Crime Narratives Research Articles

Ghostwriters of crime narratives: Constructing the story by referring to intercept interpreters' contributions in criminal case files.

Ghostwriters of crime narratives: Constructing the story by referring to intercept interpreters' contributions in criminal case files.

Trans(forming) Archives: Speculative Biographies of Ethiopians Between and Beyond Genders

ABSTRACT Through a speculative reading of crime reports from the 1960 and ‘70s, this article grapples with the way in which Ethiopians who refuse to be fixed within gender binaries were introduced to readers as social problems. Considering the violence gender-non-conforming people are subjected to – including by some cisgender members of the queer community itself – I closely study some of these archives to ask what could emerge if we engage them imaginatively. I experiment with the crime reports to see what a speculative reading might afford us in writing a history of the present. I subject the reports to speculation on what might have been instead of being loyal to archives and what they present to us. In an act of defying the authority of the archive, which gives a narrow and skewed account of lived experiences, I introduce a speculative biography of three gender-non-conforming Ethiopians in a fashion that moves away from the crime narrative within which they were limited. In so doing, however, I do not claim to recover their voice, their wishes and desires; I rather read a theory of how their existence was made (im)possible/freedom was practised. Though I heavily draw on the crime reports from Amharic newspapers, I juxtapose these with recently produced documentaries, my own childhood memories, ethnography as well as conversations with members of the queer community at home and in the diaspora.

Between Empirical Data and Anti-Blackness: A Critical Perspective on Anti-Asian Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents

Between Empirical Data and Anti-BlacknessA Critical Perspective on Anti-Asian Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents Janelle Wong (bio) and Rossina Zamora Liu (bio) After a US president (with connections to white nationalists), raised the specter of Yellow Peril and white shooters engaged in mass killings of Asian Americans in Atlanta and Indianapolis in the spring of 2021, white violence toward Asian Americans was difficult to ignore. Yet one leading story of anti-Asian violence in the wake of the pandemic is of an Asian American senior, often termed an "elder" in reporting, or young woman brutally beaten by a person who "appears to be Black." This story and others like it have circulated throughout the Asian American community via viral videos. The story has been the subject of calls for attention to "Black-Asian conflict" in the recent past.1 In March 2021, for example, Vox reporters noted that "Many of the attacks that have gained widespread attention have featured Black assailants, and have threatened to inflame tensions between Asian Americans and Black Americans."2 In April of 2021, a story by an NBC local affiliate in Seattle observed that "There have also been widely circulated videos that show Black men attacking Asian Americans."3 Meanwhile, survey and crime data suggest a different trend. Empirical data, for instance, shows that, compared to their share of the population, Asian American elders (over age 65) are underrepresented among victims of Asian American hate crimes and hate incidents. While women are more likely to report a hate incident to the StopAAPIHate reporting site, multiple sources of data show that men are as likely or more likely to experience a hate incident than women. Further, the vast majority of violence against Asian Americans [End Page 387] consists not of physical assaults but of verbal harassment and "shunning." The data also shows that Black offenders make up a minority of offenders. And, comparatively, Black Americans are up to ten times more likely to report being the victim of a hate crime than Asian Americans, and this pattern persists even in places like California, where Asian Americans comprise nearly double the population of Black Americans.4 This is true despite the fact that people of all racial backgrounds indicate that they are reluctant to report hate crimes. The point here is not to minimize the disturbing incidents, crimes, and even killings that have been widely circulated as part of anti-Asian hate media coverage; rather, placing these incidents in a broader context allows them to be better understood and ultimately addressed by well-informed policy. As two Asian American women and non-Black educators of Color, we seek to better understand the disconnection between the empirical data and the many Black-Asian conflict narratives of anti-Asian violence. We note that, despite a wealth of compelling empirical data, the media arc of anti-Asian violence—historically a symptom of white supremacy—quickly turned from the China-focused rhetoric of a white president and the heinous actions of white mass shooters to a focus on Black individuals physically assaulting Asian American elders. What is disturbing about this second narrative, which we describe as the "Black-on-Asian crime" narrative, is that it eclipses systematic racism captured by data, while gaining a widely accepted place in the discourse of Black aggression as a root cause of anti-Asian violence. The Black-on-Asian crime narrative has not only (re)ignited the Black-Asian conflict trope but seems to have also illuminated an undercurrent of anti-Blackness in narratives of Asian American victimization and perceptions of safety. In this paper, we present data regularly ignored in widely circulating Black-on-Asian crime narratives around anti-Asian violence, followed by a theoretically grounded reflection on the gap between empirical data and viral videos that emphasize Asian American vulnerability against the threat of Black violence. To be clear, we acknowledge that the anti-Asian incidents shown on viral videos are not only real and abhorrent but they have understandably elicited anger and fear in our community. What we hope to illustrate is the way in which these incidents have become prominent in discourses around anti-Asian violence, even though...

