True Crime, Male Audiences and the Digital Hardman

As I have stated, when we think of true crime, we think of murder narratives and psycho/sociopathic killers (Murley, 2008). As I highlighted in the previous chapter, this limited definition also shapes perceptions of the imagined audience for true crime, which we assume to be women. An assumption which has preoccupied journalists and academics who have sought to get to the bottom of women's attraction to true crime. I have questioned this narrow definition of true crime in previous work, identifying a wider range of violent masculine subjects beyond texts featuring serial killers. These subjects are familiar to us as gangsters and hardmen (Penfold-Mounce, 2009; Wattis, 2023). Their biographies, autobiographies and memoirs comprise a subgenre of true crime, which has been neglected within media and scholarly analyses of the genre (Wattis, 2023). Indeed, the academic literature on violent cultural subjects is mainly concerned with serial killers. This work interrogates their infamy and celebrity status in the context of late modern culture, identifying the modern serial killer as a figure of exception who attracts and captivates us (Downing, 2013; Schmid, 2008). I argue in my earlier work that the figure of the gangster or hardman in British culture (and indeed beyond) has inspired an extensive true crime output of its own, with the notoriety of certain criminals meaning that they have also become celebrities of ‘dubious infamy’ (Schmid, 2008), respected and admired in some quarters, and occupying a place in the collective psyche and popular cultural memory (Wattis, 2021, 2023).