Crime Stories Research Articles

Enfoque ético-lingüístico del término “ciudadano” en la redacción de Sucesos de Ciudad Guayana (Venezuela)

The aim of this study is to analyze the results of the use of the noun «citizen» in the crime stories in Ciudad Guayana, in the south of Venezuela. This research is founded on both moral philosophy and linguistics (Suárez Montoya, 2020a, 2021). It is evident that the grammatical questions go way beyond a statement. For this matter, semantic analysis and critical hermeneutics (Conill, 2010) were used to reflect on concepts such as the noun «citizen» (Cortina, 2001) in one of the most dangerous cities in the world. The corpus was comprised of 149 news stories from four newspapers; this interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work depicts the incidences in a subcategory called improper meanings. The finding: in some of these journalistic texts, there is what has been called in this article «moral disinformation» because there is no semantic-moral correspondence: there are constructions -in two of the four newspapers analyzed- that tend to link the «citizenry» with «delinquency». May this textual analysis serve to nurture journalistic discussion about one of the pillars of democracy: the «citizen».

Dubbing murder: censorship and manipulation in the Italian dubbing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope

ABSTRACT In the Italian context, censorial interventions and film manipulation through the practice of dubbing are not restricted to the Fascist era. In the decades that followed, official organisations continued to oversee film distribution of both domestic and international films, frequently withholding permission for public screenings when films did not conform to the conservative ideas espoused by those in power. In the 1950s, cinema was still regarded as a dangerous medium capable of influencing audiences and causing moral degradation. As a result, dubbing was still actively employed to change the linguistic content of films and make them more consistent with the Christian Democratic Party’s traditional values. This article examines an extreme case of film manipulation achieved through dubbing: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. The 1956 dubbed version of the movie can be considered at all effects an adaptation of the original: the suppression of the political and ideological components of the film, deemed immoral and perverse, significantly altered the plot and reduced the subversive nuances of all characters. Through an examination of archival documents preserved at the Ministry of Culture in Rome, I will show how censorship interfered to invisibly rewrite Rope, transforming it into a more reassuring and classic crime story.

INSECURITY IN NIGERIA: PERCEPTIONS OF SELECTED LAGOS STATE RESIDENTS ON NIGERIA NEWSPAPERS’ COVERAGE OF CRIME ON THE GRATIFICATION OF THEIR SAFETY INFORMATION NEED

Insecurity of lives and property in Nigeria has continued unabated through crime perpetration of all kinds. All forms of violent crimes, including property crimes are reported in the newspapers virtually on daily basis. Concerned by what the feelings of the audience could be on the resonating outcome of Nigerian newspapers’ crime reportage, the attendant palpable fear, anxiety, a sense of insecurity and whether or not the newspapers’ crime stories gratified their safety information need, this study adopted a non-probability sampling technique and through an in-depth interviews probed into the perspectives of purposively selected Lagos State residents on Nigerian newspapers’ coverage of crime and the gratification of their safety information need. Adopting purposive sampling technique, a total of twelve literate respondents, across the three Senatorial Districts (Lagos Central, Lagos East and Lagos West) who had lived and worked in Lagos State for at least five years preceding the study were interviewed. Findings revealed a sense of insecurity and palpable fear among the respondents; Lagos State is prone to crime; murder, robbery, kidnapping, while payment of ransom to secure the release of kidnapped victims were rife. The study revealed that the newspapers feasted on crime stories, but embraced episodic crime reportage. The newspaper crime stories were found educative and gratified the safety information need of the reader even as the police, judiciary and the political class were found culpable in crime festering in Nigeria. The paper recommends that newspapers should engage more in investigative reporting of crime by reporting it like an epidemic while the country’s security personnel require constant intelligence report in addition to being proactive, and professional. The Judiciary should ensure the dispensation of justice in all crime cases.

