Writing True Crime , livre ebook

Straightforward Publishing - Stephen Wade

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82 pages

English

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Description

Introduces the aspiring crime writer to the skills needed to write true crime and crime history. The chapters cover everything from finding a subject, working on a creative treatment and researching in libraries and archives. The reader is given a clear understanding of the craft of writing in this popular and expanding area, with material included from social history, law and criminology.

Informations

Publié par	Straightforward Publishing
Date de parution	23 août 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847169082
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Emerald Guides
Stephen Wade 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.
ISBN: 978-1-84716-836-8 ISBN ePUB: 978-1-84716-908-2 ISBN Kindle: 978-1-84716-907-5
Printed by 4edge www.4edge.co.uk
Cover design by Straightforward Graphics
Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained within this book is correct at the time of going to press, the author and publisher can take no responsibility for the errors or omissions contained within.
Contents
Preface
Ch. 1 The True Crime Genre
One-Minute Summary
Historical Outline
Choices before writing
Some Examples
Tutorial
Ch. 2 Planning and Research
One-Minute Summary
Questions to Start With
Sources: primary
Sources: secondary
Tutorial
Ch. 3 The Elements of the Craft I
One-Minute Summary
Legal Knowledge
Criminal Histories
Background
Tutorial
Ch. 4 The Elements of the Craft II
One-Minute Summary
Micro and Macro Focus
A Feeling for Atmosphere
Sequencing Events
Tutorial
Ch. 5 The Classic Narrative
One-Minute Summary
The Crime
The Pursuit
The Arrest and Trial
Closure
Tutorial
Ch. 6 Writing a Case Book
One-Minute Summary
Choices and balance
Drama and Fact
Some Examples
Tutorial
Ch. 7 Writing for Magazines
One-Minute Summary
The Markets
Matters of Style
A Note on Journalism and Documentary
Tutorial
Ch. 8 Researching for a Book
One-Minute Summary
The synopsis
Crime History and True Crime
Tutorial
Ch. 9 Biographical perspectives
One-Minute Summary
Biographical Examples
Local and National
Revisiting the Past
Interviews and profiles
Tutorial
Ch. 10 Professional Knowledge
One-Minute Summary
Issues and Debates
The Trade Vocabulary
Case Studies
Tutorial
Reference Section
The Strange Pleasures of the Criminous
I love a good murder. How many times have I heard that statement? In my youth, the somewhat questionable truth of the assertion was there to see every weekend, when my father opened his News of the World and turned with relish to savour a headline along the lines of Torso found in Wood or He stabbed his beloved through the Heart. Yes, there was that love - but what a strange word to use, linked to the heinous crime of taking a human life. The truth is, of course, that a murder story - even one about an actual case - becomes somehow transmuted from reality into a fascinating no-man s-land between fiction and fact when we see it in print.
George Orwell understood this paradox. In his seminal essay on this subject, Decline of the English Murder , he suggested that the word pleasure needed to be applied to this popular cultural phenomenon, and he even suggests a canon of template cases: Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson.
This reminds us that back in the early nineteenth century, Thomas de Quincey had enjoyed the wonderfully subtle humour of how murder stories were enjoyed, in his mock lecture on the fine art of murder. Orwell almost takes that further by suggesting the canon of murders with ongoing reputations, as if we are in the trade of awarding status or league table positions to these killers.
There is no doubt that this fine art of murder steals the news headlines too. In his autobiographical work, Walden , Henry David Thoreau wrote, After a night s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. Pray tell me what has happened to any man anywhere on the globe - and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito river...
The activity of enjoying such tales needed a suitable adjective, and it was provided by a man who has been a presiding genius in my writing career for many years now. He is hardly a household name, but perhaps he should be, if a murder is such a nationally or even universally acknowledged media concern. The man I refer to is William Roughead (pronounced rock-heed ).
William Roughead was born in Edinburgh in 1870. His father was a drapier in Princes Street. But when his father, John Carfrae Roughead drowned at sea off the Scilly Isles in 1887, the business was sold. William began his studies at Edinburgh University, taking up law, but not completing the degree programme. He had been articled to a law firm in George Street, and William, having a comfortable income from the sale of the business, had no pressing need to follow the normal route into a professional career. He had acquired an interest in the dramatic criminal trial and this became his primary concern, forming the basis of his future success in writing.
