How Writers Reap the Harvest of their Loves by Les Hinton

I’ve spent my career as a fresh-faced reporter, a travelling correspondent, an editor, and as an executive responsible for huge media companies. I enjoyed it, and learned a lot; but what I didn’t realise until recently was something else it was training me to be.

I had already written a memoir called The Bootle Boy and the research had been easy. I wrote about my life and experiences in chronological order, looking back now and then at old diaries, calendars, and newspaper clippings to check my memory.

After that, I wanted to try fiction, which is a whole other thing, and, I discovered, much more difficult. 

Thinking up the story; inventing characters; developing the rise, fall, and climax of the story. All this turned out to be far more difficult than I had dreamed.

But what I hadn’t realised was how built-up lessons of my life would help rescue me.

Writers of fiction, as many readers here will be aware, depend heavily on their lived experience. That’s what feeds their imagination. To give their work authenticity, they infuse what they write with the true dreads and joys of the life they’ve lived. Not literally, of course, but to summon the glowing moments of happiness they have known; or the sadness of a loved one’s death; the romance gone wrong; the betrayal of someone you trusted, and to use their imagination to apply these experiences to create wonderful and terrifying moments in their fiction. 

The richness of a life, linked with a fertile imagination, is the foundation of all fiction. I can imagine the above words will be like teaching some of you to suck eggs. But I’m new at this and want to go on to explain what it means to me; how a life face to face with the extreme tragedy and beauty of human existence can be a treasure for a writer.

Let me tell about someone who has seen the highest and lowest of life:

He has been with lottery winners celebrating their millions; with the destitute and homeless and drug addicted; sat in court as a black-capped judge delivered the sentence of death. 

He has stood by the piled-up, rotting corpses of massacred women and children in a war zone; walked through the horrifying remains of what was the world’s worst air disaster; survived an IRA bomb.

He has been drunk in a Manhattan punk bar with Johnny Rotten; received a playful punch in the stomach from Paul McCartney; made the late Queen Elizabeth laugh at his jokes.

He has met presidents and prime ministers; stared from two feet away into the cold eyes of Benjamin Netanyahu, sat alone with an anguished Tony Blair as he prepared to send his country to war; been the object one-to-one of the overwhelming persuasive power of Margaret Thatcher; and a victim of the easy, body-pressing charm of Bill Clinton.

He has worked in the fantasy world of Hollywood among the movie stars and egocentric moguls. Sat at a breakfast cafe next to Stephen Spielberg; watched Meryl Streep stroll by with a baby on her hip; lived next door to O J Simpson at the time he may, or may not, have murdered his wife and her lover.

This someone I’m writing about, you will have guessed, is me and that list represents a fraction of the life I’ve lived. It’s part of the inventory of my life and a treasure that means I should never run out of the ideas a fiction writer needs.

I’m not the first journalist in this position: Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Geraldine Brooks, Michael Frayn, Frederick Forsyth . . . I could go on, there are many more, and I’m definitely not comparing myself with all that brilliance.

My point is that, if you’re a journalist long enough, all human life will pass your way. Some of it is tough, unbearable sometimes and the stuff of terrible dreams, but, boy oh boy, it’s great raw material if you want to write fiction.

My book Dying Days is about the dying days of newspapers and a mysterious group intent on the murder of Press barons and their editors.

It is entirely fictitious, more or less. There’s a prime minister who “no matter how serious things were, a perpetual expression of amused indifference seemed to play on his face.” But it’s not Boris Johnson. This PM bites his fingernails; but it’s not Gordon Brown.

There’s a nonagenarian Press baron and “all the stresses and strains and dirty tricks of his long life were carved deep into his war-torn face” … but it’s definitely not my old boss Rupert Murdoch, far from it.

There’s another Press baron who’s “a caricature of his bawdy newspapers . . . an alien life form unreached by everyone else’s ideas of civility and social convention.” Well, I admit having Robert Maxwell in mind when writing that.