Perpetrator Trauma in Television Crime SeriesWe Hunt Together

Crime fiction scholarship increasingly focuses on trauma in contemporary crime narratives but has largely neglected to investigate perpetrator trauma. This article contributes to filling this gap by exploring perpetrator trauma in We Hunt Together (2020), a British television crime series written by Gaby Hull, that portrays the consequences of perpetrator trauma on a former child soldier from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Babeni (Baba) Lenga, waiting for permanent residency in the UK. Viewers learn about his violent past through flashbacks and his involvement with Frederica ‘Freddy’ Lane which precipitates Baba’s present return to violence. Informed by crime fiction studies, literary trauma theory, and research on child soldier narratives, this study argues that perpetrator trauma complicates and renders agency ambiguous in We Hunt Together, where Baba’s story eventually leads to healing. Ultimately, the perpetrator trauma narrative of a former child soldier, focalised through Baba, brings together the themes of war, colonialism, and the growing use of child soldiers in the present, challenging the crime-solving plot by raising ethical and political issues of guilt and responsibility and problematising any easy distinctions between victim and perpetrator/criminal.

Audiences of popular European television crime drama: A nine-country study on consumption patterns, attitudes and drivers of transcultural connection

This article presents findings of a mixed-methods audience study on consumption patterns and attitudes towards European television crime narratives among European viewers. Based on semi-structured interviews in Denmark, Germany and Italy, and a nine-country online survey (n1321), we asked how, when, where and why European audiences watch crime series, and whether watching non-domestic European crime narratives influences perceptions of the European ‘Other’. Our findings reveal preferences for Anglo-American content, combined with a criticality towards domestic content often perceived as stereotyped. While stereotypes and personal and previous non-mediated encounters draw viewers to European content, they do not necessarily challenge viewers’ perceptions of the European ‘Other’. It does, however, enable critical reflection on viewers’ domestic societies and TV cultures, leading to a process of banal cosmopolitanism.

The “Unclaimed Experience”: Trauma and Crime Fiction

This paper examines the intersections between trauma and literature and crime fiction, more specifically. By looking at the representations of trauma in crime fiction, it is argued here that trauma in crime novels involves a multilayered and complex discourse that generates its own narrative, one that relies on techniques like fragmentation, repetition, puzzle-solving, deliberate vagueness, and obscurity. It is also proposed that the use of trauma as a lens to examine crime narratives is both valuable and problematic, as it brings forth the conflict and the tension in the trauma discourse regarding words and wounds; expression and silence; representation and unspeakability. This paper will highlight that exploring the meeting points between trauma and crime narratives can also function as a as a point of departure from the conventional readings of crime fiction and contemplates a reading of the crime novel as trauma fiction. By so doing, this paper stresses the configurations of trauma in crime fiction beyond the medical framework and addresses the aspects and techniques in which trauma is centrally positioned in crime narratives.