Despite the aborted course of his legal studies, Roughead entered the law by another route: he became a writer to the signet. The word writer here is a specifically Scottish term for lawyer and the post was linked to the status of the private seal of Scottish kings, and so Roughead was basically a solicitor, his name appearing in the official Scottish Law List. From his time as a student through to the year 1949, three years before his death, he was there in the Edinburgh High Court whenever there was a trial for murder.
He married Janey More in 1900 and they had a daughter who had Down s Syndrome, Winifred, who died in 1929, and also three sons. William was destined to lose another child- his son Frank- who died in a train accident in 1947. As for the future crime writer, he began his writing life as a poet and editor, but his entrance into the criminous world as an author was from the springboard provided by the company that has been forever linked with high quality and scholarly publishing of crime records: Hodge. To the aficionado of crime and courtroom analysis, the Notable Trials series is a template of excellence. Hodge was a friend of Roughead s and together they started Notable Scottish Trials with a volume on Dr Edward Pritchard, a Glasgow doctor who poisoned his wife and his mother-in-law. Roughead s role was to be editor of the volume, a book that would have to cover the process of the trial in detail. It set the standard for what was to follow, such was Roughead s expertise and depth of knowledge of the trajectory of a high-profile trial. He also had the research skills to back up the local knowledge.
In my library of old volumes on crime and law, I have a special collection of books by this man- a figure widely regarded as the one who first tried to make true crime writing a branch of literature, rather than a species of literature limited to the narratives of the Penny Dreadful genre in popular Victorian publishing. Roughead wrote an essay which sums up this dubious and puzzling pleasure, called The Enjoyment of Murder , and in this he makes it clear that he is not a criminologist: All I claim to do is to tell a tale of crime well and truly; to supply the psychologically minded with reliable grist for their recondite mills; and to give, if possible, the gentle reader as much pleasure in the perusal as I found in the writing. That would be my apologia also for my writings in the criminous vein.
There we have the word then: criminous . The adjective aspires to define, though loosely, that intrigue we have with the narrative of horrendous or at least puzzling criminal transgression. This includes the professional Ripperologists as well as those who buy and enjoy the red and black crime magazines every month, but it also includes the higher end of the spectrum: the works in which true crime is a genre bordering on multi-layered biography, social history and even amateur psychology. In recent years, this end of the spectrum in the genre is perhaps exemplified by Kate Summerscale s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008). I attempted this kind of project in The Girl who Lived on Air in 2014, in which I revisited the arguably most famous crime story in Victorian Wales, involving Sarah Jacob, the so-called Welsh fasting Girl. I discovered that for the amateur sleuth, it demanded intense research into both the legal definition of manslaughter in 1869 and the workings of the Welsh jury.
I discovered the real demands of a truly criminous subject when I wrote that book, and so in Murder in Mind, I was mindful of the fact that we true crime writers and crime historians have to tread fearlessly into the arcane world of the criminal law and the labyrinth of the criminal justice system.
I wanted to write a book which fused together the memoir, a crime casebook and reflections on the criminous in our reading pleasure. It is a work concerned with Yorkshire, as much of my crime writing has been about my home county; it takes in the theme of growing up with horrible murder tales as an accompaniment to other strands in an oral culture, for my growing-up around Leeds was very much a bookless world, but nevertheless it was a world teeming with stories.
Up to the age of seven I was a dialect speaker; my broad West Riding intonation and dialectal vocabulary then met Standard English at school in a different part of Leeds, and I was a slow reader. There were no books in my home. We did have magazines and comics, and of course the newspapers, so interestingly, most tales were spoken. My brother recently dug out an old cassette tape of a Christmas gathering of our family, about 1960 I think it would be. At that gathering we sang and we told jokes; we recounted adventures and experiences and we listened to each other like the traditional fireside clannish sharing of stories one reads about in the footnotes of social history.
What dominated the stories told by the