There are many the other characters, foul and fine people, and I know there’ll be others who’ll say of them “ah, that’s so and so.” But they’ll never be right, not completely

It’s almost all made up. None of it is absolutely true. But it does draw from the rich harvest of the life I’ve had.

Dying Days by Les Hinton is published by Whitefox on 6 November, £9.99 paperback

Journalist Dan Brasher wasn’t supposed to be at the Chatstone family’s exclusive summer gathering – a who’s who of media moguls, politicians and power brokers. But when a bomb rips through the historic mansion, Dan and fellow journalist Jess Hunter find themselves thrust into the most dangerous story of their lives.What begins as a shocking act of violence soon reveals something far more sinister, trapping Dan and Jess in a lethal web of power, treachery and cold-blooded revenge that stretches to thehighest levels of global power.

Wish You Were Here: A Journey from Expensive Holiday Resorts to the English Seaside

My novel Wish You Were Here borrows its title from an 80s holiday programme. This featured middle-class presenters who travelled to exotic destinations and reported back to the cold, wet UK. For most people I knew, this was aspirational telly, none of us having anywhere near the money to travel to these places. This didn’t stop us from watching and fantasising. Wishing we were there. They travelled to Praia de la Luz or, as the presenter called it ‘Luge’. I remember the strangeness of the town’s name on her tongue and her incredible tan and how hot and ridiculously foreign the beach looked. It looked like paradise. 

The next time I saw the resort, though, it was not paradise but the scene of a worst nightmare; the disappearance of a young child. The resort felt vaguely familiar as I watched but I didn’t make the connection right away. That came, years later, when I watched a documentary about Madeleine McCann as part of the research for my novel about a missing girl and it included a clip. My memories of watching it at the time came flooding back and from that moment onwards, I knew the title of my book. There’s an 80’s TV connection in the storyline, too, so it made perfect sense. 

The longer I lived with the title, the more it meant. My fictional child was a working-class girl from a single parent family and disappears from the English seaside, a deliberate contrast. So, my title references those English seaside postcards, too. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about a missing child from this kind of background. As a writer, you’re encouraged to show rather than tell and I wanted people to feel this experience, to feel the injustice that I felt about the way society, the media and, these days, people on social media treat and judge people differently based on a number of prejudices. I’d read Chavs by Owen Jones years before and was struck by the stark contrast he highlights between the way Madeleine’s disappearance was covered compared to that of Shannon Matthews. He even puts a number on the concern shown for the two girls, pointing out that the rewards offered for information leading to their return valued Madeleine’s life fifty times higher than Shannon’s. 

Madeleine had been missing nine months when Shannon disappeared and yet still dominated the front pages, with Shannon featured in minor columns of the same newspapers. The shameless and not entirely unconscious class bias of opinion columns at the time is chilling to read back on. The general take on Madeleine’s case appeared to be ‘this shouldn’t happen to families like us’ and there was even a revealing comment about the resort itself not being a place you would expect to meet ‘the kind of people who wallop their weeping kids in Sainsbury’s’. Apparently, not. Just the kind of people who leave their kids home alone while they go out drinking with their mates, then. 

Inequalities in our society play out in a heartbreaking way via the efforts we make to find our missing children. This was shown starkly in one of the documentaries I watched, a stream of photos of local children who’d gone missing in Portugal around the same time as Madeleine, whose names and photos I had never seen before. Recent research found that missing persons cases in the UK where the victim was Black or Asian were significantly less likely to be solved, the victims less likely to be flagged as at risk or vulnerable even when they clearly were. Such things fall sadly for me under the heading ‘shocking but not surprising’. Systemic racism has been an issue in the UK police force for years, and it’s something I explore in my books via Sian’s partner Kris, a serving Black police officer. 

