True crime and noir narratives (literary and filmic)

In 2008 Tobias Jones published the nonfiction exposé The Dark Heart of Italy. Jones was a fan of the country and went to live there hoping to find a pastoral idyll. Instead, he found a nation that disturbed him profoundly so he chronicled Italy’s paranoia over domestic terrorism and unbridled corruption, its rampant crime and seemingly impotent justice system, its seedy underworld and the hidden, and not so hidden, collusion between politics, business, organized crime, and the church. The book made for uncomfortable reading. Mixed in with the grand history, inimitable sense of style, and the fantastic cuisine was a world of murder, violence, and really bad television. Jones’s Italy was certainly not la dolce vita. - See more at: http://thelifesentence.net/book/dissecting-italys-dark-heart-tobias-jones-101/#sthash.2Iqy1PlI.dpuf

El presente artículo realiza un análisis comparativo entre el poema de Gertrude Stein " Patriarchal Poetry " y el largometraje de Robert Siodmak The Spiral Staircase. La escritora y el director toman como punto de partida la estructura patriarcal desde un acercamiento Modernista. Realizan una profunda crítica yendo a la raíz de dicha estructura a través de dos elementos cognitivos: la imagen y el sonido. La imagen de la mujer se explota de manera lingüística y visual dando lugar a un interesante juego con el receptor. Por otra parte, el sonido aporta la identidad tanto al objeto de la obra como al propio texto. Estos elementos textuales confieren una perspectiva de la mujer de su época enmarcada dentro de un determinado sistema connotativo. Examinaremos dichos conceptos para comprobar si alcanzan los objetivos de los autores y de qué manera los elementos cognitivos se fusionan en el texto.

Athens 1953. Financier Kostas Floràs is accused of the murder of painter Nassos Karnezis, found dead in his apartment in the exclusive area of Kolonaki. Floràs’s son from his first marriage, Dimitris, convinced of his father’s innocence, together with two friends, a journalist and the other a former member of parliament, try to discover who the real murderer is. In the beginning they suspect Mirtò, the daughter of an admiral that Karnezis had handed over to the Germans during the Nazi occupation and who was subsequently killed. However Dimitris and Mirtò, who proves to be innocent, fall in love while the darker side of Karnezis, involved in a smuggling ring is revealed. Juliette, Karnezis’s lover is found murdered. Dimitris and Mirtò likewise face death but are saved as a result of the intervention of Inspector Giorgos Bekas.

About the Author:
Yannis Maris
Provided one goes along with the author, the modern reader will discover several interesting aspects in the works of Yannis Marìs. First, is the inventiveness of his stories which has led one of his most credible imitators, Petros Màrkaris, to point out, “Jannis Marìs belongs to the European avanguardia in terms of detective stories. He was one of the first to understand the potentiality of the crime story to also deal with social aspects […] The only other writer who is a contemporary of Marìs who has written socio-political novels set within a detective story is Leonardo Sciascia”. To read Marìs is, in other words, to read a relatively unknown yet significant author who, had he written in a more prevalent language, (accoring to the claims of Màrkaris) could have become a cult author beyond Greece, and who made a significant contribution to the detective genre in its ‘Mediterranean’ version.

Noel Calefs  Kriminalroman "L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud" (1956) hat sich durch die gleichnamige Verfilmung von Louis Malle  (1958) sowie die im Auftrag des SWR produzierte Hörspieladaption von Walter Adler (1999) zu einem Medienverbund entwickelt.
Dieser Medienverbund bildet den Gegenstand der folgenden Untersuchung. Hierbei stehen für das Noir-Genre typische Elemente, Motive und Figurenzeichnungen im Zentrum der Überlegungen. In diesem Zusammenhang wird der Frage nachgegangen, inwiefern Motive des Noirs wie Entfremdung, Einsamkeit und Angst sowie menschliche Abgründe wie Mord, Eifersucht und Egoismus in den Literaturunterricht integriert werden können.

This article examines Our Father the Serial Killer (Court TV/Everyman, 2002) as one example of a
growing number of 'true crime' documentaries that focus on the
'fallout' of crime, attending to its victims, bystanders or witnesses as the victims not simply of crime but of the traumatic event in the heart of the community.The phrase 'true crime' is usually
used quite broadly to include any true accounts or case studies of
real crime and its aftermath. It often refers to documentaries
using an investigative mode either to 'solve' or to recall the
details of notorious murders or other atrocities. In this context,
however, I am referring to a far smaller band of films and
programmes that explore the aftermath or 'fallout' of the crime
and its status as traumatic event. The latter type would include
films by Errol Morris such as The
Killer Inside Me (2000) and Joan
Dougherty, Crime Scene Cleaner
(2000), Nick Broomfield's Aileen:
the Life and Death of a Serial
Killer (2003) and, most recently,
Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the
Friedmans.

