When writing dictates the format: What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime

By Jennifer Fleetwood

As you probably know, Tom Kremer set up Notting Hill Editions to ‘revive the art of the essay’. In an interview he said that he needed to ‘create the frame, the format… if there is no format – you create it!’ This idea resonates with my most recent book What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime, published as a paperback original by NHE. 

Format versus content

I’m an academic criminologist, and most of the time my writing is dictated by the format. For example, journal articles must be a certain length, tend to make one argument, and are bound by stylistic conventions around the use of ‘I’, the need to state the argument before you make the argument, and so on. But, working under the aegis of NHE, there was much greater freedom to create a format that fit the ideas. NHE’s publishing director Rosalind Porter and I worked together to come up with a frame that would hold the book together as ideas unfolded. 

I wanted to explore the apparent rise in the sheer number and significance of personal experience narratives about crime. At the time, Shamima Begum was in the courts, arguing to be allowed to return to the UK to contest the government’s claim about her. I was watching the HBO adaption of the Handmaid’s Tale (a fictional, first-person account of state crime, as I read it). Personal stories abounded on social media, including testimonies about Harvey Weinstein and #metoo posts. I had a sense that something important was happening and that it was worth paying attention to. 

Creating the case study framework

Rosalind proposed a frame: a series of examples or case studies, with each chapter looking at just one well-known example of a personal story being told in public. Sitting in a café in South London we brainstormed possible examples. ‘Why not Prince Andrew?’ she suggested. I was slightly taken aback. Yes, it was a good case study – a great one even. I briefly tied myself in knots about whether I was ‘expert’ enough; I finally sat with the interview, applied everything I knew as a criminologist about stories, and the book started to take shape. 

Taking a case study approach allowed my imagination and analysis to range much more widely than in my previous academic work. After Prince Andrew came a chapter on Shamima Begum’s Times interview, and next was Mo Farah’s BBC documentary account of being a victim of human trafficking and domestic servitude. More chapters slotted into place: Howard Mark’s criminal autobiography Mr Nice, Chanel Miller’s viral victim impact statement and some of Myra Hindley’s autobiographical writing. Being challenged to roam widely led me to think differently about how and why people tell stories about an experience with crime. 

At the start, I thought this would be a book sharing my expertise as a criminologist, and how I read and think about personal narrative. And while the book does that, it has also generated new insights into personal narrative that will travel back into my academic work. 

NHE make handsome books, and mine is no exception. The paperback original is the perfect format: the size and shape invites being slipped into a jacket pocket or a bag, to be read in airports, coffee shops, bus-stops: that is, many places where we might talk about crime.