Of course, what happened next in the Shannon Matthews case neatly fitted the media’s narrative of a ‘shameless’ underclass. But that doesn’t change the stark contrast in the way the girl’s disappearance was covered by the media before any of this was known. An even starker contrast is seen when you look at the lack of column inches given to the disappearance of five-year-old Elizabeth Ogungbayibi, who disappeared the year before the two white girls. I’m sure we care about all the missing children but it’s also a fact that we continue to demonstrate that we care about some of them more. 

Nicola Monaghan is the author of Wish You Were Here published by VERVE Books

DNA doesn't lie. But what if the truth is dangerous?DNA expert Dr Sian Love has settled into running her own investigative agency and living with her partner, Kris. She's also started seeing a therapist to work through her traumatic history - a big step for Sian. Then a teenage girl brings chaos to Sian's office door. She claims to be Courtney Johnson - a child who went missing from a Brighton beach over fifteen years ago - but refuses to let Sian test her DNA. Wary but intrigued, Sian reluctantly revives the undercover skills she learned during her police force days and begins investigating. But revisiting the past has consequences...

“She looked a right miserable cow in that photo” - Behind the celebrity headlines we love! ny L C North

I’ve always had a certain fascination with celebrities. The who is dating who, going where, doing what, lure of glossy magazines. And based on the millions of weeklies sold every year, not to mention the tabloid headlines, and click-bait websites promising to tell all, I’m not the only one. 

And yet, alongside my fascination is an awareness of how strange the concept of a celebrity is, and how this group of individuals are treated in society. We place them on a pedestal and applaud their status in one breath, and in the very next, we seem to take great pleasure in pulling them back down. We consider them not like us. Not human. But delight in their mistakes. When they act human.

Weight gain woes

Too skinny

Did you see those spots?

Outfit malfunction

What was she thinking?

Miserable cow.

Every story comes with a sense that perhaps they deserve it. They chose to step into the spotlight, that harsh media glare, didn’t they? An entire grotesque industry has grown out of this twisted obsession. Paparazzi, editors, journalists and a whole lot more. But it isn’t just the magazines and tabloids anymore, it’s social media too. It’s not one headline, one story, but thousands and thousands of people commenting, sharing, chatting in tweets and posts, painting their own versions of the story, without ever considering the person underneath the sheen of that celebrity status. 

And let’s be honest, do any of us stop to consider how much truth there is behind the headlines? 

“Officially photos of Melanie Lange were hot property. Unofficially photos of Melanie looking miserable, upset or angry were the money shots”

Bill Cutting, former paparazzi photographer

This is a quote from my novel, The Ugly Truth. Bill isn’t real, but his words and the sentiment came from an interview with a paparazzi photographer who built his entire career following Britney Spears, snapping the “money shots” that will pay his bills. 

Let’s think about that for a moment. Rarely do we see a story about a celebrity popping into their local supermarket to buy groceries – that’s far too mundane. Far too normal. It’s the scowling red face of rage, the fuming set of a mouth, the teary fight with a boyfriend that hits the front pages. 

But peel that headline back and we might see a woman out to buy some flowers for her friend’s birthday. It’s a normal day. She’s running errands, getting on with life just like you and me. When suddenly, ten people with cameras appear and start shouting at her. 

“Melanie, Melanie, Melanie”

“Is it true you’re sleeping with your personal trainer?”

“Give us a smile”

“Where are you going? Meeting a boyfriend? A girlfriend?”

She tries to ignore it, telling herself - just as we do - that she signed up for this. But the group of photographers are all men and they surround her. Nowhere to go now. It’s intimidating. Scary. She starts to panic and has to push to get away. The flowers get squashed and now she’s upset and scared and angry, and she throws the ruined bouquet at the group and runs away.

The headline reads: MELANIE LANGE IN TEMPER TANTRUM, and the accompanying article tells us about a celebrity who snatched up a bouquet of flowers and threw them at an unsuspecting shop keeper. If we cared to look beyond the story (and that’s what it is) we’d see a work of fiction, and it was this concept of what lies behind the headlines that formed the inspiration for The Ugly Truth. 

