What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime

Over the past few decades, there has been a remarkable rise in the number of people who speak publicly about their experience of crime. These personal accounts used to be confined to the police station and the courtroom, but today bookshops heave with autobiographies by prisoners, criminals, police and barristers while streaming platforms host hours of interviews with serial killers, death-row residents, vigilantes and gang members. In this fascinating new book, criminologist Jennifer Fleetwood examines seven infamous crime stories to make sense of this modern confessional impulse, including Howard Marks's outlandish autobiography Mr Nice, Shamima Begum's controversial Times interview, Prince Andrew's disastrous Newsnight appearance and Myra Hindley's unpublished prison letters.

Jennifer Fleetwood is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Goldsmiths, London. Her previous research monograph Drug Mules: Women in the International Cocaine Trade (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) won the British Society of Criminology best book award in 2015. She has written for Vice, the Conversation and the Independent.