Dead but Not Buried

Abstract On April 12, 1919, Paris police arrested Henri Désiré Landru, a man who had spent the last four years of war luring women into engagements and confiscating their assets. Many of them were never seen again. Landru, charged with their murders, became an international media sensation—the inspiration for popular crime stories, including books, articles, films, television and radio programs, and theatrical performances, from his execution in 1922 to 2020. This article examines these stories for the revealing ways they bring together conceptions of war and violent crime. It considers a 1926 nonfiction account of Landru by the South African journalist and military veteran William Bolitho, the film Monsieur Verdoux (1947) written by Charlie Chaplin, Claude Chabrol's film Landru (1963), and a 2006 graphic novel by Christophe Chabouté. These narratives suggest, and this article argues, that stories about Landru—and the multiple murders he committed for profit—have served, at various times and in various places, as vehicles for critiquing warfare and the societies that embrace it.

Good Guys Became Bad Guys? Changing Representations of Asians and Other Races in Crime News During COVID-19

During COVID-19, Asian Americans were perceived as a threat to the American society, which could have led to heightened media scrutiny and a shift in media portrayals. This study examines this question with a quantitative analysis of crime stories sampled from five newspapers (2019–2021). Our results suggested that large-scale social events such as COVID-19 might have transformed media representations of Asians and other racial groups, with noteworthy variability: (a) When considering all types of crimes, during the pandemic, news about lawbreaking activities by Asian perpetrators almost doubled that of before-COVID period. No significant change was uncovered in the coverage of Asian victims. (b) However, on two types of crimes—“crimes against persons” and “violent crimes”—that have more newsworthiness and social import, stories about Asian victims during the COVID-19 were higher than those of the before-COVID period. (c) When comparing media representations with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data, the percentage of Asian perpetrators and victims in newspapers did not differ from that of the FBI in 2019 and 2020; however, Asians were overrepresented as victims in 2021.

Bad Blood: Serial Killers, True Crime, and the Racial Imaginary in Shadow of a Doubt

Concepts of racial identity and parentage played an important role in Canadian media coverage of the 1927 case of Earle Nelson, a well-publicized true crime story that was adapted into Hitchcock’s 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt. Nelson, known as the Dark Strangler, was identified as the killer of over twenty women in the United States before crossing the border into Canada, where he was captured, tried, and hanged. The evidence presented in Winnipeg in the Dark Strangler case centred on his physicality as a man perceived as mixed race. The narrative around Nelson, which was circulated several times in true crime magazines after his death, found its most famous outlet in the Hitchcock film based on the Dark Strangler case, Shadow of a Doubt. In Hitchcock’s film, the question of racial and familial identity raises its head in disquieting relationships between a mother and daughter and their serial killer relative. By examining the film through true crime paratexts, in this paper I explore how Shadow of a Doubt made taboos around illegitimacy and race visible for audiences of the 1940s.

Transborder assemblages: Johnnie To’s co-production action films in Mainland China

ABSTRACT For Hong Kong filmmakers, co-productions with mainland China are transborder assemblages characterized by increasing territorialization and coding that impart to them a palpable crisis of losing locality. However, this crisis does not necessarily mean the loss of a critical perspective. Johnnie To’s three co-produced action films demonstrate his struggles to evade or even take advantage of the disadvantageous status of dislocality and work under restricted creative conditions to carve out a space for critical expressions. Drug War not only brings to the screen the arbitrary nature of state sovereignty by telling the story of a cross-border crime—one in which narrative doubling plays a key role—but also offers reflections on Chinese urbanization in its visual composition, which takes the style of a kind of suburban realism. Three and Chasing Dream represent To’s latest efforts to develop an aesthetics of the studio defined by a tendency toward abstraction such that he uses his dislocality as a basis for a critical perspective on Hong Kong society and, especially, contemporary Chinese neoliberalism. Intertextual allusions, whether large-scale plot structures and visual styles or small-scale features of characterization and dialogue, are pervasive in To’s co-productions. These allusions can and should, I argue, be drawn into the new context of To’s transborder assemblages for a better understanding of his work.