I wanted to see the person and the truth beneath the celebrity and the headlines about them. The main character in The Ugly Truth is Melanie Lange. She is a fictional celebrity thrust into the spotlight at fifteen years old when she becomes one of Britain’s most sort after models. The two decades she spends in the spotlight draw parallels to the people and stories we know well. Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Cole, and countless more. 

Imagine trying to balance on that pedestal day after day after day while the world around you throws rocks, grabs at you, tries desperately to pull you down. What do daily attacks do to someone’s mindset? What chance do their relationships stand of surviving? And who can they trust in a world where everyone is out to make money from them, including their families? 

When Melanie Lange disappears, her father, Sir Peter Lange, says she is being cared for in a private mental health clinic. But her ex-husband and best friend say she’s been kidnapped. The media will say whichever gets them the most views.

Told in the same Tweets, documentary transcripts and headlines we expect from celebrity news, The Ugly Truth asks whose side are you on? #SaveMelanie #HelpPeter

The Ugly Truth by L.C. North (Transworld Publishers Limited) Out Now

Melanie Lange has disappeared. Her father, Sir Peter Lange, says she is a danger to herself and has been admitted to a private mental health clinic. Her ex-husband, Finn, and best friend, Nell, say she has been kidnapped. The media will say whichever gets them the most views. But whose side are you on? #SaveMelanie #HelpPeter

More information can be found on her website.

You can follow the author on Twitter @Lauren_C_North and on Facebook.

Photo credit ©Ross Dean Photography

Call for Papers: Investigating True Crime & the Media.

 

A conference hosted by Journalism@Newcastle and 

Ethical Space, the International Journal of Communication Ethics. 

23 June 2022 – Deadline for abstracts 29 October 2021

True crime has a long and popular history in journalism, literature, drama, radio, film and television – and now the podcast. A warning for fair women (1599), the anonymous dramatisation of the 1573 murder of London merchant George Sanders by his wife’s lover, was the curtain-raiser for many more playwrights to adapt true murder narratives in the decades and centuries that followed (Rohrer 2019). True crime podcasts today clock up tens of millions of downloads (Punnett 2018) and research suggests that the audience is overwhelmingly made up of women (Boling and Hull 2018). Perhaps because of this, it is often dismissed as ‘a genre of cheap paperbacks with little literary merit and highly sensational, pornographic content (Rowen 2017).

But such perspectives are challenged by research which identifies a focus on advocating for justice where the formal justice system has failed (Rowen 2017). True crime podcasts represent women in ways that ‘use the affordances of mass media to draw support from the public, effectively inviting the audience to perform as an alternate jury’ and engendering change in judicial processes (Pâquet 2020). The sub-genre of criminal biography uses the voice of the accused to challenge institutional truth-claims (Buozis 2017) and journalistic investigations repeatedly expose miscarriages of justice (Larke-Walsh 2021). Kelli Boling (2019) argues thattrue crime podcasts are impacting the criminal justice system in unprecedented ways and could challenge both criminal justice and media reform. But proponents also areaccused of complicity in the propagation and popularisation of narratives of female-directed violence and the visualisation of mutilated female bodies (Greer 2017). Erica Haugtvedt (2017) interrogates the range of ethical tensions which emerge when, for example, the conventions of fiction are applied to reportage, people become characters and factual narratives are developed as plots. And a focus on particular types of criminal activity address critical social issues of our day such as femicide (Mahadeen 2017); the persecution of racial (Oliver 2003) and LGBTQ+ communities (Polchin 2019); human trafficking (Gregoriou 2018) and crimes against the planet (Ruddell 2017). Case Punnett (2018) charts the theoretical landscape that we might draw on – but much of the topography remains to be mapped.

