The cultural scope and criminological potential of the “hardman story”

Abstract

The true crime genre has become synonymous with the serial killer. As such, other narratives dealing with different types of violent criminal subjects have been overlooked in academic and media analyses. The following article explores a subgenre of true crime which has been overlooked—the life story of the violent criminal or “hardman biography.” However, in acknowledging the hardman, the discussion also reveals his presence across fact/fiction boundaries and a range of cultural terrain. Following a discussion of the cultural space this figure occupies, I turn my attention to hardman stories which exist predominantly in the local imaginary and focus on one such text which tells the story of a violent protagonist and cultures of crime and violence in the North of England in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In so doing, I focus on how this text animates cultures of violence and marginality left in the wake of deindustrialization and economic decline, combining this with relevant theoretical and ethnographic work. I conclude by arguing that the text is a further example of the way in which popular criminology can complement and advance academic criminological understandings of crime and violence.

The role of the media as a parallel tool of justice for crimes against a civilian population

“…This gives the mass media extremely powerful leverage, because the very fact of discussing its application at the government level will depend on their position, not only the specific measure (Carlsvärd, 2019). The thesis that the mass media play a central role in shaping cultural ideas about crime and measures to combat it can be considered a general conclusion (Wattis, 2021). Therefore, the study of the role of mass media should be at the centre of criminological studies dealing with the problems of crime control and social order (Greer, 2017), policies in the field of justice (Baranauskas and Drakulich, 2018).…”