Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

True Crime Fictions

Northern Crimes: the Moors Murderers and the Yorkshire Ripper

Birkbeck creative writing lecturer Mark Blacklock’s true crime fiction novel, “I’m Jack”

Het Phillips (Birmingham) started the conference with a discussion of materiality in true crime, drawing in a wide range of references, mentioning crime writing from the Moors Murders to David Peace. What most struck me was her emphasis on detail as a textual feature of crime writing. Detail might be a literary relative of the detective’s ‘evidence’; reading could be forensic attitude. Phillips referred not just to Roland Barthes’ account of detail in ‘The Reality Effect’, but even, strikingly, to Hugh Kenner’s discussion of material details in Joyce’s Ulysses.

Martin King’s (Manchester Metropolitan) approach was oriented to social science and media studies. His focus was particularly on David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Four and the TV dramatization Red Riding, and on the versions of masculinity explored in both. King suggested that Peace cannot be wholly separated from a more prurient representation of gruesome crime. What Mark Blacklock called ‘culture industry questions’ – where is a fiction situated, who is the audience, whom does it benefit, is there profit to be made? – come into play.

Helen Pleasance (York St John) closed this panel with a paper given from a creative writing background, in which creative non-fiction and memoir were key genres. She revealed a personal connection to the investigation of the Moors Murders, via her father who was a probation officer in Greater Manchester at the time. This had deterred her from engaging with the history of that crime – yet she has ultimately been unable to avoid it, and spoke of ‘what it means to know too much about Myra Hindley’. Pleasance criticized Jean Rafferty’s award-winning novel Myra, Beyond Saddleworth (2012) but found much more virtue in David Constantine’s story ‘Ashton and Elaine’ which she described at length. Constantine’s story, it emerged, addresses the murders obliquely and looks to find a way beyond them for the region.

The panel not only highlighted the particular role of the North in crime writing, but also suggested that two cases in particular have dominated the modern history of ‘Northern crime’: the Moors Murderers and the Yorkshire Ripper. Of the two, it seems to me that the former has had the deepest hold over public imagination and has been more prone to mythologization – as was indicated, for instance, by the connections that various quotations drew between the Moors Murders and Wuthering Heights.

True Crime in the United States

The second panel shifted our attention over the Atlantic. David McWilliam (Keele) described the ‘activist ethics’ of author Sarah Burns’ work on the ‘central park five’, a case of wrongful conviction. McWilliam’s presentation opened issues of race, representation and incarceration in the United States. These were also pertinent to the presentation by historian Roger Panetta (Fordham University, New York), who is undertaking a history of Sing Sing Prison. His work took us back to the nineteenth century, as he outlined his aim to better describe the prison’s inmates, ‘retracing the lifelines knotted in one cell’. Adam Gearey (Birkbeck) discussed a work by the former Weatherman activist Bill Ayres, taking ‘true crime’ into the realm of what could be called ‘domestic terrorism’ or home-grown revolutionary activity in the counterculture era. Gearey’s emphasis was not so much literary, legal or political as philosophical, drawing on Aristotle to emphasize ideas of virtue and self-fulfilment, and suggesting that bad rhetoric indicates bad ethical action.

Graphic Art and True Crime

Harriet Earle (Birkbeck) could not be present on the day but her paper was read out. Earle’s discussion of comic book art offered tools for formal analysis, with the comics My Friend Dahmer (2012) and Green River Killer (2011) her particular examples. David Platten’s (Leeds) presentation was on the fiction (written and graphic) of French communist author Didier Daeninckx. Platten showed how Daeninckx had returned repeatedly to the incident of state brutality on 17 October 1961, when Algerian protesters were murdered by police.

Ethical Issues in True Crime Writing

In the final two sessions we moved from criticism towards creative practice. Professor Martin Eve chaired a panel of authors who had written about true crime. Mark Blacklock spoke of his novel I’m Jack (2015), which fictionalizes the Wearside hoax that diverted police attention from the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Andrew Hankinson is the author of You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] (2016), a narrative based on extensive study of the Geordie killer’s statements and actions. And Daragh Carville spoke of his authorship of a forthcoming BBC drama about the Shankill Butchers of Belfast. The intensity of the material struck me. Author events and interviews often stay at a genial, genteel level; but here, I gradually realized that all three authors had engaged with deeply disturbing and violent material, sometimes in forensic detail. This in turn raised ethical issues – who has the right to write true crime? What about the feelings of the victims’ families? Can you be sued for libel? – which were aired in discussion.

Another point that connected the three was an emphasis on place. Hankinson’s Geordie background connected him to the Moat case. Blacklock talked of his Sunderland background as his crucial motivation, even of his novel as an ‘exorcism’ for his home town. And Daragh Carville spoke of his love for ‘that weird city’, Belfast: a little like Helen Pleasance in her initial avoidance of the Moors Murders, he had avoided the Troubles all his writing life, but here at last he found himself confronting it directly. This intense concern with place – specifically with towns and cities – in turn made me wonder how large a city would need to be to transcend the effects of a particular crime. Sunderland, for instance, is a city of 175,000. Would London, at nearer 8 million, be too large to be haunted by one individual’s actions? True, Jack the Ripper and the Krays are notorious London criminals, but they are also very closely associated with the specific area of the East End. Perhaps the last crime to feel ‘London-wide’ in its effects was the 7/7 bombings: a murder case belonging to that special category called terrorism.

