Writers, by and large, are a boring lot – even more so now that so many are employed by the state (or states in the case of the US) to teach middle-class youth how to tell imaginary stories in prose. Yes, yes, the academy is a fascinating subject and you can't have enough tales about college politics or balding, paunchy middle-aged lecturers lusting after young girls. But even so, something elemental has been lost: a connection to the blood and piss and fecal slime of life.

Take killing for instance. For millennia, humans have taken great delight in slaughtering each other. Indeed, in some cultures, a man was (is) not a man until he had (has) shed another's blood. Read a modern literary novel about killing however, and you'll get a lot of angst-ridden waffle ripping off other, older books – an imaginative projection of the postmodern self onto earlier, more openly violent times. Naturally this waffle will be written by somebody with little or no experience of violence, who probably earns a crust teaching middle-class children how to tell imaginary stories in prose.

Of course, I am not suggesting that authors should kill just so they can know what it feels like. Killing is bad. But given that we live in an extremely violent world, a world indeed that is predicated upon violence, where even tiny little insects spend a lot of time fighting, I have been wondering recently about authors who have direct experience of killing. Who are they, and what can they tell us?

In my efforts to identify violent men of letters, I have come up with two categories: the professional killer and the inspired amateur.

The first category is the broadest, and contains some of the greatest names of world literature. Cervantes, for instance, was a professional soldier who lost the use of his left arm in battle. Extremely proud of all the killing he did, he went on to write Don Quixote, a humorous novel about a demented knight who believes the world is like the one you encounter in story books, and not the extremely violent place Cervantes knew it to be.

Another great author-killer is Leo Tolstoy. It's been a while since I read The Sevastopol Sketches, his account of his military experiences in the Crimean war, but I do note that in later life he grew a very long beard and took to munching vegetables, so he was undoubtedly much less gung ho about killing than Cervantes (although Tolstoy's later repudiation of violence should also be seen in the broader context of his labyrinthine and complex relationship with God, the soil and Russia, etc).

Then there is Winston Churchill, who had few qualms about killing when he felt it necessary. In The River War he recounts his youthful experiences massacring tribesmen in the Sudan – which do not appear to have caused him many sleepless nights.

But then, war is war and it's acceptable to shed blood on the battlefield. It's a different story when you're located in civilisation, amid teacups and sofas. Of course, popular fiction is awash with dead bodies and corpses; detective stories and true crime are top-selling genres in the US and UK. But how many of those individuals writing about killing have actually snuffed out another's life?

Precious few, as far as I can see. I suppose the most famous freelance author-killer is William Burroughs, who shot his common law wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951. It didn't do his career any harm, that's for sure, but only added to the myth of the skeletal narco-fiend. There is a lot of violence in his books, and I do believe that it is intended as a critique of something or other, but alas I find his work unreadable so there's not much I can learn there.

Recently, however, I read a fascinating story in an old copy of Life magazine (the 29 October 1971 issue to be exact). Inside was a story about Jesse Hill Ford – an acclaimed and bestselling southern novelist in his day – who shot and killed a man for parking on his lawn. Ford was subsequently tried for murder, only to be exonerated of all charges. Incredible! I thought. Why haven't I heard of this guy?

And then all became clear. Ford had established his reputation with a novel entitled The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, a searing indictment of racism in the Deep South. A black undertaker names a white sheriff as co-respondent in his divorce suit; the sheriff kills him; and then the white community pulls together to protect the murderous lawman. The book was filmed, and Ford became very wealthy. But it also earned him the enmity of his neighbours, since it was based on an actual event that had happened in their community.

The thing is: the man Ford killed was black. Ford claimed that he had suffered a history of harassment from the local black community because the recently desegregated high school football team, which was captained by Ford's son, contained no black athletes. As a result, when a mysterious car parked on his lawn, he feared for his family's safety and opened fire.

A likely story? Well, according to the article, Ford rapidly made nice with the local racists who still preferred to side with a white man against a black man, even if he was the author of a book they all hated. And so he was found not guilty. No doubt Ford was relieved to get off, but his reputation as a liberal southern author was ruined.

Had Ford possessed a great soul like Leo Tolstoy, he might have been able to gaze directly into the darkness of his actions; he might then have written a true masterpiece. Instead, burdened with massive debts, he moved to Hollywood where he churned out unproduced screenplays for cash. In the late 1980s he re-emerged as an angry right-wing columnist, before in 1996 turning to violence again, only this time of the sort more commonly practiced by writers – he killed himself.

But that is an entirely different category of killing, and a topic well explored elsewhere. There are whole studies on The Author and Suicide, and those books do indeed have a macabre appeal. Nevertheless, it's the other kind of author-killer, the man (or woman) who sheds another's blood, who has more to teach us.