Does 'true crime' make you feel dirrrty?
Our variety won't!
A quick reminder that paid subscribers to MY LIFE IN THE PAST can join me on Sunday at 7pm, London time, for a conversation with Top Historian Helen Castor, writer of The H Files, and author of brilliant books like SHE-WOLVES and THE EAGLE AND THE HART. See you on Sunday - and do send me any more questions you want me to ask her!
Hurray, next week a new season of Lady Swindlers is coming to Radio Four, to BBC Sounds, and to wherever you get your podcasts!
Now, sometimes when I tell people I work on a smash hit podcast in the genre that’s often called ‘true crime’, I feel a bit dirty.
After all, listeners might well assume that this involves poking round in the private lives of people who can’t answer back because they’re dead, and who’d probably have preferred that our podcast didn’t exist.
However! Whenever such an intrusive thought comes my way, I remind myself of why we started our sister series-es Lady Killers (about female murderers) and Lady Swindlers (about conwomen), and why this matters.
What were the reasons?
For historians, CRIME PAYS. When a crime happens, evidence happens. People write down things that otherwise wouldn’t be recorded. That’s small things like what clothes they were wearing, and how the room was laid out. But also big things like the family relationships and jobs of the people involved, and what they believed to be true about the world. When you’re talking about people from lower down in society, whose lives wouldn’t ordinarily have been recorded in any other way, this evidence is priceless.
In our show, women are in charge. We were motivated partly by the fact that in so much ‘true crime’, documentaries or podcasts, the female cast members are usually the victims, either dead already, or else running naked and terrified through the woods. It’s so refreshing to find out about the times when women committed the crimes, rather than being the victims. We always take a lot of trouble to include, where we have them, the actual surviving words or testimony of our criminals, so that we hear their voices too.
And the motives of female criminals can sometimes shed light on problems shared by a lot of other women living at the same time. Sometimes our women are simply bad - but some do bad things because of the abuse suffered at the hands of a husband, or because of untreated illness, or because they had starving children and were desperate. Sometimes a woman does something bad because society has pushed her into a tight corner.
The Fox sisters: nineteenth-century American mediums
And then, there’s the fact that we’re all secretly more interested in the history of crime than we maybe we’d own up to. I think it’s just part of modern life in countries like Britain, actually, where life is pretty clean and safe. Look at it this way: if you’d lived in eighteenth-century Britain, your greatest fears would probably have been dying of famine, or disease, or maybe in a war. But by the nineteenth century, it was much more likely you’d be living in a city, with indoor plumbing, and a police force to look after you. And now you’d have the luxury - for luxury it is - of worrying about something as inherently unlikely as getting murdered. An unhealthy interest in crime goes along with neurosis, and paranoia, and anxiety, and all the other things we enjoy about modern life in the city!
In the new season of Lady Swindlers, there’s lots to enjoy. We’ll meet a fake philanthropist, a medium who later admitted she was a trickster, and an armed robber in 1920s New York called the Bobbed Haired Bandit, whose own children didn’t know about her life of crime. We’ll encounter an international art thief, a lady burglar, and a dodgy folk healer known as the ‘Yorkshire Witch’.
As one of our contributors - the brilliant novelist Naomi Alderman - said, just imagine how great it would have been had they all lived in the same city at the same time, got to know each other, and formed a multi-genre Crime Syndicate!
In other exciting news for subscribers, we’re concentrating on all the Helens in our live video chats this month! On Sunday 18th May, 7pm, London time, I’m joined by the planet-sized-brained Helen Lewis, of The Bluestocking, to introduce us to her new book THE GENIUS MYTH, which is about the nature and history of what we think a genius is. You won’t want to miss this!
Fancy something else criminally good? You might like the ‘mystery’ of the Princes in the Tower, or you can watch historian Hallie Rubenhold introducing her new book about the victims of Dr Crippen, Story of a Murder.
Sadly, women are too often defined by the men who dominate them. I'm trying to get the conviction of Florence Maybrick quashed: she was sentenced to death for murdering her husband, on the say-so of his brother. This was commuted to penal servitude for life because there was insufficient evidence that he HAD been murdered. When the need for a Criminal Court of Appeal was being considered, hers was one ot the cases reviewed. It's a clear example of miscarriage of justice, but her conviction still stands. However, most people are not interested until they learn of the allegation that either her husband or brother-in-law was Jack the Ripper.
Dirty? No. Sometimes a little sick and bewildered by depravity; feeling is squared when children or the weak or innocent are the victims
Don’t feel guilty for investigating. Hallie Rubenhold spoke for the victims in _The Five_. I think speaking for the victims is the greatest goal of true crime writing or reporting.