It’s not often that I’ll spend more than 99p on a Kindle book, but when I read the description of criminologist Jennifer Fleetwood’s essay collection with Notting Hill Editions, I didn’t hesitate to buy it. The premise sounded so enticing; it was irresistible to me as a reader very interested not just in crime fiction, but in the way that storytelling facilitates, complicates and sometimes transforms the reality of crime. In this book, Fleetwood takes seven personal narratives about crime ‘and examines the kinds of stories told, what they can do, and who for,’ she writes, in the context of a world that bristles with crime narratives of all kind, some of recent innovation.
‘Bookshop shelves heave with autobiographies by prisoners, victims, police and barristers; streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube host hours of interviews with serial killers, death row residents, vigilantes and gang members; podcasts host a cacophony of personal anecdotes, and crimes are even live-streamed on social media. The past few decades have seen a remarkable rise in people speaking about crime publicly, as victims, witnesses, as people accused of, or convicted of breaking the law.’
The first four cases examined are Howard Mark’s autobiography of his drug dealing days, Shamima Begum’s disastrous interview with The Times, Olympic athlete Mo Farah’s documentary as a victim of human trafficking, and Prince Andrew’s carcrash interview with Emily Maitlis. Pretty excellent examples, I thought to myself. In each case, Fleetwood provides a comprehensive walk-through the narrative in question, and she makes a few points about them. But I began to feel uneasy at the subdued level of analysis. The chapter on Howard Marks concludes that the autobiography probably isn’t one hundred percent truthful. Mo Farah’s documentary shows that you need to be a huge success in your new homeland if your account of being trafficked is going to result in outrage and renewed acceptance, rather than swift deportation. The Prince Andrew account suggests that simply stating you are honorable is not evidence enough to persuade anyone. These were conclusions I could have drawn myself.
The Shamima Begum chapter is better. Here, Fleetwood makes a compelling argument that being an isolated, pregnant teen in a refugee camp, with a husband also imprisoned, Begum was not free to tell her story – if she was even able, given the level of trauma involved, to put together a story at all. Instead, the journalist, Anthony Loyd, exploited his opportunity for a scoop. At fifteen years old, Begum had run away from the UK with two girlfriends to Syria in order to join IS. The fact she would not express regret at joining the caliphate or denounce its atrocities was worked up into a media frenzy, with the result that Begum had her UK citizenship revoked and – as she feared – her baby died in the camp. This is a complicated ethical situation, and one more than worthy of revisiting with a cool eye. But I found myself frustrated that Fleetwood confined herself to discussing just this one interview and not the many subsequent ones Begum has made.
The problem was, this wasn’t at all the kind of book I’d been expecting. What crime does to, and with, stories is fascinating, and this didn’t seem to be getting any air time. Take your basic work of crime fiction: the dead body in chapter one represents the end of a story that has been invisible or disguised in order to fly beneath the social radar, and which will now require a master reader to piece together from incomplete fragments. When we look at crime accounts in the media, they offer a complicated Venn diagram in which ethical and moral stories dangerously overlap the monolithic myths of prejudice. A criminal trial is the battleground between two opposing narratives that will need to fight it out, each account subject to strenuous attempts at deconstruction en route to crowning one victorious. In other words, crime is a highly contested site for narrative, with stories jostling each other for precedence, proliferating unreliable truth content, fighting each other to be the defining representation. I understood that Jennifer Fleetwood was confining herself just to personal narrative, but even here we find the rich complication of our self-storied identities (the person we think we are, or ought to be) bumping awkwardly against the stories proposed by our acts and behaviour, post-hoc justification being a very powerful motivator for creativity. And this just didn’t seem to be coming out of her accounts.
The second half of the book improved. In this section, Fleetwood looks at Chanel Miller’s victim impact statement, true crime podcasts, and Myra Hindley’s attempts at an autobiography. For me, the chapter on Hindley was the best in the book, and there was much more to enjoy in her discussions of victim impact statements and the short shrift they often get in the courts. The chapter on podcasting saw Fleetwood finally talking more about stories themselves in this new format, suggesting that the podcast offered a place for failures of justice to be aired, and for ordinary people to get public attention.
And yet. Even here I found myself wishing that she would push her arguments further. For me, podcasts often exploit the gray area of old cold cases, or uncertain verdicts, where it’s not clear if a crime has been committed or if the correct investigative procedure has been followed. They tackle the definition of crime, sometimes our understanding of what crime is, and they challenge (and undermine) the work of the authorities in ways that have the potential to be troubling. As part of the democratization of knowledge, they give power and airspace to armchair Sherlocks, a situation that we ought to consider carefully. Take the Nicola Bulley case, for instance, in which a middle-aged woman disappeared on a morning dog walk. This attracted so much internet attention, with so many amateur sleuths insisting her husband had killed her, that the police ended up releasing private information about Nicola that in retrospect constituted an invasion of the family’s privacy. The information came out in an attempt to prevent an innocent and grieving man from being crucified in public, but at an unforeseen cost. The furore stemmed from the description of Nicola as ‘menopausal’ – itself an intriguing example of a word conferring a whole story upon a woman.
Oh, there was so much that could have been said in this book, about a culture that’s moved in living memory from Magdalene laundries to the prosecution of date rape; and from the kind of confession designed to renounce subjective desires and beliefs while reinforcing hegemonies, to the kind that makes wrongdoing a thing of intoxicating glamour. We live in a world where some people still get stoned in the streets, while Trump runs for the White House a second time. All this is due to the complex relationship between stories and the crimes they represent. I feel sympathy towards Fleetwood for having to confine herself within the short format that Notting Hill Editions offers – you never get to say as much as you want to in a piece of writing. And in fairness to her, she really does pick on some fantastic examples for her discussions. But this was, if you will forgive me for saying so, a criminal waste of the material.