“Meddling with Sorcery”: Hypnotism, the Occult and the Return of Forsaken Women in the 1890s Ghost Stories of Lettice Galbraith

Lettice Galbraith’s ghost stories are largely excluded from histories of the Victorian supernatural. Despite writing within a genre popular in the 1890s, little is known of her biography, her literary circle or her influences. Like other 1890s writers, Galbraith capitalised on public fascination with the tropes of crime narratives – the foggy London streets, the sensational newspaper snippets, violence and suppressed scandal – as well as the fascination with hypnotism and the occult revival. In the stories “In the Séance Room” and “The Missing Model” (1893) the wronged woman, abandoned, mistreated and objectified, returns as a terrifying spirit, who manifests in disturbing form to shame professional men. The séance room and the art gallery admit the excluded woman who silently petitions for her lost story to be told: the ghostly women have “magnetic” stares, subverting power relations in contemporary discourses of hypnotism. In “The Blue Room” (1897) women’s attempts to summon a demon have dangerous consequences and are seen as “meddling with sorcery”. Borrowing from the crime narrative with its mysteries, clues, detection and fake identities, Galbraith refashions the Victorian ghost story to hold men accountable for their deception and violence and addresses fears about black magic and hypnotism.

Modernization noir in Greek cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s: New topographies and temporal tensions

The focus of this article is the examination of the Greek crime film during the 1990s and early 2000s. The main question concerns if and how certain crime narratives from the 1990s and early 2000s responded to ideological discourse of ‘modernization’ that prevailed at the time. The analysis of three films (Apo tin akri tis polis, O hamenos ta perni ola and Sti skia tou Lemmy Kosion) with neo-noir features, unveils a field of representations produced in contrast to the period’s mainstream discourse of uplifting transformation, which was closely linked to Greece’s entry to the Eurozone and to the preparations for the Olympic Games. These films provide a critique of the city’s transformation into a metropolis, and of the subsequent transmutation of its societal tapestry not only within a European environment but also within the cultural logic of late capitalism. The ‘modernization noir’, as named in the article, includes two narrative trends: the first negotiates the arrival of new ethnicities, which transform the city and produce new hierarchies and topographies; the second self-consciously uses the genre in its ‘neo’ phase to comment on the transition between old and new.

DETECting the “noirification” of European popular narratives across film, fiction and television

The article explores the transcultural dimension of European crime narratives by looking at the specific role of cinema in this context. Building on the research conducted by DETECt scholars in different areas of contemporary popular culture—especially literature and television—it first discusses the link between the more and more widespread use of the “noir” label and the increasing cultural legitimation of the crime genre. The article then argues that this phenomenon echoes the emergence of a new “European quality crime film” in recent years. While stressing the potential contribution of the genre to the circulation of European cinema, the evident limits of its impact in this field are also examined. Finally, it looks more closely at the transnational circulation of contemporary Italian crime films to assess to what extent they have been able to find a transnational audience on a continental level. In this context, the importance to look beyond theatrical distribution and the centrality of intermedial exchanges are highlighted, indicating new directions for research.

‘True Crime and…’: The Hybridisation of True Crime Narratives on YouTube

Digital platforms have heralded a renaissance in true crime production and engagement, providing previously marginalised voices with opportunities to challenge longstanding – and often problematic – genre conventions. Whilst significant consideration has been given to professional streaming platforms and aural user-generated mediums such as podcasts, few studies have explored visual user-generated content such as that appearing on YouTube. In order to explore these new but increasingly popular forms, we focus on the videos of Stephanie Soo, Samantha Taylor and Bailey Sarian, who combine true crime narratives with the popular YouTube staples of Mukbang, ASMR and makeup tutorial videos. Our work examines the repercussions of true crime becoming a unique selling point within these YouTube subgenres and considers the ethical consequences of using the true crime genre’s paradigms to bring greater attention, likes and subscribers to established YouTube channels. We observe that these videos are contradictory documents which provide a potentially empowering outlet for female-led true crime while simultaneously replicating the troubling trends that have marked the genre as a space in which the bodies of victims are often exploited as entertainment.

