Reading James Reading Roughead: "Take a Bite Out of (True) Crime"

This essay explores Henry James's 1913-1915 correspondence with William Roughead (1870-1952), a Scottish lawyer, writer of "adventures in criminal biography," and editor of criminal trials. James loved reading Roughead, and this article makes the case that the eating and architectural metaphors James used in his letters to describe his reading experience reveal just how much plotting, James's "love of a story as a story," mattered to James. "The gallery of sinister perspective," as James called Roughead's writing, helps us see the origins of James's "taste" for crime writing and how his own writing contains many of the same elements.