ABSTRACT
According to Seltzer (2007: 2), “true crime is crime fact that looks like crime fi ction” or, as he puts it elsewhere, indeed bad crime fi ction. He (2007: 9) also argues that true crime “knowingly takes the crime novel as its prototype and tries it out on real life”, turning to imitate its imitation as it were. He posits that true crime is made of clichés, and that it is more than formulaic; it is actually hyper-conventional: “a sort of writing or screening by numbers” (Seltzer, 2007: 35). I investigate the nature of that hyperconventionality fi rst by looking at Nigel Cawthorne’s work before turning to look at that of Christopher Berry-Dee’s in some detail.
