Author: MCJ

Mairi R R Campbell-Jack is a writer with an MA in Creative Writing from Edinburgh Napier. Her first Novel, Self Help For Serial Killers is currently being represented by Kevin at The North Literary Agency.

Two Faced by Happy Face: A True Crime podcast

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Moore, with her highly unique experience is slowly building a podcast which is valuble in the true crime field, it deepens our understanding of the innocents effected by brutal crimes, the ones that all our storytelling forms, news, films, books have neglected. For those who truly seek to understand the most devient crimes, understanding not just what led up to them, but also there half life is equally important, and Moore does so well in giving a voice, to those who had previously been voiceless.

Paradise: A True Crime Podcast

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The fact that behind the fandom, obsessiveness and excitement that true crime can illicit in it's follower there is terrible pain. Not a pain that is showey and ostentacious, but the pain so many people carry with them every day, which becomes a constant companion and eventually is just part of you. It is a reminder of how things happen to people, and the choices that impact us the most are often the ones other people make, sometimes far, far away. Their ripples are sent out throughout the world, but always hit the heart.

Men Who Hate Women – A True Crime Book

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Bates book is part of a genre I have decided to name True Dystopia, so unrelenting and difficult to counter are the subculture she maps. However, at the end of the book we do gain some glimmers of hope as to how these incidious and dangerous ideas can be dealt with, and it will take a lot more energy and time than I suspect many realise. It is not the internet per say that has created these groups, but general culture, the internet just allowed communications between their individual members, who have used that opportunity the way any living organisim does, to grow, to become stronger, to reproduce.

Interview with Daniel Seton, Commissioning Editor at Pushkin Press

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Daniel Seton, Commissioning Editor at Pushkin Press, and good conversationalist. This week instead of a review Mairi interviews Daniel Seaton who is the Commissioning Editor at award winning Pushkin Press, who recently published Dust Off The Bones, which was reviewed on TCF earlier this year. You can listen to the full interview here, which ranges …

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Unravelled: A True Crime Podcast

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Once you've been consuming true crime for a while things can get, well, a bit boring. It is possible to hear the same cases again, and again, all researched from the same Wikipedia article, and as humans we crave novelty. However as a genre which has to do more than any other in terms of ethical naval gazing the search for novelty is something that has to be finely and carefully balanced with what is both legal and moral. It is this difficult high wire act where Unravelled is placing itself.

Chasing the Bogeyman: A Crime Fiction Book

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By trying to inhabit both the best of true crime and crime fiction Chizman displays an admirable amount of creative ambition and playfulness. Of course some of the best work in true crime comes is in the first person, and to truely inhabit that position he has to write as himslef. There is the added bonus that this lends great authenticity to the time and place, but this is perhapse at the expense of the telling the story, and it feels to me that in this novel at least everything should be in greater service to the story.

Dust off the Bones: A crime fiction book

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As someone who does not believe in an afterlife with punishment editions, and also would not strictly adhear to conventional ideas of reincarnation, death to me has always appeared to be a release from suffering. So the obsession with death as a punishment, the ultimate punishment, has always puzzled me, surely if punishment is really what you want then creating a worse life on earth is what is called for - and as we can see throughout history, we are really, really good at doing that.

Thunderbay: A True Crime Podcast

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I think Thunderbay is a testament to Ryan McCann's, persistent yet somehow still gentle focus on this issue, and for pulling back from the true crime trope of focus on individuals, and looking at the bigger picture of how crime intersects with literally everything else. As humans we are messy, and complex and unpredictable, and our desire to want crime wrapped up neatly and quickly is probably a reflection of the fact crime gives us a sense of a lack of control.