“We’re already violent,” Harold Schechter shrugged, when asked if watching violent video games incites juvenile crime. “One of the things that is encouraging to me when I look at all this violent entertainment,” he added, “is that we are this species that has managed to turn seriously destructive instinctual impulses into play.”

For the last three decades, Mr. Schechter, 56, a Queens College professor of literature, has pursued an unusual – and unsettling – academic subject: crime, violence, and the human psyche. His 26th book, “Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment” (St. Martin’s Press, 208 pages, $24.95), published last month, argues that contrary to popular belief, today’s entertainment is no more violent than in previous times. “Part of my argument,” he told The New York Sun, “is that people really don’t know just how violent popular culture was.” Nineteenth-century dime novels, for example – which featured “insanely graphic” murders – provoked the same kind of moralistic outcry aroused today by video games, he said.

Another point Mr. Schechter makes is that humans have evolved over a short period of time from watching others being tortured and killed as a public spectacle to an era in which “we happily settle for virtual simulations of violence.” Take, for instance, the use of animals in filmmaking. Until the 1930s, Hollywood used tripwires to send horses flying during cavalry charges. Compare this, he said, to watching the film “The Perfect Storm,” in which a disclaimer appears in the final credits saying that no fish were harmed in the making of the film. “Hollywood was routinely killing animals for the pleasure of the American public; now we’ve evolved to the point we can’t even kill a fish.”

Mr. Schechter explores such topics in a graduate course at Queens College called “American Dream/American Nightmare,” in which he takes a similarly historical – and philosophical – view of murder and mayhem. True crime, he said, goes back to the invention of the printing press and even before that, when there were oral ballads about gruesome crimes called “murder ballads.”

In one of his classes, he uses a historical true crime book he wrote called “Deviant” (Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1989), about Edward Gein, a Wisconsin necrophile who dug up the corpses of middle-aged women and brought them back to his ramshackle farmhouse. Gein’s crimes served as a basis for the movie “Psycho” and, later, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Mr. Schechter said.

He went on to explain that despite the number of appalling crimes that have always taken place, there are only one or two that grip the public imagination at any given time and become emblematic; they tend to be the ones that symbolize the anxieties or obsessions of the age. The movie “Psycho,” he said, reflected the schizoid nature of the 1950s, when a repressive sexual code overlay the surface while a voyeuristic need to watch these films simmered just beneath; in the 1960s, he said, Charles Manson personified every parent’s nightmare of a drug- and sex-crazed hippie.

With the thoroughness of a modern-day Ellery Queen, Mr. Schechter has considered the effects of crime and violence on the news and popular games. “Every time a new entertainment medium is invented, it is immediately attacked by people as inciting juvenile violence. As soon as the next one comes along, the previous one is regarded as benign.” Offering a prediction, he said that 20 years from now, when virtual games allow kids to feel the blood oozing from zombies, parents will remember today’s video games as relatively innocent.

Mr. Schecter’s interest in literature and crime goes back to his youth in the Bronx. “My first ambition was to be a comic-book illustrator; I still regard myself as a failed comic-book artist,” he said. He grew up a bus ride away from the Edgar Allan Poe cottage on Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse. Poe became the protagonist of Mr. Schecter’s series of historical mystery novels, in which the 19th-century author teams up with Davy Crockett, P.T. Barnum, Kit Carson, and in a forthcoming book, a 12-year-old Louisa May Alcott.

“I spent or misspent every Saturday of my youth seeing low-budget horror films and double features at the Pelham Theater,” Mr. Schechter said. One of these films, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” he shows to his students.

After attending the Bronx High School of Science, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English from CCNY, then attended the University of Buffalo, where he studied with Leslie Fiedler, a pioneer in cultural studies. Fiedler taught whatever subjects currently obsessed him, such as Dracula, freak shows, soap operas, or comics.

One of Mr. Schechter’s areas of expertise is serial killers (he even wrote an encyclopedia on the subject). He describes most serial killers as psychopaths: a person who is intelligent, very rational, knows the difference between right and wrong, but possesses no conscience and no capacity for empathy with another human being. Despite the press attention such killings receive, he said, one is more likely to die in a car crash than at the hands of a serial killer (unless, that is, one is an inner-city streetwalker).

Does the scholarly study of serial killers make him stick out among his university peers? Mr. Schechter takes perverse pride in being “the only member of the Queens College faculty to have appeared on ‘The Jerry Springer Show,'” noting that he did so in the era before talk-show guests starting hitting each other on camera.

He told the Sun that a small percentage of serial killers are women. How do they differ from their male counterparts? Males tend to indiscriminately stab and slash to get inside their victims; female serial killers, he said, tend to need to have a relationship with their victims and nurture their victims to death by poison or smothering, for example.

Asked about his hobbies, he said he accumulates unusual pop-culture artifacts, as well as antique poison bottles. He said that in the 19th century, so many medications could kill that certain bottles had the word “poison” or “skull and crossbones” embossed on the glass so that even in the dark, one would know it was not to be taken.

Mr. Schechter takes a historical view of these morbid collectibles, too. While some people are outraged over people who collect serial-killer memorabilia or other “murderabilia” (he is not such a collector), Mr. Schechter said collecting such things is something that has long existed. When a killer was hanged, the rope would sometimes be cut up and eagerly sought. After one notorious “red barn” murder in England, people tore up the whole building to take a souvenir, and in France, miniature guillotines were sold at beheadings.

Is his subject suitable for home discussion? He said that when his daughters were little, they were not allowed to read his books. But that’s all right, since there is another author around the house – his wife, the poet Kimiko Hahn – whose work they could read. Her next book of poems is inspired by science.

Mr. Schechter said there are even advantages to his line of research. He recently attended a fancy poetry dinner. The person seated next to him asked what he wrote about. “I find when I say ‘serial killer,’ everybody gets interested, and I immediately become the center of attention. It’s an incredibly useful social sort of thing,” he said, pausing, “a great social asset.”