Next month, the publisher of Heat magazine is launching a new title, Crime Monthly, to showcase “the darkest crimes and evil minds”. What a lovely way to welcome spring! I’m in a minority on this, but there’s something about the rampant craze for true crime that icks the hell out of me, and it’s not the crimes themselves.

Crime Monthly magazine. Photograph: Press Gazette

We shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but it’s fair cop when it comes to magazines. Crime Monthly’s first cover is crowded with angelic young women, smiling tragically above captions such as “Milly: New Agony” and “Backpacker Murder: Suspect’s Creepy Messages”. But there is nothing creepier than the impression given by the magazine: that crime is only worth paying attention to when the victims are pretty and white, and the aggressors are baroque monsters, and that there’s nothing wrong with reading a splashy mag that revels in both. You could spend £1.99 on a razorblade-studded cheeseburger and it would still be a healthier choice.

I don’t even like the high-brow, or more self-aware, stuff. I couldn’t get into Serial, or My Favourite Murder, or Making A Murderer, or The Jinx, The Staircase, The Sad Cupboard, The Bad Thing. People tell me some of these are public-interest journalism at its best, unearthing miscarriages of justice, righting wrongs. But I don’t think audiences really care about any of that, as in actually care, beyond the satisfactions of the narrative. It’s just a damn good story to them. So twisty. Such a good way to kill the commute hours, especially when you haven’t got the elbow room for Candy Crush.

People fold these grim fairytales into their lives alongside Peaky Blinders and BoJack Horseman and Bake Off, and let themselves get pop-culturally obsessed in the same way. Neflix had to release a statement last month imploring viewers to stop lusting after Ted Bundy, after an inappropriate Twitter reception to the documentary Conversations With a Killer. Stop being hot for Bundy. Stop shipping Harold Shipman. Curious about whether the Freeway Killer William Bonin lived up to his name? You are probably not paying attention.

There is a live-ammunition charge to knowing that these are real human stories, yet we have been lifted of the burden of having to treat them with human dignity. Historian Hallie Rubenhold tries to right the balance in her new book The Five, which presents the true stories of Jack the Ripper’s victims; whom, it turns out, probably weren’t prostitutes, as has always been suggested, just homeless women who were murdered in their sleep. Yet I’m skeptical that the misogynistic Jack the Ripper myth will ever be dismantled. We love the top hat and cape too much, don’t we? Strong look, darling.

We listen to true crime stories as an escapist thrill, but they delude us to the true nature of most crime. Some of my friends now semi-seriously count themselves experts on DNA collection. Or spin elaborate fantasies about how they would get away with their own Very Bad Thing. They think they are clued up on the red flags of potential murderers. Brian in Compliance, keep an eye on him, they wink, now that they are bored of diagnosing people as psychopaths after reading the Jon Ronson book.

I have been called up for jury service a few times, and it always strikes me how little it resembles television, even the true-crime shows. There is no sexy grandstanding and dramatic reveals here. Most of the time, it’s a stammering barrister losing his place on the 27th page of badly photocopied phone records. It’s banal. Those experiences also showed me that violence is sickening, and everywhere – in my postcode, in yours, in the flat down the hall. There’s really no escaping it. Let alone escaping into it.