Histories of True Crime

Abstract

The popular consumption of true accounts of crime is not a recent phenomenon. A long line of literary and popular antecedents informs various kinds of modern true crime entertainment. The great mass of popular street literatures and their more respectable counterparts such as the Newgate collections, newspapers and the novel have all made some mark on contemporary true crime. Antecedents matter here for a number of reasons. Most simply, they are evidence that modern true crime, like crime fiction, consists ofCodes and conventions whose appearance is explicable, not only in terms of current knowledges and practices, but also in terms of the traces they bear of earlier knowledges and practices. It is difficult to understand how these conventions and the discourses which they support alter, shift or are even dispensed with altogether, without a knowledge of their earlier literary and nonliterary influences.