Weaving Fiction from Facts in the Adventures of Feluda

This paper seeks to study select adventures of Feluda (Pradosh C. Mitter), Satyajit Ray’s private detective created in 1965. For over two centuries, since the 1890 s, the popular literature of Bengal (India) has been featuring detectives in the detective story called “Goenda Kahini” in Bangla. An acclaimed Bengali litterateur and one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, Ray penned 35 adventures on his detective between 1965 and 1990. Initially created for a children’s magazine “Sandesh,” these adventures along with the magazine’s transformation gradually followed a more serious tone. Written in postcolonial India, the time frame of the stories is the 1960s and the 70 s. The texts that this paper proposes to study reflect the social milieu in the aftermath of India’s independence – the latent conflicts dealing with stark reality embedded in the narratives that apparently appear innocently fictitious to the readers now. The paper attempts to study beyond the Whodunit crime-inquest-discovery pattern. It looks into aspects of the adventures that go beyond the genre of detective fiction per se. The stories are not merely about crime and criminals; they are excellent travelogues, adventure stories, a source of interesting information about a diverse range of things – history, places, nature, literature, society and culture. The paper argues that these adventures of crime draw to a large extent from the realm of truth – social stigmas and the dark underworld of dons, narcotic mafias and smugglers of the times. Further, the stories based on the actual crises of the fast-fading old-world gentility of the educated Bengali middle-class of the 1960s and the 70 s; the picture of old Calcutta, make the crime narratives of Feluda, an overwhelming metamorphic presentation of fact to fiction.

A pulizziesca : genèse du roman policier corse

The rise of regional detective novels in Europe has generated an expanding interest, as is evident in the proliferation of scholarship on works in this genre. One type of crime narrative, however, escapes this rule: Corsican crime fiction. Because it is part of unique editorial, literary, cultural, political, and linguistic dynamics, Corsican crime fiction raises important questions about the future of regional literature within a national, international, and transnational literary canon. This article proposes a genesis of the Corsican detective novel; through a recontextualization of the genre in both the literary context of the island and the generic context of the detective novel, it will demonstrate how the serialization effect typical of crime fiction, coupled with the intrinsic plurality of the notion of authenticity, allows Corsican crime fiction to redefine the codes of the traditional detective novel and bring a new facet to the broader notion of Mediterranean Noir in its insular form known as the pulizziesca.

A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen

Reviewed by: A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen Francesca Bua Ann C. Christensen, ed., A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), lix + 229 pp., 18 ills. Ann C. Christensen's edition of A Warning for Fair Women (1599) decidedly accomplishes its stated goal and successfully asserts the play's "many merits for students of Shakespeare as well as directors and dramaturgs" (xii). A Warning for Fair Women is a domestic tragedy based on a real Elizabethan murder trial in which George Sanders, a successful London merchant, is murdered by his wife's lover, George Browne. Christensen's edition, with its modernized spelling, thorough endnotes, and inclusion of similarly edited primary sources, will no doubt benefit students, teachers, and dramatists alike. This edition provides a wealth of accessible and contextual information in the generous front matter, including but not limited to the genre of domestic tragedy, the staging and performance aspects of the play, and the uniquely compelling aspects of A Warning that number it as a play deserving of its own place in the early modern literary canon. Underscoring her commitment to this aim, Christensen explicitly showcases the pedagogical possibilities of her edition and helpfully offers a number of relevant and topical avenues of engagement for students toward the end of the introduction (e.g., public and private; church and state; work and professional identity; place and space/setting), under which she likewise includes discussion and/or research questions for students about early modern social and domestic spheres, providing examples from the play that delve into these ideas. In her introduction, Christensen immediately delineates the play's genre as a domestic tragedy, providing a helpful review for those who may not be well versed in the nuances of genre on the early modern stage. After turning briefly to a review of the critical attention given to domestic tragedy since the 1980s, Christensen outlines what is at stake in her edition and maintains the necessity for historicizing A Warning for Fair Women: [End Page 238] When we consider the social and institutional contexts for the play's depiction of marriage, family, religion, and the law, as well as tragedy as a genre, we can better appreciate both A Warning's novelty and its participation in aesthetic and cultural traditions … because A Warning stages uneven power and affective relations within a household space that is permeable, while also dramatizing, for example, facets of the legal system and the commercial economy, it offers insights into older forms of everyday life that still concern us today. (xxii–xxiii) For Christensen, A Warning for Fair Women shows how the early modern quotidian not only is of the past but also stretches into the present. Playfully, the editor uses the play as referent to various pop culture phenomena, the O. J. Simpson trial for example, to highlight this compression of the past into the present and to help facilitate connections between the genre of early modern domestic tragedy and modern notions of domesticity. In this vein, Christensen gestures toward true crime and domestic tragedy in the introduction, but unfortunately does not meaningfully engage with these themes in relation to A Warning's commitment to spectacle. The invitation to take up Christensen's call to read "the play's engagements with the society and culture of its time on a deeper level" (xxii) and consider the ways in which these engagements apply today is especially seductive when thinking about the sustained and ever-rising popularity of true crime narratives and domesticity's central role in them. An allusion to the O. J. Simpson trial, coupled with the misleading paragraph title in the introduction, left me itching to read Christensen's thoughts on the explicit early modern/modern connection between these two highly popularized and nearly selfsame genres. The edition continues to address possible contextual lacunae in one's first encounter with an early modern, non-Shakespearean play. For example, Christensen gives a historical overview of early modern performance conventions—notably the play's dating, theater company, and authorship, as well as its structure and stagecraft...

