Crime, fear, and the law in true crime stories

Why do true crime stories exert such popular fascination? What do they have to say about the fear of crime in the present moment? This book examines the historical origins and development of true crime and its evolution into distinctive contemporary forms. Embracing a range of non-fiction accounts - true crime book and magazines, law and order television, popular journalism - it traces how they harness and explore current concerns about law and order, crime and punishment and personal vulnerability. From Agatha Christie To Ruth Rendell Considers Seriously The Hugely Popular And Influential Works Of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Nag Marsh, P.d. James And Ruth Rendell/barbara Vine. Providing Studies Of 42 Key Novels, This Volume Introduces These Authors For Students And The General Reader In The Context Of Their Lives, And Of Critical Debates On Gender, Colonialism, Psychoanalysis, The Gothic, And Feminism. It Includes Interviews With P.d. James And Ruth Rendell/barbara Vine.--jacket. Lives Of Crime -- Gendering The Genre -- Social Negotiations: Class, Crime And Power -- Lands Of Hope And Glory? Englishness, Race And Colonialism -- Detecting Psychoanalysis: Readers, Criminals And Narrative -- Gothic Crimes: A Literature Of Terror And Horror -- The Spirits Of Detection -- Feminism Is Criminal -- The Complete Detective And Crime Novels Of The Six Authors -- A Conversation With Ruth Rendell/barbara Vine -- A Conversation With P.d. James. Susan Rowland. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 214-216) And Index. "Heather Worthington's book challenges the traditional account that finds detection before Poe's Dupin and Doyle's Holmes only in Gothic and Newgate novels and some police memoirs. In fact, the popular press, from broadsides to periodicals, is where both the fictional detective and the investigative case-structures developed, in line with major changes in the real discipline of crime fighting. The well-known masters of early crime fiction, including Collins and Dickens, drew on and refined the raw riches of the popular field, found in texts that have rarely been reprinted or even discussed, but which are analysed in depth in this book. The book benefits from extensive archival research and is theoretically informed by Foucault's account of disciplinary power "Anita Biressi has written an account of true crime and the figures that populate it - victims, serial killers, burglars, lawyers and criminal investigators. She charts its historical origins and evolution in contemporary forms including magazines, television, popular journalism and criminal biography. Case studies illustrate how true crime draws on both established discourses of religion, melodrama, horror and the newer languages of forensic science, surveillance and policing to investigate the modern subject's anxiety about personal vulnerability and mortality. Focusing on the cultural context of true crime reveals its populist reworking of political discourses of home, citizenship and law and order."--Jacket Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction....Pages 1-12 Front Matter....Pages 13-13 ‘True Stories Only!’....Pages 15-40 Histories of True Crime....Pages 41-72 Discourses of Law and Order in Britain from 1979 to 1995....Pages 73-108 Front Matter....Pages 109-109 Crime Magazine Stories: From American Idiom to an English....Pages 111-125 Period True Crime....Pages 126-145 Daring to Know: Looking at the Body in the New True Crime Magazine....Pages 146-163 Figure in a Landscape....Pages 164-194 Concluding Comments....Pages 195-196 Back Matter....Pages 197-238 No study has examined this material in anything like the detail or with the explanatory approach offered here. With full references, comprehensive narrative description and written in an accessible and readable style, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction is essential reading for those researching in, studying or just fascinated by crime fiction."--Jacket What happens to detective fiction when the detective is "post-colonial," a marginalized native or settler in a country recovering from colonialism?