Gender and the Disruption of Patriarchy in the Crime Stories of Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire

While Mariana Enríquez is most recognised as a writer of Gothic horror, this article explores issues of gender and power in crime stories from her collection Things We Lost in the Fire: ‘The Dirty Boy’, ‘Under the Black Water’ and ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’. Enríquez aligns herself with feminist variants of the crime genre by centring women's concerns and voices, breaking down binary and hierarchical representations of gender and sexuality and illustrating the struggles women and marginalised groups face in Argentina under patriarchy. Discussed as well are the implications of Enríquez's feminist project in contemporary crime fiction.

Quenching Annihilation: Exploring Cinematic Space in the Crime Film Pieta

Pieta is a South Korean film directed by Kim Ki-duk, featuring a crime story about love and redemption between a mother and her son, starring Jeong-jin Lee and Min-su Jo. The film narrates the story of a “mother” and “son” without any blood relation, aligning with Director Kim Ki-duk’s consistent thematic choices: love and redemption, death and destruction. This article focuses on the analysis of the audio-visual language of Pieta, attempting to examine the film’s narrative space from the perspective of audio-visual language. It primarily explores the functional forms of space, analyzing the construction of physical, mental, and social spaces within the film’s scenes.

Karin Slaughter’s Crime Novel "Blindsighted" as a Southern Forensic Thriller

The forensic thriller has emerged as a significant subgenre of crime fiction that depicts the work of medical examiners, coroners, forensic pathologists, and anthropologists who analyze scientific evidence. Forensic investigators do not engage directly in pursuing the criminal; instead, they interpret the physical evidence collected from the victim's body and the crime scene. The popularity of forensic fiction, film, and TV series has created the general assumption that criminalistics has become a routine police procedure. This article presents Karin Slaughter's novel Blindsighted as an example of the Southern forensic thriller. The American writer Karin Slaughter is the author of crime stories and thrillers set in the American South. Her Grant County series consists of six crime novels, beginning with Blindsighted and followed by Kisscut, A Faint Cold Fear, Indelible, Faithless, and Beyond Reach. The essay introduces the main qualities of a forensic thriller and highlights the novel's generic characteristics. Then, Blindsighted is analyzed within the paradigm of Southern regional literature, with its distinctive qualities and religious imagery.

A true crime story: The role of space, time, and identity in narrating criminal authority

Abstract This article presents a theoretical and methodological argument for employing a narrative-based approach to explore criminal organisations’ (COs) claims to political authority, accompanied by an empirical example. International Relations scholarship is increasingly interested in the role narratives play in political meaning-making processes, with violent non-state actors (VNSAs) beginning to occupy a central space in such investigations. This work has contributed important insights into how VNSAs, such as terrorists and insurgents, mobilise narratives to challenge state authority. However, this literature still needs to take stock of groups that do not directly challenge the state but rather live within it. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and using the Sicilian Mafia as a case study, I show that COs exercise and construct their narratives of political authority by reappropriating the state’s key constitutive narratives of space, time, and identity. By reflecting the same form of (statist) political imagination via alternative spatial, temporal, and identity configurations, these groups simultaneously reject and reproduce modern articulations of political authority in their spatio-temporal and identity dimensions.

Using True Crime Stories to Demonstrate Medical Library Research

The author wrote a series for the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library’s blog that explored the connections between true crime and medicine. Each of the ten entries in the “Disorder in the Court” series tells a true story of a crime or court case that involved a medical diagnosis. The entry then delves into the etiology and pathophysiology of the particular syndrome, using information from research articles and point-of-care databases available through the library. This blog series shows the potential of storytelling in demonstrating how to conduct library research.

