For those who enjoy delving into the aberrant psychologies behind some of the worst true crime, you will soon come to notice that it reflects the same biases and inadequacies as the rest of society. It's serious nature does not lead it to be immune from the fact that humans are inherently flawed no matter …
Continue reading Father Wants Us Dead: A True Crime Podcast about John List
The nicest man in crime fiction This week Mairi interviews Jonathan Whitelaw, author of The Bingo Hall Detectives. They talk cosy crime, podcasts, journalism and writing tips. You can buy a copy of The Bingo Hall Detectives from the TCF shop where profits support independent bookshops and this podcast and site.
To support independent bookshops and the podcast you can buy The Bingo Hall Detectives at the TCF shop. Cosy crime is a genre that is often spoken about with a sneer, exactly the same kind of snobbish tone that is used with terms like "chic lit," or "domestic drama." It presupposes that there is a …
Continue reading Bingo Hall Detectives: A Crime Fiction Book set in Penrith
In Britain however the crimes that we are often most gripped by tends to be those that happen to ordinary people, who live quiet lives. Perhapse that is to do with the fact that despite seeing ourselves as a modern state, in the UK we still live with the hangovers of the feudal system, with such regressive concepts as the "deserving poor," and moralisitic phrases like "hard working people," still finidng currancy in our politics, which has been overrun recently with those for whom even their privilage comes gold plated. We've never admired our rich and powerful as much as tolerate them, and get on with our own lives.
For LGBTIQ+ communties crime is too much of a reality. Across the globe queer people are more likely to be victims of crime, historically they have been more likely to be criminalised, and in many places the fear of imprisonment for being nothing more than who you really are is far, far too present. So in this post we are going to pinpoint some of the best podcasts and books TCF has reviewed over the last seventeen months which whether fiction or non-fiction have an LGBTIQ+ element.
In life things are seldom as permanent as we think they will be when we are children. The art of accepting and living with change is one of the secrets of life, and one that all of us will struggle with at some point, whether it is the end of a relationship, a job, or …
Motherhood is an idea that permeates If You Tell by Greg Olsen by it's absence. Olsen recounts the life of Shelly Knotek, who killed three, and abused countless others, including her own children. Knotek could easily be cast in the role of femme fatal, her good looks attracting many unsuspecting men into her orbit, but that would be too surface a reading of what is a clearly aberant pshycology. Instead Olsen makes his readers the proverbial frog in water slowly begining to boil, as he trace the development of Knotek from a troubled and difficult child and teen into a fully fledged murderer.
With the hindsight that living in a different era gives us we can easily see that for some of these women, it was the strict, inflexible mores of Victorian society that led them to their fates, and had they lived in different times, may have had very different outcomes.
It is never long before crime fiction follows true crime, and one has to wonder if the podcaster could be poised to replace the private eye, who's peak in crime fiction does feel somewhat in the past. The prospect of the podcaster as the new crime fiction hero - or more likely heroine, given true crimes demographics - is intriguing, as they bring in not just a new job, but drag with them an audience.
It will not be a surprise to many that the News of The World would be tangled up in this most shady episode as they became a by-word for the absolute worst of tabloid journalism, souring countless lives, with it's underhand tactics.