True Crime and Memoir

©Line Kallmayer

The day closed with a presentation from Line Kallmayer, a visual artist from Denmark who is currently resident in Italy after several artistic residencies in different countries, notably the United States. She described the case of the serial killer Dennis Lynn Rader, who was caught in Wichita, Kansas in 2005. Kallmeyer gave us a narrative of Rader’s life and crimes, but it was intertwined with an account of her own travels in Kansas investigating the case. True crime was mixed with memoir. But it was also a profoundly visual presentation, as Kallmayer’s text was accompanied by a sequence of many photographs that she had taken on her travels. The effect was extraordinary. The academic format of the day was now incorporating a work of art, which accordingly asked for a different response. The quality of Kallmayer’s writing was matched by her immaculate reading and the intriguingly uncertain, Sebaldian status of her images. I already thought that we had witnessed a day of high quality work, but Kallmayer closed it by taking it to a different place, and making us listen and watch differently.

What could the future hold for the study of true crime? Is there more discussion or publication ahead? I hope that this conference has started the conversation in a way that delegates will find helpful as they continue their research on true crime fictions.

This conference was generously supported by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Find out more:

Anglo-German Encounters with Drama and Poetry

The injustices produced by urban “development” and “revitalization”

1 Reply

This post was contributed by Dr Joel McKim, is lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck and co-organizer of the Architecture, Space and Society Research Centre. Here, Dr McKim reports on the recent BIRMAC (Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture) event led by Dr Isabelle Anguelovski, titled: “New directions in gentrification studies: From inequities in neighborhood greening to emerging injustice(s) in new urban food spaces”

Isabelle Anguelovski

It’s perhaps no surprise that an event on gentrification attracted a large and engaged audience at Birkbeck on the evening of Friday, 3 June. The term “gentrification” has its origins, after all, here in London, it being coined by the UCL sociologist Ruth Glass in her introduction to the 1964 book London: Aspects of Change.

There are also few places where the impact of contemporary gentrification has been more pronounced – the forms of property speculation, community displacement and uneven economic development that characterize the urban phenomenon have long been defining elements of London life.

Isabelle Anguelovski’s visit to Birkbeck encouraged both a global consideration of gentrification and an awareness of the potentially overlooked role that environmental justice movements and food spaces play within these larger urban processes.

New Directions in Gentrification Studies

Anguelovksi is a senior researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona where she leads a number of major research initiatives, including the “Cities and Environmental Justice” and “GREENLULUS” projects. Her aptly titled Birkbeck talk, “New Directions in Gentrification Studies,” highlighted the inequalities and injustices produced by processes of urban “development” or “revitalization” in the diverse cities where her research has been conducted, contexts ranging from predominantly black and Hispanic neighbourhood of Jamaica Plain, Boston to marginalized informal settlement communities in Medellín, Columbia.

Food networks and environmental resources lie at the centre of Anguelovski’s case study research and her work uncovers the ways in which green-oriented neighbourhood “improvements” often fuel the very processes of gentrification that threaten the communities living within these areas. Her talk highlighted the manner in which the benign surface appearance of green, environmental or ecological development schemes can serve to mask the negative impact these projects may have on marginalized populations.

Case studies: The processes of gentrification

Isabelle Anguelovski presents a the BIRMAC event

In the case of Jamaica Plain in Boston, the arrival of the organic Wholefoods Food Market has also involved the closing of the Hi-Lo Supermarket, not only an affordable source of Latino food staples, but also a focal point of the community. Meanwhile, improvements in park and leisure spaces have led to rising rents and the influx of wealthier residents.

In Medellín, Columbia, the development of a 75 kilometre green belt around the city will also initiated the process of displacing the informal settlement communities that have long been using this land for farming and sustenance. To characterize these deceptively damaging new forms of gentrification, Anguelovski has coined the term GreenLULUs, an adaptation of an acronym (Locally Unwanted Land Uses) usually reserved for unwelcome urban spaces like landfills, prisons, and power plants.

The troubling political paradox that emerges from Anguelovski’s insightful work is that the negative impact of green or ecological gentrification leaves environmental justice movements in an extremely difficult position – attempts to improve quality of life for poor or marginalized communities may well have the unintended consequence of raising property values, exasperating social inequalities and pushing out the very people these activist movements are attempting to help. If a solution to this paradox exists, Anguelovski suggests it must come in the form of alternative networks and resources that involve the community directly in their organizational and, perhaps most importantly, ownership structure.