In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe argues against a single explanation for women’s interest in true crime and instead gives a series of reasons women might be attracted to stories of violence and murder. Monroe skillfully weaves together her personal narrative and the stories of four other women, who are, like her, fascinated with true crime. While Monroe’s book challenges the single-narrative approach to women’s interest in true crime, the stories she tells subtlety repeat the reductive idea that women’s fascination with crime comes from an identification with typical feminine archetypes of mother, victim, wife, and monster.

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Pulp by Charles Bukowski
Review by: William Anthony Nericcio
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Focus on Luisa Valenzuela (Autumn, 1995), pp. 791-792
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

In this thesis, I investigate the link between hardboiled crime fiction, Film Noir and the Black Dahlia, Hollywood's most gruesome unsolved murder. Writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain gave rise to the hard-boiled crime genre. In most of these novels, which reached their peak of popularity between 1920 - 1950, a male private eye is hired to solve a problem or a crime. These stories, which contain obvious male fantasies of heroism and use female victimhood as a plotmotif, later transitioned into film noir. In this thesis, I explore how this particular crime genre produces male fantasies that are still predominant in contemporary media culture and allows for the anonymization, the disembodiment and dissection of women through a process of forensic investigation. In 1947, the cut up body of Elizabeth Short - better known as the Black Dahlia - was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. In the second part of this text, I place her notorious murder case into context and point out its correlations with film noir and the apparatus of cinema, which uses 'cuts' and other editing techniques to objectify and disembody female characters. Finally, I'll analyse two major motion pictures based on The Black Dahlia case in order to further show how the murder was used as a vessel for male fantasies and the disembodiment of women. This thesis was written as part of my graduation for Master of Fine Art: Lens-based Media at The Piet Zwart Institute in 2021

Writers do not have to position the female body as a contested space: simultaneously conceived of as a commodity, honoured as a site of self-expression, and visualised as a vehicle for reproduction. This competition of ownership facilitates the commandeering of the female body for a variety of purposes such as the pursuit of financial or political gain. In this way, women who are central to true crime cases – as victims or as perpetrators – can be objectified by writers for the popular press in the rush to tell a story and, in some instances, marginalised, even as their stories are re-imagined. These ideas are explored through two cases that unfolded in Sydney, Australia, in the late-nineteenth century – the gang rape of Mary Jane Hicks and two murders ostensibly committed by Louisa Collins. A brief examination of the contemporary coverage of these cases unpacks how the bodies of both women were conscripted by writers for other purposes – first, to sell papers, and second, to argue for the abolition of the death penalty. This article then looks at the re-telling of these events in Frank C. Johnson’s "Famous Detective Stories", which allowed mid-twentieth century true crime writers to re-ignite debates around publishing and punishment found in the original reportage. Almost 130 years after the first of these crimes took place, this article contends offering a feminist framework to review these, and similar, cases demonstrate circulation figures and discussions around the ethics of punishment are not dependent upon the appropriation of the female body.

In this study, it will be mentioned the relationship between crime and society and true-crime as a literary genre in Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez's short novel (1981) Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), which gave him the Nobel Prize for Literature. To that end, primarily it will be tried to explain what is true crime, and at the same time, it will be given some information about the reasons why society chooses silence against crime. It will be investigated how important women's virginity is to society and why it is committed a crime for this purpose if it is a socially acceptable cause of crime or not. It will be tried to take answers whether the Vicario brothers are the culprits of the murder or the society that remains silent on the crime. Bu çalışmada Kolombiyalı yazar Gabriel García Márquez'in 1981 yılında kaleme aldığı ve kendisine Nobel Edebiyat Ödülü'nü kazandıran kısa romanı Crónica de una muerte anunciada'da (Kırmızı Pazartesi) toplumun suçla olan ilişkisi ve edebi bir tür olan gerçek suç üzerinde durulacaktır. Bu amaçla öncelikli olarak gerçek suçun ne olduğu açıklanmaya çalışılacak ve aynı zamanda eserde toplumun suça karşı sessizliği seçmesinin nedenleri hakkında bilgi verilecektir. Kadın bekâretinin toplum için ne kadar önemli olduğu ve bu uğurda işlenen cinayetin toplumca kabul edilebilir bir suç sebebi olmasının nedenleri araştırılacaktır. İşlenen cinayetin suçlularının Vicario kardeşler mi yoksa suça sessiz kalan toplum mu olduğu soruları yanıtlanmaya çalışılacaktır. Öz Giriş Latin Amerika Edebiyatı'nın en tanındık yazarlarından Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), 1967 yılında kaleme aldığı Yüzyıllık Yalnızlık (Cien años de soledad) adlı romanı sayesinde büyülü gerçekçilik akımının öncülerinden biri haline gelmiştir. Ancak, araştırmamıza konu olan eseri, sihirli ve mantık dışı büyülü gerçekçilik ögeleriyle birlikte gerçek suç hikâyesi unsurları da barındıran ve yazarın gazetecilik hünerlerini gözler önüne seren 1981 tarihli Kırmızı Pazartesi (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) adlı kısa romanıdır. Bu kısa romanı yazar "şimdiye kadar yazdığım en güzel kitap" (García Márquez 6) olarak tanımlamaktadır. Neden en güzel kitap olduğunu ise şöyle açıklamaktadır:

