Most teenage girls who dream in their bedrooms of becoming famous think they may be pop stars, perhaps actors or models, a few of them like Malala and Greta Thunberg do it through activism. Very few teenage girls dream of becoming a terrorist. However this is what happened to Shamima Begum, a 15 year old …
Continue reading Essay: The Crime and Punishment of Shamima Begum
We do women no favours if we discount their violence, their crimes or the great damage we can do and only see them as victims. More importantly we compound the damage they have done to their victims. We, however also do wrong if we don't take into account the fact that we live in a society where it is all to easy for impressionable, vulnerable women to be manipulated by older, more powerful men. My answer to the question that we should never be asking, if these women are victims or villian, is instead to let go of the pervasive "perfect victim," fallacy and accept that a great deal of the time, people can be both.
In part two of our New Year episodes, we look at a run down of the best crime fiction books TCF has reviewed in 2022. Again, this is in no particulary order.
The human centre Sounes gives us is much needed to provide depth, tone and heart. If we take only one approach, analysis without heart, or heart without analysis, we risk losing something important, the je ne sais quo, of what was happening in Gloucester and the terrible chemistry between Fred and Rose.
It is not just the effects on the soul that Dundass has got right, it's also the othering and dislike of disability from society. At the heart of HellSans is the unspoken question that all those with disability come to ask themselves sooner or later "Is it me who is disabled, or is the real disability societies inability to cope with differnece."
This is not the only time we see this behaviour, as wherever the cold clamy hand of colonialisim has touched, we find "experiments" of this sort, from the forced assimilation of Australian Aboriginals, to cutting First Nations People from their land and placing their children in residential school, we see this pattern repeated across history and continents.
The surface question of this book is "Who is killing these people?" but as a book of layers, readers who choose to dig down further find other questions, many of which will be uncomfortable. Like it's antipodean counterpart, Dust off the Bones, we are seeing an emergence in crime fiction of narrative which deeply engages with crime. Not just the crime that propels a reader to turn the page to find out who dun it. Rather crime that is rooted in great injustices, crimes of nations and states, crimes for which no one person can be jailed, so we can easily say justice is done and move on. Crimes which are so large, that they ripple throughout history, and on the level of time are still present, happening and, ongoing, before our very eyes.
It's a tale as old as time. Boy grows up beside girl. Boy falls for girl. Boy shoots his shot. Girl rejects boy. Boy unleashes a campaign of harassment, including death threats, against the girl. As such the 200 year old tale of Eliza Bolsom's death in 1821, shows how stalking, harassment and violence has always been interlinked.
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.
