Throughout the year, there's a constant stream of true crime books, from individual incidents to individual figures to a compendium of cases. And even though only one or two will stand out and remain on the best sellers' list come Christmas, several more will sell exceptionally well. Why do us Irish buy true crime in bulk? What is it about reading about gruesome murders or terrifying events that make us go back to the bookshop for more?

True crime books as we know then in Ireland today didn't exist until 12 years ago when Sunday World journalist Paul Williams (who has since sold half a million books in Ireland alone) wrote The General, a book detailing the dealings of Irish gangster Martin Cahill. Apart from kick starting the incessant nicknaming of Irish criminals, the book became the foundation for a new Irish genre, one which would quickly be flooded to the point of being, as Michael O'Brien, publisher of O'Brien Press puts it, "probably a bit over saturated". "Everyone has jumped on the bandwagon, " O'Brien told The Sunday Tribune, "there are some very second rate books being published. It's a pure commercial response from a lot of publishers assuming the market is bigger than it is."

Williams . . . whose books are the mostshoplifted in Ireland . . . followed The General with Gangland, Evil Empire, Crimelords and last year's The Untouchables, which according to Eason remained in the top twenty until the end of 2006. "In the last six or seven years, it's 20 07.10.07 SundayTribune really taken off, " says Chenile Keogh, the managing director and publisher of Merlin Press. "Six years ago, there wasn't an Irish true crime section. Now if you look at the true crime section in a shop, there's a hell of a lot of Irish books. Irish people are nosy and they have a fascination with why people commit certain crimes, and why haven't people been brought to justice."

Nobody knows the appeal of crime more than the newspaper industry, so crime generally makes up a disproportionate amount of coverage. Whether this reflects a concern amongst the general population, or manufactures one is hard to tell, but certainly, it's what most people want to read about.

And when a crime occurs that captures the public's imagination, the news stories run and run. Everything from the initial crime . . . the linear murder story . . . to the search for explanation, arrests and a subsequent trial, is dissected as far as legally possible, and sometimes beyond.

Perhaps no other crime has been more closely and consistently followed than the murder of Rachel O'Reilly by her husband Joe. After her murder three years ago, the arrest and re-arrests of Rachel's husband Joe, the media's constant and sometimes blatant innuendo alluding to his guilt, and various twists and turns including hidden letters in coffins, a secret lover and private and revealing emails would have made a bestselling novel, never mind a book of non-fiction. It was inevitable that a book would be written about this dramatic case, and the first one comes courtesy of journalist Jenny Friel with The Suspect, out later this month.

Friel who interviewed O'Reilly after his wife's murder and sat through everyday of his trial, believes that many factors have contributed to the public's appetite for books on true crime.

"It has a lot to do with the programmes that are popular at the moment ; CSI, Without A Trace . . . there's a bit of a detective in all of us. We like to think we have an idea of why someone would commit a crime. True crime books have made that more accessible to us. I think people like the idea that fact is stranger than fiction and have the chance to pick something up and read about it."

For reasons known only to the collective brain of the Irish public, some crimes grab their attention more than any other.

Catherine Nevin, who was found guilty of soliciting to murder her husband in 2000 ended up inspiring three books; Will You Murder My Husband? : Catherine Nevin and the IRA . . . The Inside Story by Gerard Doherty, The Black Widow: The Catherine Nevin Story by Niamh O'Connor and The People v Catherine Nevin by Liz Walsh. The murder of Fareh Swaleh Noor by the so-called 'Scissor Sisters' was documented by two bestsellers, John Mooney's The Torso In The Canal and Mick McCaffrey's The Irish Scissor Sisters.

Sunday Tribune journalist McCaffrey says that it's impossible to tell why certain cases change from news stories into best selling titles, "It does depend on the case and certain cases for unknown reasons capture the public's imagination. Look at the Rachel O'Reilly case . . . nobody could've predicted that would become what was probably the biggest murder case in Irish history. Three publishers asked me to write a book on it, and there's one coming out, so that means at least four companies were interested in putting one out."

The question of misrepresenting the reality on the streets is one that doesn't bother many publishers as long as the book sells, but some still raise questions about it. Eoghan Rice, co-author of Homicide: Investigating Murders and Manslaughters in 21st Century Ireland is philosophical about the popularity of true crime books in Ireland. "I think people in Ireland have a fascination with crime.

