Fashioning an Ex-crook Self: Citizenship and Criminality in the Work of Netley Lucas

Abstract

This essay uses the autobiographical and journalistic work of the confidence trickster Netley Lucas to explore the possibilities and problems of writing as an ex-crook in inter-war Britain. In so doing, it considers the intersections between emerging forms of mass culture, popular and scientific narratives of criminality, and increasingly heated debates about the social and institutional management of crime. This case study provides an opportunity to think critically about the extent to which inter-war criminology was the modernizing project it often claimed to be. In the hands of Lucas and others, different modes of writing about crime bled into one another. Older forms of criminal confession coexisted with 'modern' criminological knowledge as mutually constitutive ways of apprehending the social.