ABSTRACT
The task of analysing the literature of homelessness and crime has fallen mainly to historians and literary critics rather than to criminologists. The rogue pamphlets were the first extensive crime media, and in terms of style they can be placed somewhere between today's tabloid press and the true crime genre. The postwar literature of homelessness can be characterised by one predominant theme: the persistence of premodern homelessness into modern or post-modern times, highlighting the stark evidence of abject need amidst affluence. The 1960s and 1970s saw the development of a striking new televisual genre, the docudrama, whose dramatic sequences and black-and-white air of gritty realism were perfectly suited to the subject of homelessness. The medium of television was to become an increasingly important one during the 1970s and 1980s, and the investigative journalism style of the docudramas came to influence literature of many kinds, both factual and fictional.