The Horror of Serenity

The sublime is a common subject in European literary studies, particularly in Victorian and Romantic period literary scholarship. The Greek writer Longinus proposed the concept in the 1st century in On the Sublime (first printed in 1554), and Edward Burke later popularized it in his work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). The sublime is less discussed in anime studies due to its European origins, but it has a robust history in Japanese literature and philosophy. Recently, scholars have begun discussing its presence in anime. This paper examines European and Japanese definitions of the sublime and then applies the European Romantic definition to Psycho-Pass. Psycho-Pass’s focus on horror, self-knowledge, and European philosophy makes it an ideal subject for examining the sublime in anime. Rikako Oryo is a schoolgirl who murders her classmates and is hunted by the protagonists in one of the show’s side arcs. Her art emphasizes how the sublime's "horror" element can stimulate critical thought and concurs with the Kierkegaardian theory of the sublime. The primary antagonist, Shogo Makishima, represents the more transcendent aspects of the sublime and its role in self-knowledge and identity. After examining Rikako and Makishima, the paper takes a step back and apply the principles of the sublime to anime as a medium and Psycho-Pass as a whole. Psycho-Pass reminds viewers that violent media like horror anime and crime stories can use the sublime as a catalyst for critical thinking without endorsing violence.

Crime in the Context of Philosophy of History

Methodological foundations for improvement of criminological science involve the expansion of its interdisciplinary connections, including its connections with philosophy and history. This makes it possible to study crime as a certain social process taking place in the general logic of the development of society and subordinate to it. The classical philosophy of history offers several options for understanding the meaning and driving forces of the historical process that predetermine competing views on the history of crime. Theology and Marxism, fundamentally differing in their view of the mechanism of history, provide an understanding of crime as a linearly developing process that has its origins in the past, but inevitably disappears in the future as the «end of history» is reached. Cyclical concepts of the historical process allow us to look at crime as an eternal, indestructible phenomenon that changes its basic forms as historical cycles change and in accordance with the basic parameters of this cycle itself. The concepts of multifactorial historical development determine an emphatically sociological explanation of crime, within which its state can be assessed outside the context of the past and future. The postmodern challenge to universal classical historiosophical concepts has actually destroyed their explanatory significance and methodological value. At the same time, postmodernism creates favorable opportunities for understanding the process of crime as an integral part of many parallel and overlapping histories: the history of liberalism, the history of economics, the history of preserving national identity, etc. In this case, crime stories (plural) appear in place of crime history (singular). And only such a multi-layered view of the processes of crime development and its connection with social processes can provide adequate methodological support for criminological research. In this regard, the results of the study can be considered as a contribution to the development of historical criminology, which is gaining relevance.

Creating a Place in Middle America: How Spanish-Language Local News Serves the Hispanic Community

A fraction of Hispanic people in the U.S. uses Spanish-language news because a language barrier prevents them using English-language news. Functional theory suggests ethnic media serve ethnic community needs ignored by mainstream media. Research on how Spanish-language news serves U.S. Hispanic communities and differs from English-language news typically studies large, politically liberal cities with large Hispanic populations, neglecting Hispanic people living elsewhere. Content analysis of local newscasts to assess differences between network-affiliated, English-language television stations and the Telemundo affiliate serving a mid-sized, midwestern, politically conservative market addresses these limitations. An analytic framework derived from functional theory categorizes community needs as informational and representational. Results show significantly different agendas between Spanish- and English-language news. Spanish-language news airs more human interest and government stories and fewer crime stories. It addresses unique informational needs, helping orient newcomers and airing government stories that sustain ties to Spanish-speaking countries. Regarding representation, results show Hispanic people are invisible to a greater extent than they are negatively portrayed in English-language news. Thus, Spanish-language local television news serves the Hispanic community by making it visible to itself. However, Spanish-language news focuses on the Hispanic community rather than being a general news source, supplementing rather than substituting for English-language news.

