In a 1996 essay for Granta, the late Gordon Burn set down his experience covering the trial of Rose West. “There was nothing much to see and it was always much the same,” he wrote. “But the heavy media presence was in itself justification for having the story high in the running order.” Burn was a writer of unusually versatile brilliance, who returned repeatedly to the most violent, sordid corners of British life. But even in the mid-1990s, he was to diagnose a growing weariness at the sheer number of crime stories on offer. “There are now so many … that only the most sensational or brutal or those which contain unusual elements stand any chance at all of making it on to the news agenda.”
Having just published my own book on a historical crime, I know all too well that Burn’s diagnosis can be applied today with minimal alteration. True crime is in the midst of an exceptionally well-documented boom. Real-life tales of murder, rape, robbery and fraud are deeply ingrained in the Anglo-American cultural landscape, arguably long past the point of oversaturation. We are more than familiar with the arguments as to why this may be a bad, or at least unedifying, thing. It sometimes feels that for every Serial or Dahmer, there is an accompanying viral essay restating the baked-in exploitation and muddied ethics implicit in packaging grisly crimes of the recent past as entertainment.