In 1959, on the Kansas high plains, two ex-convict drifters fell upon a defenseless farm family, slaying them ‘in cold blood’. As the subject of a book widely regarded as the first of the modern true crime genre—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood— the murdered and murderers live on in the spectral, haunting the minds of the public as the horrors of random crimes and senseless violence. Paying close attention to the cultural production of both the present and absent, this paper considers how violence haunts commonplace geographies and the imaginations of everyday actors, through the lens of banal crime reporting and celebrated true crime novels. Doing so, it offers unique context and insight into the production of suspect identities and the social insecurities that underpin everyday life. 

http://www.travislinnemann.com/capotes-ghosts.html

El 9 de junio de 1956 un grupo de hombres civiles son masacrados en un basural de la zona de José León Suárez de Buenos Aires. Unos meses después le llega a Rodolfo Walsh la noticia de que hay un fusilado que vive, y de ahí empieza la investigación que llega a ser Operación Masacre, aparentemente la primera novela testimonio de la literatura mundial. En este trabajo se estudia el libro de Walsh, y se deuestra que, aunque se considera novela testimonio, contiene recursos literarios y características típicas del género policial. Esto se analiza usando artículos y libros teóricos escritos sobre el género, y sobre la obra de Walsh en particular. El objetivo principal del trabajo es buscar ejemplos en la novela de Walsh, y de este modo analizar hasta qué medida usa características del género policial y cuáles son.

Petros Markaris is one of the most important writers of detective novels
and representative of the "Mediterranean noir". His series starring the police
investigator Costas Haritos (seven novels and one collection of short stories) draws a
picture of Athens “in black” and analyzes the serious social, political and economic
problems of current Greece.

Ensayo que analiza la novela "La procesión infinita" de Trelles Paz en base, en primera instancia, a un ensayo que publicó el propio autor donde estudia el género de la novela policial alternativa hispanoamericana. También se añaden conceptos como "el eterno retorno de lo mismo" de Nietzsche, el dualismo pulsional de Freud y el hipermodernismo de Lipovetsky.

My original essay “Death by Folklore” was written soon after the 1982 murders of teenagers Annette Cooper and Todd Schultz in an area of Southeastern Ohio plagued by rumors of Satanic cults. I argued that the killings and the local reaction to them could be understood as acts of ostension, possibly criminal acts or, more likely, acts of interpreting ambiguous events in terms of familiar legends about Satanism. Since then, the original defendant has been exonerated, and a convict has confessed to being the actual murderer, which he says was the result of an unmeditated impulse with no folklore relevance.So, was my article irrelevant to the crime? The essay surveys new information uncovered through investigative journalism and criminal justice research, and concludes that ostension, in its current sense, remains the best theoretical tool for understanding the murders’ cultural significance.