There's a widely held believe that it's a huge and growing problem in the country, even though statistics don't make it out to be as big a problem. All newspapers place a very heavy emphasis on crime reporting to a degree that doesn't reflect the reality, and people lap it upf There is maybe not such an appetite to examine crime in a different ways; as to what the big problem is, the causes, the solutions. There are very few true crime books that actually talk about say the housing problems in '50s and '60s that breed modern crime. There are very few about the growth of the drugs trade from a human level and what it does to people. These so-called 'drug godfathers', in a lot of the cases, these people being written about aren't as big as they're made out to be, they're just thugsf People become terrified of this notion that they're going to be killed by drug-crazed people around every corner. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are reading so much about crime, they tend to expect more and that kind of feeds what eventually occurs."

But the rise of true crime has as much to do with a rise in crime than anything else. The rise in Ireland's murder rate, rather sickeningly, provides authors with more material.

Also, the shift in the Irish media to focus more on crime, especially murder and assault has whetted the public's appetite. When all the headlines are written, all the analysis completed, some still want more. It's a oneread situation; a composition of what is generally already in the public arena throughout the reportage of the incident and its aftermath, hopefully with a few extra tidbits, some unseen photographs and an attractive cover. Most importantly, a quick turnaround is needed while the events are still fresh in the public's mind, and still part of the country's collective water cooler conversation topic.

Inevitably, journalists are those who are called upon by the publishing houses to write the book. They are the ones who cover the stories in the first place, and as a result have easy access to the details of the crime and further sources that can ensure a quick turnaround of copy and sprinklings of extra information. The books are easy to market in the sense that you don't have to explain the content to anyone, given that the story will probably already be a topic of national conversation. The difficult part is getting the book out as fast as possible before people lose interest in the subject matter. Speed is everything. Niamh O'Connor's The Black Widow, a true crime book based on the Catherine Nevin affair took just six weeks for her to produce. That's a lot of strong coffee.

Journalists are favoured over other types of writers given their ability to write quickly and turn around a large amount of words in a short space of time. The most prolific true crime authors are all journalists, namely Paul Williams, Paul Howard and Barry Cummins of RTE, author of the best sellers Missing and Lifers who last week published his latest Unsolved.

But why, specifically in Ireland, are we spending so much on true crime books?

Surely these things that are being written about are so horrific, that we wouldn't want to cart them off on holidays with us to read by the pool. Not so, it seems. The most popular venue for the sales of true crime books is the airport. Three months after McCaffrey's Scissor Sisters tome was published, it was still in the top 10 in Dublin Airport. And the grizzlier, the better. "There is a desire in publishers to look at the gorier end of the scale, " explains Eoghan Rice. "Publishers are under no illusions that that's what sells. They want to read sentences like 'she walked into room and was hit from behind and there was blood everywhere'."

"No doubt about it the public have an incredible appetite for grizzly stories, " Michael O'Brien agrees. "And, you know, I never really understood it. . . I think one of the reasons is people want to understand some of the nastier things that surround them without having to experience them."

"In fairness, true crime isn't just big in Ireland, " says Rice. "I think it says a lot about the human psyche, that people enjoy reading about the downfall of others and the tragic and grotesque endings of others."

So, who's behind the sales? You'd imagine the same people who go to horror films or the same gender or demographic that commit crime themselves. Not so. The biggest buyers of true crime are young women in their 20s and 30s. "Anecdotally it's mainly women who are buying, especially younger women in their 20s, " says Maria Dickenson, book purchasing manager for Eason. "They buy them like they're a magazine, buying one a week.

Women read more for a start so that's probably one of the reasons, but I'm not sure what else drives it. Women are fascinated by the psychological side of everything, maybe they want to know what makes these people tick, or whether it's an element of finding out your worst fears because so many crimes are perpetrated against women. It could be about pushing the limits of your worst fears."

Women of this age group are also the biggest buyers of thrillers and what the publishing industry calls 'misery memoirs' . . . memoirs based on child abuse or drug addiction. "Maybe behind that happy smile there's something dark, " laughs publisher Michael O'Brien. "Maybe it's a form of self protection, but it's also entertainment, women seem to like reading about murder." Chenile Keogh from Merlin Press puts the rise of the genre down to the Irish fascination with other people's business and actions, which although the murder rate has grown, hasn't abated. "Ten years ago, the country stopped when someone was murdered. Today, you listen to the news and it feels like it's one a day." And despite this trend, we just can't get enough of it.