Crime Stories

There is a seemingly natural relationship between criminality and narrative. Stories about daring thefts and violent deaths—and about those who have sought to thwart, solve and punish them—have featured prominently over the last few centuries in woodcuts, pamphlets, broadsheets, newspaper articles, novels, theatrical productions, radio dramas, films, television shows and video games. In parallel, specialist and ‘expert’ narratives on crime—developed and disseminated by academics, state agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)—have multiplied, offering claims not only to explain the causes, establish the boundaries and define the meanings of crime but also to provide ways of solving (or reducing) it. If ‘narratives’ derive from universal human capabilities to transmit socially useful knowledge,¹ the interest in wrongdoing is unsurprising: social beings have an interest in knowing about the transgression of cultural norms and potential threats to life, limb and property. However, narratives about deviance, crime and violence reflect historically distinct constellations of social relationships, cultural circumstances and institutional priorities; they are often ‘about’ more than crime itself. The articles in this special issue consider European and transatlantic contexts of the inter-war relationship between media and crime. From the late nineteenth century, a mass press developed in Europe and the USA committed to what Dan Vyleta, focusing on Vienna, has called the ‘radically modern phenomenon’ of press-driven crime reporting.² Murder generated disproportionate attention, but other crimes—especially if related to a threatening (but potentially glamorous) underworld³—were also standard press fare. Crime reporting was also influenced by the expansion of sociological and criminological discourses about lawbreaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴

The place of the inter-war period in the historiography of crime and media varies according to national context, but recent years have seen a notable increase in interest driven in part by the growth of European press history.⁵ For instance, while the media fascination with ‘decadence’ and the underworld in Weimar Germany has attracted enduring historical interest,⁶ several recent works have given a particular emphasis to the relationship crime news and broader concerns.⁷ With regard to France (with some exceptions⁸), the focus has been more on explicitly political forms of crime and violence.⁹ In Britain, the inter-war period is now emerging as a focus of inquiry with regard to media and crime.¹⁰ And while there has long been a fascination with the violence of Prohibition-era America, recent work has brought a distinctive attention to press narratives.¹¹ Across national boundaries, newer work shares emphases on crime-related ‘discourses’, the role of gender in shaping them and the impact of the newspaper press on broader perceptions of crime, justice and national well-being.

In much of Europe in the inter-war period, rates of serious interpersonal violence and homicide remained at or near historical lows; nonetheless, those years saw a press obsession with crime, often American crime, since the same decades saw a dramatic growth in criminal violence in that nation.¹² The period was also awash in fictional tales of crime—in print, on the radio or at theatres and cinemas—that often channelled broader cultural anxieties.¹³ The inter-war case studies that follow are connected by common interests in the themes of crime narratives, the agents who created and disseminated them, the techniques of their propagation and the geographies (real and imagined) that they depicted.

One of the most important general themes was the social and cultural aftermath of the Great War. Todd Herzog has recently emphasised how Weimar Germany's post-war ‘culture of crisis’ was vividly expressed in the proliferation of crime narratives questioning the motives of criminals and the effectiveness of criminal justice institutions.¹⁴ Daniel Siemens has shown how newspapers in Paris and in Chicago took a more supportive (if still critical) view of their local law-and-order machinery than did the highly antagonistic Berlin press.¹⁵ Much of the British press tended towards a positive, even celebratory, view of the British police and justice systems, with particular injustices or scandals being depicted as minor deviations from a ‘British’ norm.¹⁶ However, even if Britain avoided the political violence of Germany, Spain, Italy or France, it saw fears of ‘new’ criminals such as ‘gangsters’, ‘motor bandits’, ‘razor gangs’ and ‘dope fiends’ or of war veterans with few scruples about using physical violence.¹⁷ The disruptive effect of the war on European gender norms and the various post-war efforts to re-establish more ‘traditional’ patterns made female criminality and sex crimes magnets for press attention.¹⁸

Narratives are developed and disseminated by specific agents embedded in particular groups and institutions. Key creators of crime narratives included law enforcers and criminal justice administrators (police officers and judges), academic and state officials (scholars, civil servants and politicians), media professionals (journalists, editors, playwrights and film-makers) and non-specialist members of the public. Some agents defy easy categorisation, such as voluntary organisations (later, ‘NGOs’), that urged—and lobbied for—government action in response to perceived crime problems. They were also ‘criminals’ themselves, and there was growing interest in the forms of crime-related autobiography that were common in the inter-war press.¹⁹ These categories of agents were interconnected. Police officers and journalists, to point to only one key example, maintained constructive—if often contentious—relationships.²⁰

In inter-war crime reporting, the techniques pioneered in the pre-war period—verbatim transcripts of testimony, ‘pen portraits’ of courtroom dramas, sensationalised ‘human interest’ articles and photography—became even more prevalent. ‘Scientific’ and psychological criminological discourses also influenced popular press narratives. The lives of crime-fighters also took on a new salience, as the popularity of detective memoirs shows.²¹ Press reports contributed to wider images, legends and cultural myths, amplified by new media such as wireless and cinema. While ‘true crime’ radio did not develop in Europe to the extent it did in the USA, it was certainly true that Hollywood crime films were screened in European cinemas.

