too, haunting novelists whose vivid imaginations are able to pick up where experience falls mercifully short. From Truman Capote’s seminal ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood to international hits like Emma Donoghue’s The Room and Emma Cline’s The Girls, chilling wrongs have a way of becoming only more so once they’ve been fictionalised, enabling them to take up residence in the darkest recesses of the mind.

These five crimes and the literature they’ve inspired create a literary hybrid that is not for the skittish.

Black Dahlia