Crime Stories

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 973 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Laurie Taylor explores the fascination for true crime stories. He's joined by Jennifer Fleetwood, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at City, University of London, whose latest work considers the remarkable rise in the number of people who speak publicly about their experience of crime. Personal accounts used to be confined to the police station and the courtroom, but today bookshops heave with autobiographies by prisoners, criminals, police and barristers while streaming platforms host hours of interviews so how easy is it for the 'truth' to come out?

Louise Wattis, Assistant Professor in the Department: Social Sciences ·at Northumbria University, Newcastle looks at the skyrocketing interest in true crime as a form of popular entertainment. What do we know about the appeal of 'Hardman' biographies of violent criminals, a hugely popular subgenre, particularly for male readers?

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I want to tell you why I love podcasting.
0:04.7	Hi, my name's Tommy Dixon, and I make podcasts for the BBC.
0:08.4	I'm a big fan of stories, always loved a good book.
0:11.4	But when I started commuting for my first job, I discovered podcasts.
0:15.4	I was blown away by how a creative idea and the right mixture of sounds could take you into
0:19.2	a whole new world full of incredible stories. You know, the type that make you go, wow. And that kind of inspired me to
0:25.2	give it a go myself, which to cut a long story short led to a BBC training scheme and a whole
0:30.0	new career giving other people that exact same feeling. So if you want to hear amazing stories
0:34.2	that make you go wow like I did, they're just a tap or click away on BBC Sounds.
0:40.8	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is a thinking aloud podcast from the BBC, and for more
0:48.6	details and much, much more about thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co.com.
0:55.6	Hello. John McVicker, the one-time armed robber turned newspaper columnist, died aged 82 in
1:04.1	2022. It was sad news for me. I'd known John for over 50 years, meeting him for the first time when he was one of the
1:11.7	prisoners in the class I gave to prisoners in the much publicised Ewing of Durham Prison,
1:17.2	beginning to know him so much better when after his release he came to live with me in my Battersea
1:21.3	flat and eventually helped me write a book about the lives and the tactics of a range of
1:25.9	professional criminals.
1:32.1	At that time, there were relatively few autobiographical accounts by former criminals,
1:35.8	that as my first guest today is expertly documented,
1:40.4	over the last few decades, there's been a proliferation of such accounts.
1:46.5	Well, how might we make sense of this, what can we call it, confessional outburst? Your time to turn to, Jennifer Fleetwood, whose senior lecturer in criminology at City
1:52.4	University of London. Jennifer, you note that bookshop shelves heave now with autobiographies
	...

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