Britain, and the nursing profession have been rocked by the trial of Lucy Letby. For those who do not know this case, Letby was a placid looking neo-natal nurse. Loved by patients parents to the extent one couple considered making her a Godmother to their child (whom she tried to kill) and well liked amoung …
Continue reading Crime in Culture: Why Lucy Letby? And The Patient
We all know that periods of time get names. There are the decades like the roaring 20's or the great depression in America's 1930s. Artistic styles are also name periods of creation baroque, rococo. There may be more scientific namings, covering great swathes of time in geology before humans even graced the planet, or …
There are some people who become much more than who they were as a phsyical living, breathing, person. Instead they appear to grow into something bigger, and symbolise something greater than who they ever were in life. One example of such is King Arthur. Originally a pagan war lord of the Britons, he has …
Continue reading Crime in Culture: Podcasts about the Black Dahlia
There are many different ways to look at truecrime. One can chose to take a feminist perspective, or look at it through the lens of any of the professionals surrounding a case, the police, the psycologists, the lawyers, the press. Sometimes the lens of those who were victims, or their families. It's fair to say …
Continue reading The Letter – A True Crime Podcast About Forgiveness
We all have an identity, it is what makes us who we are as individuals. It can be made up of a combination of physical traits, personal traits, style, attitudes, but it can also be found lodged in the small things we do which often go unnoticed by others. It is not fixed and it …
Continue reading I Am Not Nicholas: A True Crime Podcast About Identity and the Rossi/Knight case.
Genre cross-overs in most entertainment can work incredibly well, such as horror comedy. The reason that this works so well is that is that horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin, they both rely on the unexpected for their big pay off, and so mould well together. Not so much true crime and romance. Sure there are couples in true crime, Bonnie and Clyde, Starkweath and Fugate who Natural Born Killer's Micky and Mallory was based on, and later Iain Brady and Myra Hindley. While there are a few big names, couples where both are active in a crime tend to be the exception rather than the rule, but even more rare are couples where one is a criminal, and the other is a serving police officer.
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.