Este texto parte de premisas en torno a cómo los relatos y las representaciones en torno al crimen ratifican o cuestionan las epistemologías dominantes, los modelos de construcción del conocimiento de lo real y de la verdad en determinados contextos socio-históricos, y qué imaginarios proyectan respecto a la acción y a la agencia, a la racionalidad de los sistemas policial, legal y penal y a las emociones humanas. A partir de ello, sus argumentos y análisis se estructuran en tres apartados. El primero se ocupa de trazar ciertas genealogías y corrientes de pensamiento que asocian el crimen y la modernidad a través de la concomitancia temporal entre la emergencia de nuevas narrativas policiales, criminales y legales y nuevos regímenes epistémicos. En el segundo se piensa en cómo estas tradiciones narrativas y visuales, que forjaron modelos de representación de la escena del crimen y el teatro judicial, convergen en el documentalismo contemporáneo en un periodo (las décadas últimas décadas del siglo XX y las primeras del siglo XXI) de nuevas incertidumbres respecto a la producción (legal y mediática) de la verdad. Termina, el último, abordando la manera en que algunos creadores españoles han lidiado con el true crime y las narrativas (para)judiciales en el campo documental en obras que problematizan la construcción de los discursos públicos sobre violencia, especialmente en aquellas de sus manifestaciones cuya tipificación legal ha desplazado del ámbito del crimen común al sistémico. 
Epígrafes del texto: 1. El crimen y la modernidad; 1.1. La escena del crimen: epistemes y regímenes visuales y narrativos; 1.2. Desafíos e impugnaciones a la racionalidad científico-policial; 1.3. El teatro judicial: epistemología, creencia y testimonio. 2. Documentalismos contemporáneos: postverité y true crime; 3. Creadores españoles/as en el documental expandido: crimen y género. 
Palabras clave: epistemología, true crime, trial film, documentary trial play, Lo que la verdad esconde, El caso Alcàsser, Una novela criminal, Jauría.

“il Sì della Notte”
Genere letterario: prosa con frammenti e citazioni poetiche, viaggio nell'immaginario, romanzo fantastico di introspezione. È anche un “romanzo musicale” che contiene collegamenti ipertestuali a brani musicali che ne costituiscono la vera e propria “colonna sonora”.
Sinossi.
Una bruciante delusione amorosa. Una passione travolgente finita o mai ricambiata. Da questa sofferenza profonda può nascere un sogno? Se l'amante tradito ha forza psichica e fisica sufficiente a creare un simulacro del suo amore capace di stargli vicino giorno e notte, allora il lettore entrerà con lui in un labirinto senza uscita che potrà condurre entrambi alla pazzia, al viaggio nel regno delle ombre, al faccia a faccia con i mostri più oscuri e feroci della loro mente... della nostra mente.
Il lettore è il burattinaio di questo mondo folle dei non-nati oppure è il burattino? È il ragno, la tela o la farfalla prigioniera e morente? Questo romanzo porta nei recessi più oscuri e inaccessibili della psiche umana. Alcuni ne vengono fuori sani, o quasi, altri ancora si stanno aggirando, ciechi, al buio, col fiato dei mostri dell’inconscio sulla pelle. Romanzo fantastico di introspezione con sfumature noir, tratta il tema del “sogno” come proiezione diurna del desiderio.
Il protagonista ha il dono di vedere e toccare i sogni, quelli che evochiamo al nostro fianco per sopperire all'assenza di una persona cara, o per configurare l'aspettativa di una riuscita professionale o affettiva, quelli che materializzano per il sognatore i desideri, le speranze, le fantasie di successo, specchio onirico della vita reale.
Nik Medwall è un investigatore privato operativo a Los Angeles fra gli anni '30 e gli anni '80 del secolo scorso. Per seguire un'indagine cui tiene molto dovrà affrontare la discesa nel regno delle ombre, che altro non è che il viaggio nelle oscure e sconosciute profondità di sé stessi.
Grazie alla collaborazione del suo amico-fratello David (un sogno che solo lui è in grado di vedere), della bibliotecaria Sybil, laureata in onirologia all'Indiana University, e dello sciamano messicano Pablo, l'indagine avrà successo, ma il viaggio lo porterà a confrontarsi con i più oscuri mostri del suo io.
Ho scritto questo testo in sei mesi di lavoro “matto e disperatissimo”, in cui sono arrivato a consultare (e possedere parte in cartaceo, parte in pdf), nel contesto di circa 4.000 titoli di bibliografia, tre manoscritti in latino, cinque in volgare e quattro testi a stampa del Somniale Danielis, una copia dei cinque libri di Artemidoro di Daldi in una edizione del 1547, svariate edizioni del Somnium Scipionis con il commento di Macrobio, oltre a 426 testi in inglese, più 15 specifici sulla cultura del sogno fra i nativi americani, 112 in latino, 36 in spagnolo e 263 in italiano.
Il mio lettore-tipo: i sognatori di ogni sesso ed età in cerca di un racconto nuovo, ben narrato, ricco di affettuosi legami con temi allo stesso tempo antichi e attualissimi (rapporto sogno-realtà, capacità di lottare per far nascere i propri sogni, capacità di distinguere fra sogni realizzabili e vane
illusioni, viaggio alla ricerca di sé e dell'altro etc.), nonché tutti coloro che siano interessati ai temi dello sciamanesimo, inteso non come porta per il mondo dell'occulto, ma come radice culturale ancestrale comune a tutte le civiltà umane.
Credo, infine, che questo lavoro possa incontrare l'interesse di molti lettori amanti della musica. Ho collegato al testo una ampia ricerca, tratta dal repertorio americano, di circa quaranta brani che coprono un arco di tempo di una settantina di anni, fra gli inizi del secolo e gli anni '80 del '900. Questa scelta musicale è stata condotta sempre sul tema del sogno, stavolta in musica. I brani musicali sono accessibili e possono accompagnare la lettura attraverso semplici QRcode.