Journalism@Newcastle – the journalism department at Newcastle University, UK – and Ethical Space invite papers for a global conference: Investigating True Crime & The Media. Submissions are welcome which explore its rise in popularity in recent years, shifting perceptions and receptions, changing platforms, new understandings. To be held at Newcastle University and online, June 23, 2022. Authors are also invited to submit their papers to peer review to feature in a subsequent winter 2022 special double edition of Ethical Space. 

Submissions are open to researchers, PhD students, and practitioners working in the field, and parity of esteem will be afforded to both theoretically-driven and practice-related papers. 

We particularly welcome submissions from diverse voices and nations and regions beyond Western perspectives. The aims of the conference and double issue are to explore current and emerging concepts, developments and potential future trajectories of true crime narratives and production from a global perspective. 

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Feminist perspectives (production, consumption, reception)

• Theorising the field 

• Queer theory and true crime

• True crime in Africa, Asia, South America and the Pacific 

• European perspectives and the Nordic Noir

• The rise of the true crime podcast and dedicated channels and platforms 

• Ethical tensions 

• Campaigning and investigative journalism

• Literary true crime – critical reception and unease 

• Media reporting

• Representations of victimhood

• The accused and control of the narrative 

• The writer’s mission

• Fictionalisation and negotiations of truth

• The commodification of fear

• Institutional failure and the quest for social justice

• True crime and a warming planet

• Commercial imperatives and the public interest

• The political economy of true crime
  
  Deadlines: 
  Please submit abstracts of 500 words plus a 50-word biography to Barbara.henderson@newcastle.ac.uk by Friday 29 October 2021. Authors will be notified of the outcome by 19 January 2022. PowerPoint presentations are acceptable for the conference on 23 June 2022, but full papers (5,000 words including references) for publication in Ethical Space Winter 2022 should be submitted by 31 August 2022.

  Works cited:

  Boling, K. S. and Hull, K. (2018) Undisclosed information –Serial is my favorite murder: Examining motivations in the true crime podcast audience, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, Vol. 25, No. 1 pp 92-108 

  • Boling, K. S. (2019) True crime podcasting: Journalism, justice or entertainment?, Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, Vol. 17, No. 2 pp 161-178
    
    Buozis, M. (2017) Giving voice to the accused: Serial and the critical potential of true crime, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 pp 254-270
    
    Greer, A. (2017) Murder, she spoke: The female voice’s ethics of evocation and spatialisation in the true crime podcast, Sound Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 pp 152-164
    
    Gregoriou, C. (2018) Representations of transnational human trafficking: Present-day news media, true crime, and fiction, Springer Nature
    
    Hauhgtvedt, E. (2017) The ethics of serialized true crime, McCracken, Ellen (ed.) The serial podcast and storytelling in the digital age, London, Taylor & Francis pp 7-24
    
    Larke-Walsh, G. S. (2021) Injustice narratives in a post-truth society: emotional discourses and social purpose in Southwest of Salem: The story of the San Antonio Four, Studies in Documentary Film, Vol. 15, No. 1 pp 89-104
    
    Mahadeen, E. (2017) ‘The martyr of dawn’: Femicide in Jordanian media, Crime, Media, Culture, Vol. 13, No. 1 pp 41-54
    
    Oliver, M. B. (2003) African American men as ‘criminal and dangerous’: Implications of media portrayals of crime on the ‘criminalization’ of African American men, Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 7 pp-18
    
    Pâquet, L. (2020) Seeking justice elsewhere: Informal and formal justice in the true crime podcasts Trace and The Teacher’s Pet, Crime, Media, Culture
    
    Polchin, J. (2019) Indecent advances: A hidden history of true crime and prejudice before Stonewall, London, Icon Books
    
    Punnett, I. C. (2018) Toward a theory of true crime narratives: A textual analysis, London, Routledge
    
    Rohrer, M. (2019) 'Lamentable and true': Remediations of true crime in domestic tragedies. Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 pp 1-17. Available online at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/439/360
    
    Rowen, L. (2017) True crime as a literature of advocacy, Bellarmine University, Kentucky
    
    Ruddell, R. (2017) Oil, gas, and crime: The dark side of the boomtown, Springer

  
  

CFP: Murder and True Crime in the Media

Proposals are invited for an interdisciplinary conference at St Mary’s University, Twickenham on Friday 29th May 2020. 