Finally, media images of crime both reflected and constructed forms of crime geographies, whether real or imagined. Much recent work has highlighted how discourses of criminality were closely associated with specifically urban anxieties.²² Siemens's comparative study of Berlin, Paris and Chicago reveals similar sets of anxieties around urban modernity, even if specific political situations, social relationships and cultural imperatives resulted in different ‘local moral orders’.²³ Andy Davies's examination of Glasgow's reputation as the ‘Scottish Chicago’ shows that imagined identification with criminals from a very different geographical context could have an impact on the local self-understanding of gang members.²⁴ Imaginations of the ‘underworld’ and of ‘international’ crime had both intensely local and broadly transnational aspects; inter-war Malta—while a ‘marginal’ location from some European perspectives—was perceived to be a centre of international crime and the subject of lurid newspaper stories about the ‘white slave trade’.²⁵

Each of the following articles considers specific crime stories before the broader inter-war background described above. Heather Shore (‘“Rogues of the Racecourse”: Racing Men and the Press in Inter-war Britain’) explores press narratives about organised crime on the basis of violent racecourse gangs. Newspaper reporting emphasised the gangs’ motorised mobility, willingness to use violence and ‘foreign’ membership. As Shore shows, there were fears that the gangs were more geographically mobile and better organised than the police, contributing to innovations in police techniques (such as the ‘Flying Squad’) that themselves became part of a public crime discourse also influenced by interest in American-style gangsterism.

Per Jørgen Ystehede (‘Two Suspicious Persons: Norwegian Narratives and Images of a Police Murder Case, 1926–1950’) examines the murder of two police officers in western Norway in 1926. The case remained relevant beyond the late 1920s; a book published on it in 1933 is considered to be one of the first ‘true crime’ novels in Norway. A film version was produced in 1949 but was subsequently banned for half a century. Not only was the murder itself a cause célèbre that captured the interest of the inter-war Norwegian press, but the media images of the killers also reflected fears of foreignness, anxieties related to Norway's recently achieved independence and the influence of ‘expert’ criminological knowledge.

John Carter Wood (‘The Constables and the “Garage Girl”: The Police, the Press, and the Case of Helene Adele’) considers a London policing scandal. Concerns about the possible abuse of police powers had led to the calling of a Royal Commission on police powers in 1928, but shortly before it began, a new scandal rocked London's Metropolitan Police: two Metropolitan Police constables were convicted of having brought false charges against a young woman named Helene Adele in order to discredit her claim that one of the officers had attempted to sexually assault her. Adele sold the rights to her life story to the press, and, as Wood shows, her narrative not only put a personal, sympathetic face on critiques of police powers but also highlighted the vulnerabilities of young poor women in London.

Paul Knepper analyses narratives of crime fighting in an international context (‘International Criminals: The League of Nations, the Traffic in Women, and the Press’). The League of Nations directed significant attention to crime within the framework of its Social Section, particularly the traffic in women. The League commissioned an intercontinental investigation to establish the facts of the traffic, and the final report, released in 1927, received significant attention in the press around the world. The report ushered in the modern conceptual language of ‘traffic in women’ over the nineteenth-century language of the ‘white slave trade’. However, the New York World ran a series critical of the investigation, and this undermined a key aspect of the League's strategy, that of using the threat of negative publicity to shame states into compliance with international regulations.

Notes

1. Mellmann, “Storytelling.”

2. Vyleta, Crime, Jews and News, 2.

3. Shore, “Undiscovered Country.”

4. Fritzsche, “Talk of the Town”; Rafter and Ystehede, “Here Be Dragons”; and Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal.

5. Rowbotham et al., Crime News; Newman and Houlbrook, “Press and Popular Culture.”

6. Claßen, Darstellung von Kriminalität; Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 591–610.

7. Siebenpfeiffer, Böse Lust; Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen and “Explaining Crime”; Elder, Murder Scenes; and Herzog, Crime Stories.

8. E.g., Maza, Violette Nozière.

9. Sonn, Sex, Violence; Brunelle, Murder in the Metro. For pre-war perspectives, see, for Germany, Müller Auf der Suche and, for France, Kalifa, “Crime Scenes.”

10. Bland, Modern Women on Trial; Seal, “Single Women”; Houlbrook, “Fashioning an Ex-crook Self” and “Commodifying the Self Within”; Davies, “The Scottish Chicago”; Brown, “Amazing Mutiny” and “Criminal Mobility”; Shore, “Criminality and Englishness” and “Constable Dances with Instructress”; and Wood, “The Third Degree” and The Most Remarkable Woman.

11. Ramey, “Bloody Blonde”; Miller, “Bobbed Haired Bandit”; Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy.

12. Eisner, “Violent Crime”; Roth, American Homicide.

13. Wood, “The Third Degree”; Breu, Hard Boiled Masculinities; Kawana, Murder Most Modern; Kreutzahler, Bild des Verbrechers; Ashkenazi, “Prisoners’ Fantasies.”

14. Herzog, Crime Stories.

15. Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen.

16. Emsley, “An Indulgent Tradition”; Wood, “The Third Degree,” 481.

17. Emsley, Hard Men, 19–22; Brown, “Criminal Mobility”; Emsley, “Violent Crime.”

18. Shapiro, Breaking the Codes; Brückweh, Mordlust; Ramey, “Bloody Blonde”; Miller, “Bobbed Haired Bandits”; Wood, The Most Remarkable Woman; and Bland, Modern Women on Trial.

19. Houlbrook, “Commodifying the Self Within.”

20. Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen; Müller, “Covering Crime, Restoring Order”; Johansen, “Keeping up Appearances”; and Shpayer-Makov, Ascent of the Detective.

21. Shpayer-Makov, Ascent of the Detective, 272–97; Lawrence, “Scoundrels.”

22. Elder, Murder Scenes; Müller, Auf der Suche.

23. Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen.

24. Davies, “The Scottish Chicago.”

25. Knepper, “White Slave Trade”; Knepper and Azzopardi, “International Crime.”