{"id":359,"date":"2011-11-14T23:06:34","date_gmt":"2011-11-14T23:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=359"},"modified":"2018-10-23T13:21:52","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T13:21:52","slug":"true-crime","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=359","title":{"rendered":"True Crime"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The literature of true crime is a growing area of study.\u00a0 Within the last decade there have been two major studies:\u00a0 Anita Biressi’s\u00a0Crime, Fear and The Law in True Crime Stories\u00a0<\/em>(Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) and David Schmid’s\u00a0Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago 2005).\u00a0 This section of crimeculture, which contains a contribution by David Schmid, includes discussion of the true crime press, the representation of the serial killer, and the cover art of true crime magazines:<\/p>\n

An Introduction to the True Crime Press<\/a>:<\/span>\u00a0 Vicky Munro\u00a0 ranges from Victorian origins to the contemporary popularity of writers like Ann Rule and Joe McGinnis, analysing the representations of the lives and alleged crimes of killers whose stories are on sale in the True Crime sections of bookstores – serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, children who killed their parents, parents who killed their children, nurses who killed their patients and children who killed each other.<\/p>\n

Serial Killer Non-Fiction:<\/a><\/span>\u00a0 David Schmid argues that “One of the curious things about non-fictional treatments of serial murder is that many of them appear\u00a0avant la lettre<\/em>. In other words, before the term \u201cserial murder\u201d was popularized by the F.B.I. in the 1970s and 1980s, many works on the subject were published that used a variety of names to describe what would later become known as serial murder.”\u00a0 Drawing on his highly regarded monograph,\u00a0Natural Born Celebrities, Schmid begins with earlier non-fiction works on serial murder\u00a0 – both “the sensational” and “the technical” – and then moves on to consider work published by F.B.I. agents alongside the best-selling books of Ann Rule and Truman Capote.<\/p>\n

True Crime Covers (PDF)<\/a>:<\/span> \u00a0Lee Horsley’s “Dead Dolls and Deadly Dames”, on the iconic female figures of pulp true crime publishing. This section contains extracts from Lee Horsley’s article on the iconic female figures of pulp publishing – “voluptuous, tantalizing and dressed to kill, they voicelessly tempted generations of men to buy the stories of their death or disgrace…” \u00a0 Pulp covers, Horsley argues, are a condensation of the clich\u00e9s of the dangerous and the endangered woman, offering bold, suggestive embodiments of the sexual dynamic that so often drives both \u2018true\u2019 and fictional crime narratives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The literature of true crime is a growing area of study.\u00a0 Within the last decade there have been two major<\/p>\n

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