ABSTRACT
As book publishers, filmmakers and television producers have long known, crime is an intensely popular and interesting matter. Newspapers would be depleted without crime news like the serial killing of prostitutes in Ipswich (United Kingdom) late in 2006. Television regularly showcases fictional crime series, documentaries and more recently ‘reality TV’ shows. Novelists since Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon through to Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, James Lee Burke or Patricia Cornwell have made crime fiction into a literary genre and a best-selling business. Not a year goes by without some special case attracting widespread media and public attention. Cases like the O.J. Simpson murder trial in the United States, Dr Harold Shipman (‘Doctor Death’) in the United Kingdom, or the Lindy Chamberlain case in Australia, which ultimately saw a dingo found guilty of the murder of her baby, all become stand-out cases. They suggest that ‘real-life’ crime is as fascinating to large numbers of ordinary people as any television series or crime novel.