The Failure of Imagination and its Redemption: John Banville‘s The Book of Evidence

ABSTRACT This article focuses on John Banville’s The Book of Evidence in which art serves as an intrinsic thematic concern for the narrating character Freddie Montgomery who becomes captivated by a 17th century Dutch portrait, tries to steal it, and savagely kills the servant who interrupts him. Besides offering a story of crime and punishment, the confessional monologic form inexorably establishes a particular ekphrastic narration, showing a fascination for the rhetorical and imaginative possibilities of art. While the novel has been frequently noted for its invigorations of self and authenticity, little attention has been given to redemptive power of art evoking ethical questions with a focus on the other. Banville oscillates between an aesthetic and an ethical framework through which framing the portrait as a source of inspiration, he deploys a further layer of ekphrasis which is found in W. J. T. Mitchell’s picture theory situating ekphrasis in three crucial steps; the ekphrastic indifference, hope and fear denoting emulations between the visual and verbal representations.

Crime Fiction and the Knowing of Pain.

Recent studies of pain have disputed the idea that pain eludes representation in language. Where these have largely focused on the experience of pain, my paper examines the epistemological function of pain in crime fiction, a genre that by definition foregrounds meaning: what and how we know. A good crime story depends structurally on resolution, but its pleasure derives more thoroughly from suspense. Pain would seem to defy those logics; surely we long for its ending, not its persistence. Yet many contemporary detectives do their work in pain, embodying an impossible contradiction between chaos and order. This suggests that pain is somehow integral to the process of knowing, inviting us to rethink pain as disrupting rather than constituting the forward motion of meaning.

Critical Narratives Or Crime Stories? The Ethics And Politics Of Narrative Research In Criminology

Abstract Amid growing criminological interest in narrative, there is hope that the mainstreaming of ‘narrative criminology’ will yield a more critical disposition within the discipline. This article contends that critical practice does not simply entail attending to issues of harm, power and resistance or researcher reflexivity, but grappling with the complex ethics and politics of our research practices. Focusing on the field of ‘narrative criminology’, this article explores issues of voyeurism, empathy, listening and bearing witness and poses some questions to guide ethical narrative practice within criminology. It calls for criminologists to consider how we may use narrative more responsibly within our discipline.

Речевой портрет блогера-рассказчика “true crime story” (лингвостилистический аспект)

The aim of the study is to identify the linguistic and stylistic features of the speech portrait of a blogger leading his blog in the genre of “true crime story”, which is dedicated to the narration of real crimes. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the fact that the linguistic features of this genre are considered in the work for the first time and the specifics of the narrator’s speech portrait in the genre of “true crime story” manifested in the electronic environment is revealed. As a result of the study, it has been found that the speech portrait of a blogger-narrator of “true crime story” can be characterised as follows: a restrained, concise manner of narration, the unity of the audio-visual means used to enhance the impact on the listener, the representation of the blogger’s values to a wide audience, a detailed description of events, the use of links to information sources, the documentary nature of the presentation of the material, the abundance of legal terminology in speech, the predominance of bookish vocabulary, the use of epithets with negative stylistic colouring, rhetorical questions, parentheticals and quotations, etc.

Concept of FOREIGNER in the militia film. A contribution to the research on ludic and propaganda discourse in the Polish People’s Republic

An increasing interest in the popular culture of the Polish People’s Republic has been noticeable in recent years. The author believes that the ludic and propaganda discourse, which combines entertainment and persuasive functions, has a major part in it. This is evidenced by numerous multimodal texts, including crime stories, the so-called militia crime stories. They provide an interesting research material for the contemporary media linguistics. This article presents a media linguistic reconstruction of the discursive image of a foreigner in militia cinema. The tool applied in the analytical procedure is the cognitive definition model. The analysis has proved that the image of foreigners is dominated by negative evaluation, which concerns Germans and Americans in particular. In the author’s opinion, developing this type of research will contribute to broadening the knowledge of persuasion mechanisms and Polish cultural memory