True Crime in the UK: A Genre Quickly Surpassing All Others
Part One: Blood and Guts of the Soul
There’s an unwritten law in the media most of us stand behind. Except for extremely high-profile cases—i. e., Maddie McCann—we here in the states don’t pay much attention to crime stories from the UK, same as they don’t pay much attention to our crime stories.
A handshake deal. You know.
One thing I’ve noticed in recent years, however, is that true crime in general has a much larger audience in the UK than it does here. Not just the books. But crime news of any kind. For this reason, I scan the UK wires every week to see what’s being said, etc.
This is why I about spit out my coffee when I read the following headline last week: “The pornography of misery memoirs.”
The Daily Mail article was written by Danuta Kean. According to her Website, Kean is “an award winning freelance arts journalist and publishing commentator, whose work appears in national newspapers including the Times and Financial Times. She presents Textual Analysis on www.Channel4Radio.com, which features in-depth interviews with authors. She also writes a column for the Author and is a regular contributor to a number of other literary magazines. She has also edited two reports into cultural diversity. As well as books she writes about music, film and the creative industries.”
The subhead to the article was even more ridiculous than the headline: “Drunken mothers, bestial fathers, pedophilia and incest. They’re the titillating popcorn of publishing today. Here, in a furious blast against her own trade, a leading book industry figure attacks the lucrative market in ‘misery memoirs’…”
The story, for the most part, was about Dana Fowley, who “came to public attention after declaring that she still 
loves her mother, Catherine Dunsmore, even though Dunsmore ‘supplied’ Dana, now 27, and her sister to a 15-strong pedophile ring, which systematically raped and molested her from the age of six to 15.”
Reading on, I was astounded to learn that pedophile and molestation stories are quickly becoming the UK’s largest selling true crime books.
“Dana’s been talked into selling her story to a publisher for a staggering £200,000,” Danuta says.
Now, if Danuta Kean had stopped there, I would have, like most, scratched my head and wondered, Gees, there seems to be something wrong with this. But Danuta had to make it personal and, with a sweeping attack on all true crime, blast a genre she obviously knows very little about.
“[Am I] the only one to think that the gaggle of publishers who bid so high so quickly have more than a whiff of ambulance-chasers about them?”
That is an old insult: the ambulance chaser. Sure, there are some (in our genre here in the states, too), but a majority of the TC authors working today respect their work and practice journalism. Those who write TC memoirs, moreover, have their own reasons for doing it—reasons we shouldn’t question.
Danuta went on … and on …
But, judging by the current trend for ever more graphic tales of sexual abuse, just months after seeing her mother incarcerated Dana will be expected to perform an emotional striptease and deliver up every graphic detail of her abuse for public consumption.
Every molestation, every forced depravity and every betrayal by her mother is likely to be demanded in full color for readers who will revel in the pornography of misery.
If Dana’s book follows the disturbing wave of recent misery memoirs, it will read as if you were there: as if you were the victim – or the perpetrator.
Even among the ghoulish world of misery memoir publishing there is a sense of shock at the haste with which Dana has been pounced on.
“I think it is going to be the most horrible yet,” says one ghostwriter, with a hint of relish at the detail it may reveal.
“I have heard it described as ‘the book to end all books’ on the subject.”
Well, I wish it were. Because the slew of such memoirs pumped out at the behest of supermarkets – which sell these books in the kind of quantities normally reserved for The Da Vinci Code – have crossed a line this year.
Rather than inspire, they risk titillating with the intimate detail they provide: members of religious cults rape young girls, fathers rape sons.
The descriptions are vivid and explicit as publishers fall over themselves to provide increasingly shocking accounts to take a chunk out of a market that is now worth £24 million.
From here, Kean goes on to describe—in lurid detail, mind you—the subject matter of several books.
My favorite line: “In ‘Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed,’” Danuta writes, “Stuart Howarth provides relentless detail about repeated rapes by his father. He was even forced by the brute to have sex with pigs.”
No wonder that some claim these uninhibited accounts offer pedophiles tips on how to groom children and ensure their foul activities remain closeted.
Not that the publishers and ghostwriters responsible see it that way.
“A lot of those readers are women with children,” insists Carol Tonkinson, non-fiction publisher at Harper-Collins, the market leader in misery lit – though the publisher prefers the name “inspirational literature” (like fairy tales, a happy ending is compulsory).