Book your free place on the conference website:

New Confirmed Keynotes

Dr Sarah Moore‘s research is concerned with gender and risk, she has published work on media representation of date rape and student beliefs concerning drug-facilitated sexual assault. Sarah is the author of Crime and the Media (2014, Palgrave Macmillan) 

Dr Jane Monckton-Smith has published on interpersonal violence, stalking, coercive control, domestic abuse and homicide prevention. Jane is also the author of the Homicide Timeline – the 8 stages. 

About the Conference 

Modern audiences demonstrate and appetite for true crime, and particularly stories that involve murder. Whilst public fascination for true crime is not new, the genre has long dominated our entertainment industries, from biopics, whodunnits, to gangster films; interest in true crime is certainly renewed. One reason for the resurgence of popularity for true crime is Industrial. There is a recent influx of new content available. Making a Murderer can be viewed through the lens of Netflix and binge-watching, Sarah Koenig’s Serial is closely linked to an increase in podcast listeners. Extremely Wicked, Shocking Evil, and Vile and Mindhunter both demonstrate the draw for well-known stars (such as Zac Efron) and personnel (David Fincher) to this genre. 

Where there is scheduling, there is also a market. The people that ‘demand’ on demand. Therefore, alongside these industrial contexts, there are a number of wider factors involved in the surge of murder content. Violent crimes, particularly murder, have ideal narrative structures with a ready-made story arc, ‘social order is disrupted by a deviant act, the guilty are sought and generally identified, and, finally, justice is done or thwarted’ (Auden in Moore, 2014: 177). They are enigma narratives that compel audiences to binge-watch the investigation so that they may finally achieve satisfaction in the form of closure. Some narratives are exoneration tales, using documentary as trial spaces that jurify the public (Bruzzi, 2016), others provide us with an opportunity to experience fear in a safe environment. David Altheide’s (2002) work on fear and the news and Ulrich Beck’s (1992) on Risk Society demonstrates how a perceived lack of control over our lives has led to a preoccupation with safety and risk. 

Through the consideration of murder in the press, documentaries, films and novels, this conference will interrogate the different representations of true crime and how these can contribute to important debates in contemporary culture and society. For instance, can analysis into victims shed light on the way that social groups are constructed in the media, and whether there is a process of selection occurring? How can the study of murder cases provide further insight into coercive control? How might the representations of crimes vary, from knife crime, organised crime, to the glamorisation or even celebrification of some serial killers? What are the ethical considerations when producing murder content and how do platforms such as podcasts and YouTube, pose issues of regulation?

Papers are invited from a broad range of disciplines including Media, Film, Criminology, Sociology, Law. Some focal points include (but are not limited to) 

·         The victims and/or survivors of murder 

·         Serial killers and/or mass murderers in the media 

·         Organised crime and human trafficking  

·         Murder in the news 

·         Policing and the murder investigation 

·         Domestic violence  

·         Coercive control 

·         True Crime trials – the use of documentary and podcasts as an alternative ‘trial space’ to either exonerate the falsely accused or announce culprits (and negotiations in-between) 

 ·       The platforms and technologies of true crime - Netflix, podcasts, YouTube, crime binge-watching (extending to issues of regulation) 

·         The ethical considerations involved in murder themed productivity 

·         Negotiating risk and fear in true crime  

·         Cultivation theory 

Abstracts

Please submit a maximum 500-word abstract by Friday 14th February 2020 to

 Dr Maria Mellins,  maria.mellins@stmarys.ac.uk 

St Mary’s University, Waldegrave Road, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. TW1 4SX.