Neo-Victorian felony – Crime narratives in Graeme Macrae Burnet’sHis Bloody Projectand Ian McGuire’sThe North Water

AbstractThe neo-Victorian novel has been one of the most significant branches of contemporary British historical fiction for the past three decades. Thanks to works like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Sarah Waters’ trilogy Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the genre has gained not only considerable popularity among readers, but also almost a canonical literary status. Although recent neo-Victorian fiction has been trying to find some new ways in which the genre could avoid stereotypical narratives, it still retains its most determining idiosyncrasies. One of them is an interest in the undersides of Victorian society, including the themes of violence and criminality, which is why these novels often resort to the genre of crime and detective fiction. This is also the case of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016), both historical novels set in Victorian Britain which were, respectively, shortlisted and longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This paper attempts to show the different manners in which these two novels employ various forms of crime narratives so as to achieve their goal of presenting convincing and seemingly authentic insights into the more obscure aspects of the Victorian era.

A guarantee of safety, a cautionary tale or a celebration? Popularity of true crime narratives through the lens of Mary Douglas’s concepts of pollution and defilement

The fascination with crime, hastily described by some as a symptom of moral degradation of Western culture, seems to be a defence mechanism used by individuals to deal with social transgressions and anomalies represented by serious crimes. The aim of this article is to analyse the growing popularity of true crime through the lens of Mary Douglas’s theory of purity and pollution, with a particular emphasis on the methods of dealing with anomalies appearing within conceptual schemata of a given culture. For this purpose, the text has been divided into four parts: the first part briefly presents the history of true crime; the second part analyses the idea of murder through the lens of Douglas’s theory; the third part discusses the reasons behind the popularity of true crime narratives; and the fourth part showcases how individuals use true crime stories as tools to deal with anomalies.

Polar Bear in 'Fortitude'. Affective Aesthetics and Politics of Climate Change

In the first season of TV Eco Noir crime series Fortitude (2015) the polar bear appears as a sticky object that embodies an ambiguous affective charge as an icon of global warming. This article discusses the ways in which the polar bear evokes viewer affect in the series through two discourses. The first one relates to violence, essentially present in crime narratives, and how the human and nonhuman animal are positioned in relation to global warming, violence and each other. It lifts up questions of place and belonging in a local and global context and detects how the polar bear is constructed in terms of stranger danger and victimization in relation to human animals and the threat of global warming. The second one targets the ways in which the polar bear is rendered sticky as the object of the human gaze and how this process of human animals looking at artistic bear photos both constructs and deconstructs the subject-object relation, hierarchy and agency. Methodologically, the article draws on “close looking” and the main theoretical starting points are ecocriticism and affect theory. The article argues that the representation of the polar bear contributes in essential ways to the socially and environmentally critical emphasis essential in contemporary crime narratives including Fortitude: the distracting and emotionally charged representation of the polar bear evokes ambiguous affective responses in viewers. Thus, as the article further argues, a representation of this kind is capable of—and liable to— inducing a higher consciousness of the present environmental crisis than a more straight-forward, less affectively charged representation.

Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment. Martina Althoff, Bernd Dollinger, Holger Schmidt (Editors)

Article Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment. Martina Althoff, Bernd Dollinger, Holger Schmidt (Editors) was published on June 21, 2021 in the journal Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform (volume 104, issue 2).

COUNTER-CLAIMING FOR A CRIME NARRATIVE: AN EVALUATION OF THE DEFENDANT’S PLEA AT THE CORRUPTION CRIMINAL COURT

In a criminal trial, the plea of the accused is arguably a very important appraising discourse tool functioning mainly to counter the crime narrative made by public prosecutors in their indictment and closing statement. As an appraisal instrument, the plea represents the stance of the accused with regards to the facts of the case as well as the legal aspects of the alleged crime. In this regards, the plea may serve both argumentative and persuasive functions and may shape, to some extent, the understanding and the consideration of the judges who decide on the case. The study, which is qualitative in nature, uses Martin and White’s appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005) to investigate evaluation strategies employed by an accused of a corruption case in his plea. Evaluation strategies are defined here as strategies in discourse used to counter the crime narrative by employing relevant evaluative resources. The result of the analysis shows that the accused strategically uses the three main discourse semantics resources, i.e. engagement, attitude, and graduation. The contractive options of engagement (deny, counter, and pronounce) are used to counter aspects of the crime narrative, while judgment of propriety (social sanction) and capacity (social esteem) of the attitude component are employed mainly to evaluate aspects of the crime narrative negatively and aspects of the counter narrative positively. Furthermore, amplification and quantification options of the graduation component are used to strengthen the degree of evaluation. It can be concluded that the narrative of plea is arguably an important evaluative instrument which, strategically and professionally constructed, may help the accused convince the judges of his/her innocence.

Queer citizens and the perils of the neoliberal city: Racialized narratives of homophobic hate crime in Oslo, Norway

This article examines the relationship between queer citizenship, state violence and the exclusion of racialized, homophobic ‘others’. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with LGBT people in Oslo, Norway, I investigate the presence of racialization in narratives of homophobic hate crime. The findings suggest that racialization structures narratives of risk assessment among several of the participants. However, in these narratives, racialization often operates through place-specific references, rather than racial and ethnic markers of identity. The narrative work thus displays ambivalence and a disassociation from racism. I argue that these narratives feed on an already established conflation of space, ethnicity, religion and homophobia, to which both mainstream media and part of the LGBT community contribute.

White Subjectivity and Black Nationalism in José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo’s Alack Sinner Comic “Vietblues” (1975)

The Argentine artist José Muñoz and writer Carlos Sampayo began publishing their Alack Sinner detective comic in the Italian magazine Alterlinus in 1974, after which its stories appeared in French, Spanish, Argentinian, and US publications. Beginning in 2015, the complete Alack Sinner was republished in several languages, winning over a new generation of readers and critics. In the fourth tale, “Vietblues” (1975), Muñoz and Sampayo liberated their storytelling from the limitations of pastiche and formula to challenge the genre conventions of the “private detective” crime narrative. The comic, set in New York City, foregrounds a white protagonist who refuses to partner with a group of Black nationalists intent on tearing down racist power structures. This article shows how the comic explores two definitions of history and political action: an idealistic, subjective, and individualistic one, and a more historical vision predicated on connections between oppressed groups. Muñoz and Sampayo argue for the possibility of interethnic solidarity while documenting their protagonist’s inability to successfully act on that promise. Key to the analysis are Muñoz and Sampayo’s treatment of race and the ways their white protagonist depoliticizes the African American experience by projecting it into himself as a dream state.