“Eighty-five percent of these books sell in supermarkets,” she replies, when I tell her about the unsavory men I have seen hanging round the “abuse/incest” section in the Borders bookshop chain.
Kean then claims that the books sell so well because, “I suppose that in the same way a horror film gives us a vicarious thrill by allowing us to be terrified without any risk to ourselves, so reading stories of abuse from the comfort of our sofas means we can experience the chill of fear and disgust as voyeurs, without ever having to confront such nightmares in our own lives.”
This has all been said before. When you beat this dead horse, you comer across as a bitter (frustrated) writer who doesn’t understand the genre, lashing out at a group of readers who don’t really have to explain why they buy the books they like, no more, perhaps, than the bowtie-wearing academic who buys the Mechanics of Genetics and other Juicy Intellectual Stories from the college bookstore does.
Furthermore, calling Kean a “leading publishing figure” is a bit of a stretch. She bills herself as an author of “literary” articles, a publishing industry gatekeeper of sorts, which should automatically exclude her from commenting on anything true crime. It’s sad, too, because I have yet to see a leading TC author go after the literary elite, simply because we have no business stepping on the toes of someone in a different genre.
Nor should we be questioning why an abused woman sells her story.
With a few exceptions, TC outsells literary fiction and nonfiction, incidentally, ten to one. That alone should beckon one to think that maybe there’s a tight stitch in Kean’s knickers somewhere.
Monday I’ll get into the numbers—which are staggering—and some of the reasons why we are all so infatuated by the most vile true crime we can find. Right now I have to get back to working on my book about a lesbian love triangle that ended in the murder of a woman leaving choir practice.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
In a way I see both sides of this arguement, though I confess I lean more towards your side than hers. In part because I don’t read the specific substrate of the TC genre that she is talking about. I don’t need to – let it rest at that.
Not that the TC books I have read don’t contain their share of lurid details on occassion. Perhaps it is a mark of my “normalcy” as a human being that I find them sickening and wonder how anyone could consider such descriptions “tintillating”. And I’m damn sure some readers do. In fact, I’m sure she is right in saying that such books get used by pedophiles, on occassion, to better learn “their trade”. Then again, so do media accounts, websites (no offense meant to this one), chat rooms, etc… She is ignorant, as you say, to condemn the entire genre because of one aspect. I wonder, if she had a favorite tree and one branch of it withered, would she cut the entire thing down?
Personally it is the psychological aspect of crime that draws me to TC. The “why” not the “how” or the “what”. And my long-standing fascination with forensics also dictates what I read – “how” did they determine who it was based on old remains or carpet fibers.
I’d be lying if I claimed there isn’t a sort of morbid fascination, that same core human tick that seems to make us slow down and look at an accident scene even though we know we could see something better left unseen. But it isn’t my primary reason and I certainly don’t get any “vicarious thrill” from the stuff.
Maybe she should wonder if, in a world that seems increasingly prone to human against human violence, we aren’t just trying to arm ourselves with a little knowledge in the hopes that should the beast knock at our door we might recognize it.
I’d rather acknowledge and have some understanding of the reality of crime, than bury my head in the sand and pretend the world is a nice happy place where nothing ever happens.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Oh My Goodness. We all know these acts of evil are perpetrated upon defenseless, and innocent little children, probably daily in this country. And even having to know it happens is more than enough for me. I love to sit down in my reading chair and cozy up at night to unwind and get lost in a book and yes I admit I have a “weird?” fascination about what makes people tick. But NOT when it comes to this subject. As a child of abuse I would never consider writing down the accounts of that abuse and take the chance that some sicko would take pleasure in it! I dont understand how anyone could sit and read words of an actual child living such a brutal horror-filled event(s). I dont understand this. I would have nightmares forever……………….but that is just one woman’s opinion, for what thats worth.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
I take it you’ve never read the books by David Pelzer. They are tragic, horrible, unthinkable and I will also tell you that I cried throughout all of them. But they are also insperational. It made me think not only about my own life, but what I could do to make it better for myself and my family. It answered a lot of questions about abuse, the victim and the abuser.
Here’s a snip I found on the net: “The book, A Man Named Dave, begins with Mr.Pelzter refering to his two previous books titled A Child Called It and The Lost Boy. Next David talks about his life after his experience with child abuse. He tells in his book how he got on with his life. Dave talks about his son and how he has been an inspiration to Dave to not give up on life.”
