True Crime Narratives Research Articles

‘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.

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...

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.

True Crime Narratives

This article investigates the contemporary fascination with true crime narratives, an subject which is fast becoming a central area of interest in crime fiction studies. As the overarching genre of crime fiction itself becomes the most read literature genre, not to mention its growing popularity in other popular cultural mediums – TV, film, documentary, podcast, blogs, etc., true crime – which has always been a popular sub-genre – is arguably moving centre stage aligned to our recent obsession with the real life figure of the serial killer. The usual discussions of both individual and collective obsession and fascination with such topics, is generally limited to arguments within conscious parameters of ethical choice, This paper will explore an alterative reading that introduces the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of the sinthome and jouissance, and argues that any reading of these topics cannot be contained within conceptions of rationality and ethical choice.

Book review: Ian Case Punnett, Toward a Theory of True Crime Narratives: A Textual Analysis

Book review: Ian Case Punnett, Toward a Theory of True Crime Narratives: A Textual Analysis

In Cold Blood, the Expansion of Psychiatric Evidence, and the Corrective Power of True Crime

This paper studies Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (serialized 1965, published 1966) in the context of the evidence-exclusion procedures that were central to the due process revolution in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that Capote's text owes its canonicity in part to its mediation between legal procedure's exclusion of inculpatory evidence (an aesthetic of curtailment) and literature's inclusion of exculpatory evidence (an aesthetic of expansion). I conclude that legal procedurals such as In Cold Blood re-stage the conflict between these aesthetic frameworks, such that true-crime narratives are frequently figured as both testaments and correctives to the original legal trial.

True Crime

Abstract This poem is a creative response to contemporary true crime narratives about baby farming in Victorian times, namely Alison Rattle and Allison Vale’s The Woman Who Murdered Babies for Money: The Story of Amelia Dyer (London: André Deutsch, 2011); and the TV documentary, “Amelia Dyer: Martina Cole’s Lady Killers.”

<i>Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories</i> by Anita Biressi

This book, concerned as it is with the relations of crime and narrative, is itself situated in an interesting conjunction of narrative and metanarrative. It is both a commentary on the stories of crimes and criminals, and on the ways in which those stories have been read and represented by writers on them, so it stands already at a third degree of remove from what we could call the ‘real crimes’. Oddly though, in its presentation, this book is returned through the levels of discourse to something approaching the style of those texts upon which it commentates. The cover shows a man in a Cambridge Rapist-style leather hood, his arms and body tattooed with the words ‘murder’, ‘hate’ and ‘kill’, against a night landscape of winter trees; exactly the kind of image that accompanies true crime accounts in books and magazines. The cover also bears the words ‘Crime Files’ in the graphic style of a police case-folder stamp, this being the general title of the series within which Biressi’s book is published, and the brief overview of the series describes it as ‘offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction’. I comment on these details of the book’s presentation because it seems to me that they immediately raise questions about some of the difficulties that Biressi is attempting to unravel. What is the status of the writer on, or the reader of, true crime narratives? Wherein does the continued fascination with these stories lie and what is the nature of the pleasure derived from them? Further, in this context, how does an academic analyst differ from those other readers and writers of the genre? A suspicious police officer might be forgiven for being unable to see the difference between the isolated individual in a bedsit full of true crime books and newspaper clippings of grotesque murders, and the office of an academic containing exactly the same material. The ‘scholar, student and discerning reader’ defence hardly works, when this is the alibi that so many of the texts under examination themselves employ to justify the willing involvement of the writer and the interest of the reader in apparently indefensible material.

A woman’s place: constructing women within true crime narratives

Writers do not have to position the female body as a contested space: simultaneously conceived of as a commodity, honoured as a site of self-expression, and visualised as a vehicle for reproduction. This competition of ownership facilitates the commandeering of the female body for a variety of purposes such as the pursuit of financial or political gain. In this way, women who are central to true crime cases – as victims or as perpetrators – can be objectified by writers for the popular press in the rush to tell a story and, in some instances, marginalised, even as their stories are re-imagined. These ideas are explored through two cases that unfolded in Sydney, Australia, in the late-nineteenth century – the gang rape of Mary Jane Hicks and two murders ostensibly committed by Louisa Collins. A brief examination of the contemporary coverage of these cases unpacks how the bodies of both women were conscripted by writers for other purposes – first, to sell papers, and second, to argue for the abolition of the death penalty. This article then looks at the re-telling of these events in Frank C. Johnson’s Famous Detective Stories, which allowed mid-twentieth century true crime writers to re-ignite debates around publishing and punishment found in the original reportage. Almost 130 years after the first of these crimes took place, this article contends offering a feminist framework to review these, and similar, cases demonstrate circulation figures and discussions around the ethics of punishment are not dependent upon the appropriation of the female body.

