LIT LISTS: Six classics with supernatural crimes at their center

Robert Masello is a former journalist, TV writer, and the bestselling author of many novels and nonfiction books, many of them supernatural thrillers

with a strong historical foundation. They include The Einstein Prophecy, The Jekyll Revelation, The Romanov Cross, The Medusa Amulet, and his most recent work, The Night Crossing.

At CrimeReads Masello tagged "a half dozen of the most famous and influential supernatural novels and the intriguing, even unique, crimes central to their cores," including:

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Crime: Mortgage Fraud

Heathcliff, a man so deprived he only gets the one name, uses his ruthless temperament and financial acuity (gained somewhere in the New World, doing something mysteriously lucrative) to wind up as the owner of both Wuthering Heights, where he was at first brought as an orphan, and ultimately Thrushcross Grange, too, the estate where the love of his life, Catherine Earnshaw, once lived as the wife of the aristocratic Edgar Linton. Published in 1847, under Emily Bronte’s pen name, Ellis Bell, the book stirred up a ton of controversy with its dark, Gothic tone, its lonely ghosts wandering the moors, and its implicit challenges to traditional Victorian notions of morality. Why, Heathcliff even sneaks to the side of Catherine’s open coffin to open the locket around her neck and replace a snip of her husband’s hair with a lock of his own. Talk about chutzpah. The English poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had it just right when he declared Wuthering Heights to be “a fiend of a book…an incredible monster…The action is laid in hell – only it seems people and places have English names there.”