Academic responses

The global complexities of green or food-based processes of gentrification were further explored by two excellent responses to Anguelovski’s talk. Dr Daisy Tam, a prominent researcher of food culture in Asia visiting from the Hong Kong Baptist University, brought forward the particular ecological and food dynamics of the city of Hong Kong, where massive areas of farm land surrounding the city lay deliberately fallow in order to facilitate a change in regulations that will allow them to be used for property development.

Aaron Vansintjan, a PhD candidate here at Birkbeck and the recipient of the college’s Technologies of Sustainability doctoral scholarship, commented on the complexities and contradictions in urban politics and food culture he has witnessed during his first few months in London. Vansintjan, whose PhD project will study food networks and gentrification in Montreal and Hanoi, highlighted the difficult political position faced by young people within the city, a population that is often itself precarious and impoverished, while simultaneously serving as the first wave of gentrification in many areas of London.

Q&A

The thought provoking talk and responses were followed by a number of insightful audience questions and comments. The paradoxes and political difficulties raised by Anguelovski’s work on green gentrification certainly resonate for students and researchers confronting a number of issues involving uneven economic development and community displacement within London and beyond. Clear parallels can be seen, for example, with “smart-city” and “creative city” initiatives.

Whether these forms of green, technology, or culture-oriented urban development are designed to improve the social and economic life of the area residents, or to stimulate investment and demographic change, remains one of the key questions for contemporary gentrification studies.

Isabelle Anguelovski’s talk was sponsored by the Department of Film Media and Cultural Studies, the Architecture, Space and Society Research Centre, BIRMAC (Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture), and the Birkbeck Food Group.

Find out more

Avatar Activism: Limits and Possibilities

Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology

Where others might have chastised Jenkin’s work as the ‘intellectualisation of amusement’, Bartolovich provided an immanent critique of his thesis and a salutary reminder as to how easily the utopian qualities of cultural texts can reverse into ideological reconciliation with the present. Avatar’s ecological consciousness is typically considered to reside in the successful opposition of the Na’vi to the technological degradation and exploitation of Nature. This antagonism, however, may not be as stark as it at first seems. Nature on Pandora is, in a sense, always already technology: for each weapon or communicational network the colonisers have, the Na’vi have an analogous one. The message, as Bartolovich points out, is clear; not only do the Na’vi want nothing, but that their harmonious relationship with an intensified nature amounts to a purer, superior form of life. As T.J. Clark has recently argued in a series of lectures presented at Birkbeck, the land of Cockaigne is the fantasy of a world already cooked, where the need for sweat, labour, and toil has been thoroughly abolished. What should alarm us about the inscription of such codes in Avatar is that they perpetuate a delusion that the North can shrink its carbon footprint without any serious alteration to its current levels of consumption. Utopian resistance cartwheels into ideological containment as the necessary sacrifices of any viable climate politics are massaged into something more palatable entirely. Avatar offers, in other words, a reassuring image of an improved nature that is already dormant in the present, repressing the inevitable deprivations and constraints that would accompany a concerted effort to avert the worst permutations of the Anthropocene.

Disavowing Defeat

Another challenge to the endorsement of Avatar develops out of the observation that the military hardware of the sky people is surprisingly outdated. Where one might expect the fully automated arsenal of drone, chemical, and biological weapons, Cameron mobilises tanks, infantry, and helicopters. Coupled with the astounding ability of the Na’vis’ arrows to penetrate armoured vehicles, Avatar recodes the indigenous encounter with empire—a history of decimation, massacre, and genocide—with triumphant resistance. This aesthetic sleight of hand simultaneously disavows the asymmetry of such conflicts and, in doing so, implies that the vanquished were defeated on account of their own failings. The Bil’in video concludes with the Na’vi protesters doubled up, choking on tear gas; a potent reminder of the lethal economy that the armed state apparatus deals in. Bartolovich pointedly adds that the pristine Eden of Pandora is itself a phantasmagoric revision of the slums and toxic landscapes that the precarious communities of late capitalism are likely to inhabit. There is, then, a significant discontinuity between the types of imaginary identification entertained by the symbolic text of Avatar and the impoverished and defeated reality of the global surplus population.

Possibilities?

Bartolovich convincingly demonstrated the inadequacy of Jenkin’s proposed ‘Avatar Activism’, highlighting its inability to overcome the gap between symbolic attitude and material action. Cameron’s movie offers a green politics shorn of sacrifice, the fantasy of a world already made that the consumer can occupy without detriment to their present lifestyle. Confronted with the dilemmas of climate catastrophe, Avatar conjures away the negative, presenting an altogether agreeable impression of a greener, less alienated form of consumption. What of the possibilities? Against the ‘naïve’ interpretation of the plight of the Bil’in protesters as commensurable with the Na’vi, Bartolovich contends that the video détourns Hollywood spectacle. Wrenched out of its universalising context, the activists expose the particularity of Cameron’s movie, render visible the human damage, loss, and defeat the film silences, making perceptible the material costs the film seeks to vanish. The Bil’in video captures the uncooked raw material of a world in which radical social change can only be achieved through the sacrifices of collective action.