While I do understand, with the abuse you have endured first hand, why you would not choose to read these books yourself, please do not condemn those of us that only wish to understand how you must feel. We read these books to try and gleen some sort of insight into the thoughts of an abuser, why they do this, and how their mind can possibly allow them to do it.
I also believe that I read these books as a sort of protection. I want to know how abusers lure young children into these situations. It might help me better understand how to protect my own child.
October 13th, 2007 at 6:23 am
I won’t read the stuff. I read Dave Pelzer’s books and he came across as wounded and honest. A great many of these books that are published in the UK and several have turned out to be either total lies or not completely true. There’s such a run in the market that I suspect a lot of the people read them for ulterior motives – they get high on someone else’s pain, or read it for ideas! Yuck!
October 13th, 2007 at 6:26 am
If that was my only choice of TC reading, my TC reading would be over.
Thank God it’s not.
October 13th, 2007 at 11:06 am
I don’t like it when somebody labels a type of book they don’t like (or don’t understand) as “pornography.” It’s often a lazy shortcut, and it labels the fans as well as the product. I once witnessed an online discussion where someone who called the Left Behind series as “religious pornography.” Sure, most people knew what he meant, but it still came across as rude, especially as another member had said that her mother was a fan! As another example, some people label the military fiction (and military SF) they don’t like as “war porn.” Yet in many cases, you can’t tell the difference between the stories they like and the ones they label as “war porn.” (I suspect sometimes they label a book as “war porn” because they disagree with the politics of the author. )Instead of writing real criticism or admitting that they dislike the politics, they take the easy way out and call it “war porn.”
October 13th, 2007 at 11:30 am
I read “Broken Doll” by Burl Bauer. I NEVER want to read TC about abused children again. IT made me ill.
October 13th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
I’m glad to hear you have decided to write about the bizarre love-triangle murder that was mentioned several posts ago. I tried to find out more details at that time, but the internet failed to produce much info. Please hurry – I’m dying to read more.
October 13th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Nik
I read Mr.Pelzter’s book “A Child Called It”. It was very powerful to me. Now I want to read it again.
Reading books like this, give me inspiration and perspective on life.
October 14th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
I suppose it all depends on how the book is written. I’ve read some TC that makes me sick because it seems the author is going for shock value. Should a book be written about child molestation? Sure, but not in detail about what was done to the child. It’s really enough to know that Dana Fowley was mixed up in a 15 member pedophile ring from the time she was 6 til 15. Do we need to know what occurred? Well, of course not. I however, have a few friends that were molested as children, and I want to understand their feelings so much more than I do now. If I can glean one iota of understanding from these books, it will be a wonderful thing. However, the first book I pick up that goes into detail about the abuse, I’ll close that book and won’t pick it up again. Noone needs to know these intimate details, it unnecessary.
October 14th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Oh, for example (this just came to mind), I read some time ago, before I was into TC, “When the
Rabbit Cries”, I believe it was called. That damn book will never leave me, I so did not need to know the specifics of what that little girl went through.
November 20th, 2007 at 8:24 am
I HAVE JUST READ YOUR POSTING REGARDING MISERY MEMOIRES AND THERE WAS MENTION OF THE BOOK “PLEASE DADDY NO”.
THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN BY MY HUSBAND STUART HOWARTH AND I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT HE WAS NEVER FORCED TO HAVE SEX WITH PIGS INFACT THE PERSON WHO DID ACTUALLY HAVE SEX WITH PIGS WAS HIS STEPFATHER, THE SAME MAN WHO ABUSED HIM AND HIS THREE SISTERS, TWO OF WHOM WERE DISABLED.
SO FOR ANYONE WHO HAS NOT ACTUALLY READ THIS BOOK INCLUDING IT SEEMS, DANUTA, I CAN GUARANTEE YOU IT IS NOT AT ALL EXPLICIT AND NO PAEDOPHILE WILL GET ANY PLEASURE AT ALL FROM READING IT.
THESE BOOKS ACTUALLY MADK PEOPLE AWARE OF WHAT GOES ON IN THE WORLD SO PLEASE STOP GIVING THEM BAD PRESS.
TRACEY HOWARTH
SO FOR ANYONE WHO HAS NOT READ THIS BOOK, INCLUDING D