Writing the History of Crime


Book Description

Writing the History of Crime investigates the development of historical writing on the subject of crime and its wider place in social and cultural history. It examines long-standing and emerging traditions in history writing, with separate chapters on legal and scientific approaches, as well as on urban, Marxist, gender and empire history. Each chapter then explores these historical approaches in relation to crime, paying particular attention to the relationship between theory and the interpretation of evidence. Rather than a timeline for the historical appearance of ideas about crime or a catalogue of the range of topics that comprise the subject matter, Writing the History of Crime reveals the ideas behind crime as a subject of historical investigation; it looks at how these ideas generate questions that may be asked about the past and the way in which these questions are answered. This is a crucial analysis for anyone interested in the history of crime, the historiography of social history or the art of history writing more broadly.




A History of American Crime Fiction


Book Description

A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.




Crime, History, and Hollywood


Book Description

In order to gain a better understanding of how criminal justice history is presented in major motion pictures, ten such films were selected for Crime, History, and Hollywood. The films were selected as good representations of criminal justice subject matter, mostly centered on specific crimes, their investigation, and courtroom outcomes. Films made across a wide range of times were also selected, and ones that represented American history from the mid-1800s (Amistad) and into the 1970s (All the President's Men). The most important aspect of the film selection was that they were based on actual historical events. While films such as the Shawshank Redemption and Twelve Angry Men are excellent criminal justice films, they are not based on true historical crimes or events. Each film (chapter) will open with an introduction to the historical event and film. The authors will then present the true historical events that the film was based on. Next, they will present a review of the film's narrative and how Hollywood portrayed the historical event. It should be noted here that the viewing of the film would best complement this section of each chapter. Then a review of the historical accuracy of each film will be reviewed, mentioning the various types of historical inaccuracies employed in each film. Finally, each chapter will present a conclusion in regard to the accuracy of the film, a list of books for further reading on the topic, and the endnotes. "Their passion for history shines through their writing, which is clear, engaging, and efficient....an important contribution to criminological studies of crime films..." -- Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books "[The] book creates a wonderful path for discussion and connection." -- Lee Ayers, Criminal Justice Review 39(4) PowerPoint slides are available to professors upon adoption of this book. Download sample slides from the full 17-slide presentation here. If you have adopted the book for a course, contact bhall (at) cap-press (dot) com to request the PowerPoint slides.




Indecent Advances


Book Description

Edgar Award finalist, Best Fact Crime American Masters (PBS), “1 of 5 Essential Culture Reads” One of CrimeReads’ “Best True Crime Books of the Year” “A fast–paced, meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging (and often infuriating) look–see into the systematic criminalization of gay men and widespread condemnation of homosexuality post–World War I.” —Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle Stories of murder have never been just about killers and victims. Instead, crime stories take the shape of their times and reflect cultural notions and prejudices. In this Edgar Award–finalist for Best Fact Crime, James Polchin recovers and recounts queer stories from the crime pages―often lurid and euphemistic―that reveal the hidden history of violence against gay men. But what was left unsaid in these crime pages provides insight into the figure of the queer man as both criminal and victim, offering readers tales of vice and violence that aligned gender and sexual deviance with tragic, gruesome endings. Victims were often reported as having made “indecent advances,” forcing the accused's hands in self–defense and reducing murder charges to manslaughter. As noted by Caleb Cain in The New Yorker review of Indecent Advances, “it’s impossible to understand gay life in twentieth–century America without reckoning with the dark stories. Gay men were unable to shake free of them until they figured out how to tell the stories themselves, in a new way.” Indecent Advances is the first book to fully investigate these stories of how queer men navigated a society that criminalized them and displayed little compassion for the violence they endured. Polchin shows, with masterful insight, how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall.




Crime and Culture


Book Description

Scholarly interest in the history of crime has grown dramatically in recent years and, because scholars associated with this work have relied on a broad social definition of crime which includes acts that are against the law as well as acts of social banditry and political rebellion, crime history has become a major aspect not only of social history, but also of cultural as well as legal studies. This collection explores how the history of crime provides a way to study time, place and culture. Adopting an international and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the historical discourses of crime in Europe and the United States from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, these original works provide new approaches to understanding the meaning of crime in modern western culture and underscore the new importance given to crime and criminal events in historical studies. Written by both well-known historians and younger scholars from across the globe, the essays reveal that there are important continuities in the history of crime and its representations in modern culture, despite particularities of time and place.




Death in the Air


Book Description

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets, using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. All across London, women were going missing--poor women, forgotten women. Their disappearances caused little alarm, but each of them had one thing in common: they had the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man, John Reginald Christie, who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left. The eventual arrest of the "Beast of Rillington Place" caused a media frenzy: were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that had caused Christie to suddenly snap? And what role had he played in the notorious double murder that had happened in that same apartment building not three years before--a murder for which another, possibly innocent, man was sent to the gallows? The Great Smog of 1952 remains the deadliest air pollution disaster in world history, and John Reginald Christie is still one of the most unfathomable serial killers of modern times. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a taut, compulsively readable true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today.




No Place Like Murder


Book Description

A modern retelling of 20 sensational true crimes, No Place Like Murder reveals the inside details behind nefarious acts that shocked the Midwest between 1869 and 1950. The stories chronicle the misdeeds, examining the perpetrators' mindsets, motives, lives, apprehensions, and trials, as well as what became of them long after. True crime author Janis Thornton profiles notorious murderers such as Frankie Miller, who was fed up when her fiancé stood her up for another woman. As fans of the song "Frankie and Johnny" already know, Frankie met her former lover at the door with a shotgun. Thornton's tales reveal the darker side of life in the Midwest, including the account of Isabelle Messmer, a plucky young woman who dreamed of escaping her quiet farm-town life. After she nearly took down two tough Pittsburgh policemen in 1933, she was dubbed "Gun Girl" and went on to make headlines from coast to coast. In 1942, however, after a murder conviction in Texas, she vowed to do her time and go straight. Full of intrigue and revelations, No Place Like Murder also features such folks as Chirka and Rasico, the first two Hoosier men to die in the electric chair after they brutally murdered their wives in 1913. The two didn't meet until their fateful last night. An enthralling and chilling collection, No Place Like Murder is sure to thrill true crime lovers.




The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators


Book Description

Winner of four major prizes for the best critical/biographical book related to crime fiction: the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and H.R.F. Keating Awards; and shortlisted for both the Agatha and Gold Dagger Awards. ‘Martin Edwards is the closest thing there has been to a philosopher of crime writing.’ The Times




The Writer's Complete Crime Reference Book


Book Description

A comprehensive reference for writers of mysteries, thrillers, action/adventure, true crime, police procedurals, romantic suspense, and psychological mysteries--whether novels or scripts--covering numerous aspects of crime, outlining general rules of thumb, as well as specific policies and procedures of various law enforcement agencies. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice provides a systematic and comprehensive examination of recent developments across criminology and criminal justice. Chapters examine methodological and theoretical approaches to criminology, on-going debates and controversies, and contemporary issues such as drug trafficking, terrorism, and the intersections of gender, race, and class in the context of crime and punishment.