Luis Manuel Salcido Arispuro, cuyo alias da nombre a la novela El Sinaloa, es un policía con una doble personalidad: agente al servicio del Estado mexicano, que a su vez sirve para los intereses de la mafia del cártel del narcotráfico sinaloense de finales de los años noventa. De la mano de la narración de Guillermo Rubio, el lector se introducirá en el mundo de la mafia, con su impunidad y desparpajo, donde en medio de fiestas, excesos y violencia, descubriremos un personaje carismático, con un hambre insaciable y de una voracidad exacerbada. Ante ello, es válido preguntarnos si es una condición normal de un personaje de su tipo, o si se trata de una maldición de tintes insospechados, así como ancestrales.

Disponible en:
https://revistas-filologicas.unam.mx/acta-poetica/index.php/ap/article/view/906

https://revistas-filologicas.unam.mx/acta-poetica/index.php/ap/article/view/906/1286

This article explores evaluations of impoliteness and over-politeness in crime novel dialogues, in reference to the Pragmatics of Politeness and the Discursive Model (Watts, 2003, 2005, 2010; Locher and Watts, 2005). Metapragmatic comments, in which dialogue participants evaluate the ongoing communicative behaviour, offer important insights into the values and social norms that make up interaction. Literary dialogues, as opposed to naturally occurring conversations, have the advantage of offering numerous metapragmatic comments. This study examines police investigator dialogues that contain metapragmatic comments of impoliteness and over-politeness, concentrating on two maverick figures, Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-based John Rebus and Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Salvo Montalbano, both of whose fractiousness in regards to procedural rules extends to social norms as well. The first part of the analysis looks at impoliteness, confirming the image of the maverick for whom impoliteness is fairly stereotypical . The determining factor is police rank: I find frequent institutional, that is, legitimized, and unchallenged impoliteness by the higher in rank. Secondly, I look at instances of over-politeness. The inspector, who readily uses insincere politeness in order to manipulate a suspect or a witness, is sceptical when evaluating politeness in others. By not commenting on impoliteness and through extensive negative evaluations of politeness, the narrator creates a protagonist who has become disenchanted with politeness and uses impoliteness as if it were normal, appropriate behaviour. Keywords: politeness; impoliteness; over-politeness; rudeness; metapragmatic comment; dialogue; insincerity; appropriateness; inappropriateness

The article examines bandit myths from a socio-historical perspective, as part of the socio-cultural reality of present-day Egypt. It engages in the semiotics of banditry encouraged by Stephanie Cronin by taking a first step towards a social semiotics analysis of Rayyā and Sakīna, the two Egyptian female criminals par excellence, arrested in 1920 and executed in 1921. I will argue that Rayyā and Sakīna's criminal myth is currently being resignified in terms that can be conceived of as social banditry. Ethnography, press, and broadcast sources help to highlight two different recent shifts towards bandit myths, linked respectively to national and local circulation. "Bandits-always fierce.

Semblant ne jamais quitter la une des médias depuis quelques années, le phénomène des tueries de masse paraît se nourrir à même cette médiatisation pour croître, jour après jour, et devenir de plus en plus viral1. Lorsque la Covid-19 s'est installée dans nos vies en mars 2020, mettant à l'arrêt de larges pans de notre société et même de notre sociabilité, on aurait pu croire qu'il aurait suivi et que lui aussi aurait été placé en quarantaine forcée! Malheureusement, c'est un peu plus complexe que cela. Certes, certaines formes ont été atténuées et, parmi celles-ci, les fusillades en milieu scolaire qui représentent traditionnellement le quart des tueries de masse (pour 50% dans les commerces). Lorsque les écoles et campus ferment et sont désertés, cette violence n'a plus d'espace d'expression. En outre, certains indicateurs laissent entrevoir une baisse du nombre global de tueries qui pourrait trouver des explications finalement logiques. Le repli sur soi, la gestion égocentrée du quotidien en pandémie a affecté sans discrimination.