True-Crime Narratives and Detective Fiction in Interwar Britain

True-Crime Narratives and Detective Fiction in Interwar Britain

True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity , and: Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity, and: Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture Geoff Hamilton Mark Seltzer. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. 288 pp. David Schmid. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Violent criminality, now more than ever, occupies a weirdly central and centralizing place in American cultural life. Blockbuster media—from cable news reports on school shootings, serial slaughters, and husbands-gone-wild, to the endlessly proliferating crime narratives that appear now on everything from Spike TV to the National Geographic Network to the Women’s Entertainment channel—bring mass audiences together in consideration of trauma and outrage. World War II press reports apparently coined the term “blockbuster bomb” for a device explosive enough to destroy whole neighbourhoods. Contemporary blockbusters, some of which you may take home from your local Blockbuster, offer a related sort of communal participation in annihilation and suffering, however vicarious. It is the public and public-making aspects of criminality, the criminal’s fame and the crime’s socializing function, that concern David Schmid in Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture and Mark Seltzer in True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. The authors join here a lively conversation about the cultural significance of violent transgression, drawing on and augmenting such important works as Joel Black’s Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991), Philip Jenkins’s Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (1994), Karen Haltunnen’s Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (1998), Seltzer’s own Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (1998), and Philip L. Simpson’s Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (2000). [End Page 279] For several decades now, the figure of the serial killer has been exceptionally prominent in American culture, with real and fictional examples—Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, Aileen Wuornos, BTK, et al.—achieving a level of name recognition and “brand” prominence to be envied by any Hollywood actor. As David Schmid contends in his excellent study, a pop-cultural environment largely indifferent to moral value as a condition of fame has transformed the serial killer into both the “ultimate deviant” (25), the worst sort of human one can imagine, and also the “exemplary modern celebrity” (4), an individual revered for being so horrible. The how and why of the serial killer’s amoral ascendance is explored thoroughly and convincingly by Schmid. His opening section deals, first, with the suggestively proleptic celebrity of two nineteenth-century serial killers, Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes, who prompted powerful public revulsion and fascination, thus “inaugurat[ing] the ongoing debate about whether famous serial killers are the consummate insiders or outsiders of American culture” (33) (the Ripper’s putative “Americanness,” see below, is discussed in detail). He then moves on to examine the history of the FBI’s relationship to serial killing, revealing how this organization “claim[ed] exclusive ownership of serial murder” and “[used] popular culture to both publicize and reinforce its reputation as the unquestioned source of expertise on serial crime” (67). From here, Schmid proceeds to his second section, investigating serial killers in Hollywood films, television crime dramas, and true-crime narratives. An epilogue considers the status of the serial killer after 9/11, with Schmid tracking its overlap with concerns about terrorism and concluding that the serial-killer figure has endured because of its oddly reassuring familiarity and usefulness in framing a more recent and still poorly understood menace. One of Schmid’s central arguments—cogently defended over the course of the book—is that the serial killer’s ascendance has been made possible by the myriad ways in which this particular sort of criminal can be exploited by diverse ideological agendas and commercial interests. Among the parties who have found serial killers expedient during the last three decades are the FBI (which needed to posit a threat large enough to justify its own expansion), tabloid news (which sought lurid content in order to compete for the attention of an increasingly fragmented...

The Real Filth in American Psycho

The Real Filth in American Psycho

True Crime Narratives:

True Crime Narratives:

The Monster in the Home: True Crime and the Traffic in Body Parts

In language of man on street, he was a monster. He would always be a monster.1 Here fiction and fact are both fantasy. Here Police Gazette meets National Enquirer and neither can any longer be trusted.2 The genre of True Crime is a mode of popular writing with roots in medieval exempla literature, puritan broadside, penny journalism, and expose history of muck-raking and tabloid scandal. Serial killer narratives are a phenomenally popular variant of genre. In general, these are narratives of social crisis enacted around domestic intimacies; but by being interpellated into a Gothic rhetoric of the serial killer confirms a rubric of social fear which is politically very useful. For example, a hermeneutic of monstrous can frame Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy as monster, but more importantly, at same time it permits construction of an opposing fantasy of innocence and vulnerability. I argue that serial killer defines, by violating, a cynosure of originary innocence called domesticity. In other words, domestic Gothic of serial killer is as much political fantasy as fantasy politics-both of which are ideologically anchored in mobilizing cry of family values. True Crime narratives of serial killer, then, prompt questions, who is monster, and how did it get into home? 1. In a great number of these texts, serial killer is decried as an xeample-and confirmation-of modern American decadence. Nonetheless, patterened deaths are neither modern nor especially American To contrary, killer who murders repeatedly and in compulsively characteristic ways can be found in classics of high literature, rangimg from Homer to Beowulf, as well as in myth, folk-tale and legend. However, while serial killer is not new, threat he is seen to pose must always be new, must always be urgent. That is, while not a product of cultural decadence or corrupt societal conditions or collapsing morality, serial killers provide a flexible, demonizing frame through which each of these social crises can be defined and confirmed as worthy of public note. Thus, rhetorics of fear-anxiety-laden words like epidemic and roving-typify even seemingly objective news or academic studies. Urgency is often explicit, as for example, in sub-title of Joel Norris' Serial Killers: The Growing Menace-a phrase which had been used earlier in James Alan Fox's Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace.3 Yet for all their vaunted newness, serial killers are invariably read into a traditional grammar of supernatural monstrous that functions in two distinct ways. hermeneutic, monstrous organizes a language of reference that is saturated with political implications. a rubric, on other hand, monstrous directs otherwise unacceptable excesses of violence and passion toward sanctioned political ends. For example, Jeffrey Dahmer's death in prison at hands of another prisoner was surely not civilly sanctioned; nonetheless, it was not much lamented, either. Care had been taken, after all, to define him as a monster and as such, beyond any need for human courtesy or decency. The serial killer phenomenon seemed to arise from nowhere in early '70's-as a consequence, it is repeatedly suggested, of collapsing civic and moral structures. For example, in I Have Lived in Monster, Robert Ressler intones: As a social phenomenon, serial murder is...part of a swelling tide of interpersonal violence that has been rising since middle of nineteenth century. It is connected to increasing complexity of our society, to our interconnectedness via media and to alienation many of us feel.' Similarly, Gerold Frank's The Boston Strangler (1966) takes as its subject what happens to a great city when it is besieged by terror-terror stemming from a horrifying explosion of violence that seems more and more a part of contemporary life (viii). …