ESLJ Volume 1 Number 2 Book Reviews
Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories
by Anita Biressi.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
Pp.238, £42.50 (hb),
ISBN 0 333 74547 7.
Reviewed by:
ALEX WARWICK
Head of English, University of Westminster
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.
I do not mean to suggest that the subject is one that should not have been approached, only to point to an element of analysis that is missing from Biressi's own otherwise insightful discussion of 'how cultural critics engage with and politically interpret that troubling pleasure' (p.16), where there is a silence about her own subject position and the status of the academic metanarrative. She displays some scepticism about the use of various professional discourses such as law, medicine or psychoanalysis by true crime writers, yet no apparent consciousness of her own use of the professional discourses of literary and cultural analysis to interpret these. This is a field in which, as she rightly says, there are real consequences for those involved in more recent cases and, I would suggest, some debt of responsibility to those in the historical past.
It is perhaps this 'ethical jeopardy', as she calls the position of the true crime biographer in relation to his subject (p.26), that goes some way towards accounting for the relative scarcity of academic work on the subject. There is a very striking inverse proportion between the proliferation of true crime material in different formats and any commentary on it. For this reason alone, Biressi's book is a welcome and timely intervention, but it is also welcome in that she works carefully and sensitively to establish her thesis. Her argument is that the various non-fiction accounts of crime found in popular journalism, 'law and order' television programming, quasi-governmental initiatives and true crime publishing have produced politically inflected subject positions, most notably those of the moral subject, the good citizen and the dangerous individual, and that this production has itself raised the interest in crime through the mobilisation of the real concerns of readers about personal vulnerability and physical danger in everyday life. It is a convincing thesis, with some important insights, particularly on the ambiguities of individualism and the ways in which the tensions between individual and community identity are fundamental to public discourses of law and order. Biressi also notes in detail the political inflections of such discourses, and this is very useful in a field where there is so frequently a resort to more metaphysical deployment of the terminology of good and evil, or at least to the conventional language of psychology, that discussion is rendered oddly apolitical. There are, however, and perhaps inevitably given the range and complexity of the material, some areas where further work needs to be done.
Biressi's analysis relies heavily, and to good effect, on the work of Foucault, but there are within this some of the same oversights that have been remarked upon in Foucault's own thinking. Principal among these, I feel, is the lack of differentiation of subject positions and, crucially in work of this kind, the lack of any commentary on gender. It is clear from the figures that Biressi gives for the circulation of the periodical true crime publications that the readership is overwhelmingly female and that mainstream women's weekly magazines contain a significant component of true crime presented as human interest features (pp.4-5). As it remains the case that the majority of notorious murders and sex crimes are carried out by men and that the majority of their victims are women, there are surely a number of serious questions to be asked about the particular nature of women's interest in such writing that cannot be answered by reference to a rather universalised 'moral subject'. If, as Biressi contends, true crime writing provides a forum for the real concerns of readers about their own personal vulnerability, then it must be necessary to articulate who it is that is concerned and about what. However, the opportunity to highlight the particular gendered inflections of the argument is completely lost. There are many instances where this discussion is conspicuous by its absence, such as in the section on readership, but the first case study chosen for detailed scrutiny is that of the Thompson sisters, who murdered their abusive father. One might ask very different questions about the nature of women readers' interest in this case, for example whether it could be that women might engage in fantasies of revenge, constituting themselves as agents of power, rather than rehearsing their fears about vulnerability as they might, say, in accounts of Peter Sutcliffe's murders. Such issues are also apparent in the section on looking at the body, where there is a brief, but wholly undeveloped comparison between pornography and the photographic and written representations of the victim's body in new true crime magazines. As Biressi then goes on to discuss the situating of the body as passive object in relation to the active knowing subject that is the viewer/reader, then the very detailed and varied mass of work that exists on the problematics of gender and objectification ought to be acknowledged.
The section on the body raises another issue that is not given sufficient attention in the book; the extent to which there is any difference between written and visual representation. There is some very interesting discussion of 'vernacular images' and the arrangement of photographs as 'bearing traces of a working-class structure of feeling' (p.137) in historical true crime accounts, but the reliance elsewhere on narrative analysis of texts and their coherence with conventions of story-telling rather overwhelms this. The pleasures of the visual are of a different order than those of narrative, structured as they are on the opposite axes of linearity. The written narrative relies on movement through time, promising development and ultimate resolution, wherein the satisfaction of having understood the criminal and seen the case resolved lies. The reader here can identify her or himself with the forces of detection and resolution. The visual image is a moment in time. It has no past or future, no development or resolution and is where, arguably, the viewer is more closely and uncomfortably placed in the viewpoint of the murderer, looking down on the dead body. Of course, such a viewpoint could also be recuperated by identifying oneself as the privileged professional observer, the detective or the pathologist, but then also as the voyeuristic sightseer. What seems necessary here is the disentangling of the question of visual pleasure as distinct from narrative satisfaction, and some consideration of the complex nature of such pleasure. Such a discussion would also possibly add more detail to the otherwise rather bland and anonymous figure of the 'moral subject' who features so crucially in the argument.
The book is most uncertain in the section on histories of true crime, where it is very heavily reliant on secondary sources of commentary on earlier forms of writing about crime and criminals. This reliance on the reading of other critics means that there is very little of Biressi's own thesis evident in the chapter and some impetus in her argument is lost. The chapter thus misses some important points and propagates some errors. For example, Havelock Ellis was not a criminologist and certainly did not 'epitomise the new criminology' (p.65). There are also some terrific jumps in time, such as a switch from Defoe's writing in the early eighteenth century to a suggested bourgeois rejection of policing in the nineteenth century that are not sustainable on the evidence given. It seems to me that there is more to be said too, about the place of historical true crime, particularly that of the nineteenth century, in the formation of 'Heritage Britain', that other aspect of the Thatcherite 1980s. As I have already said, Biressi is very good on the locating of discourses of crime against certain recent political ideologies, and I would think that there are some interesting comparisons here with a return to Victorian values, the transformation of a difficult industrial past into a contemporary entertainment, and the apparently endless appetite of the public for the recreation of the past as it 'really was', as evinced by any number of television shows.
These are by no means fatal flaws in the book, however, and my remarks are perhaps more in the order of directions in which it would be interesting to see the debate develop. Biressi's work is a valuable contribution to this difficult but extremely important area of study.
This is a book review published on 11th February 2005
Citation: Warwick, Alex, 'Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories, by Anita Biressi' Entertainment and Sports Law Journal (ESLJ) Volume 1, Number 2 <http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/eslj/issues/volume1/number2/reviews/warwick/>
