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244 books match the query 'Crime' and 9 start with l

cover of L.A. Private Eyes

L.A. Private Eyes

Dahlia Schweitzer

Rutgers University Press, 2019

L.A. Private Eyes examines the tradition of the private eye as it evolves in films, books, and television shows set in Los Angeles from the 1930’s through the present day. It takes a closer look at narratives—both on screen and on the printed page—in which detectives travel the streets of Los Angeles, uncovering corruption, moral ambiguity, and greed with the conviction of urban cowboys, while always ultimately finding truth and redemption. With a review of Los Angeles history, crime stories, and film noir, L.A. Private Eyes explores the metamorphosis of the solitary detective figure and the many facets of the genre itself, from noir to mystery, on the screen. While the conventions of the genre may have remained consistent and recognizable, the points where they evolve illuminate much about our changing gender and power roles.

Watch a video of the author speaking about this topic: https://goo.gl/Xr9RFD
And also: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mkqw3mplruf7jje/Detective%20Talk%20Full.mp4?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mkqw3mplruf7jje/Detective%20Talk%20Full.mp4?dl=0)
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cover of Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy

Language of the Gun

Youth, Crime, and Public Policy

Bernard E. Harcourt

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Legal and public policies concerning youth gun violence tend to rely heavily on crime reports, survey data, and statistical methods. Rarely is attention given to the young voices belonging to those who carry high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In Language of the Gun, Bernard E. Harcourt recounts in-depth interviews with youths detained at an all-malecorrectional facility, exploring how they talk about guns and what meanings they ascribe to them in a broader attempt to understand some of the assumptions implicit in current handgun policies. In the process, Harcourt redraws the relationships among empirical research, law, and public policy.

Home to over 150 repeat offenders ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, the Catalina Mountain School is made up of a particular stratum of boys—those who have committed the most offenses but will still be released upon reaching adulthood. In an effort to understand the symbolic and emotional language of guns and gun carrying, Harcourt interviewed dozens of these incarcerated Catalina boys. What do these youths see in guns? What draws them to handguns? Why do some of them carry and others not? For Harcourt, their often surprising answers unveil many of the presuppositions that influence our laws and policies.
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cover of Law and Disorder in the Postcolony

Law and Disorder in the Postcolony

Edited by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean and John Comaroff and a group of respected theorists show that the question is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth—an order that criminalizes poverty and race, entraps the “south” in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. 

As these essays make plain, however, there is another side to postcoloniality: while postcolonies live in states of endemic disorder, many of them fetishize the law, its ways and itsmeans. How is the coincidence of disorder with a fixation on legalities to be explained? Law and Disorder in the Postcolony addresses this question, entering into critical dialogue with such theorists as Benjamin, Agamben, and Bayart. In the process, it also demonstrates how postcolonies have become crucial sites for the production of contemporary theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction.

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cover of Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths

Law and Order

Images, Meanings, Myths

Valverde, Mariana

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In living rooms across the country, Americans have fallen in love with law-related television programming. From primetime legal dramas such as Law and Order, The Guardian, CSI, JAG, and Judging Amy to a host of daytime courtroom spectacles including Judge Judy, People's Court, and Divorce Courtviewers are endlessly entertained by the practices of the criminal justice system.

But with television courtrooms appearing more like the studio of The Jerry Springer Show than institutions of justice, and with weekly dramas seamlessly blending cutting-edge forensic science with exaggerated fictions, it calls to question: just what is it about these shows that has the public so captivated? And, what effects do the images of crime and order presented through the media have on society's view of the actual legal and criminal justice systems?

In Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths, Mariana Valverde draws on examples from film, television, and newspapers to examine these questions and to demonstrate how popular culture is creating an unrealistic view of crime and crime control. Valverde argues that understanding the impact of media representations of courtrooms, police departments, prisons, and the people who populate them is essential to comprehending the reality of criminal justice.

Introducing a wealth of resources in social and cultural studies along with suggestions for classroom discussions and assignments, this book pushes the field of criminology in new and exciting theoretical directions. It is essential reading for students and scholars of criminal justice and law.

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cover of Learning to Live with Crime: American Crime Narrative in the Neoconservative Turn

Learning to Live with Crime

American Crime Narrative in the Neoconservative Turn

Christopher P. Wilson

The Ohio State University Press, 2010

Since the mid-1960s, the war on crime has reshaped public attitudes about state authority, criminal behavior, and the responsibilities of citizenship. But how have American writers grappled with these changes? What happens when a journalist approaches the workings of organized crime not through its legendary Godfathers but through a workaday, low-level figure who informs on his mob? Why is it that interrogation scenes have become so central to prime-time police dramas of late? What is behind writers’ recent fascination with “cold case” homicides, with private security, or with prisons?

In Learning to Live with Crime, Christopher P. Wilson examines this war on crime and how it has made its way into cultural representation and public consciousness. Under the sway of neoconservative approaches to criminal justice and public safety, Americans have been urged to see crime as an inevitable risk of modern living and to accept ever more aggressive approaches to policing, private security, and punishment. The idea has been not simply to fight crime but to manage its risks; to inculcate personal vigilance in citizens; and to incorporate criminals’ knowledge through informants and intelligence gathering. At its most scandalous, this study suggests, contemporary law enforcement has even come to mimic crime’s own operations.  

 
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cover of Lemons Never Lie: An Alan Grofield Novel

Lemons Never Lie

An Alan Grofield Novel

Richard Stark

University of Chicago Press, 1971

 An action-packed crime novel starring Alan Grofield, the ladies' man associate of the legendary heister Parker

Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating and more hot-blooded than Parker; think fewer guns, more dames.
 
Not that there isn’t violence and adventure aplenty. Lemons Never Lie—a taut thriller that finds Grofield recruited by a man named Myers for a sketchy brewery heist. But when Grofield gets cold feet, he has to decide if it’s riskier to go through with the plot, or to say no to Myers.
 
With a new foreword by Sarah Weinman that situates the Grofield series within Westlake’s work as a whole, these novels are an exciting addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.
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cover of Leopold and Loeb: THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Leopold and Loeb

THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Hal Higdon

University of Illinois Press, 1975

Among the criminal celebrities of Prohibition-era Chicago, not even Al Capone was more notorious than two well-educated and highly intelligent Jewish boys from wealthy South Side families. In a meticulously planned murder scheme disguised as a kidnapping, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb chose fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks at random as their victim, abandoning his crumpled body in a culvert before his parents had a chance to respond to the ransom demand. Revealing secret testimony and raising questions that have gone unanswered for decades, Hal Higdon separates fact from myth as he unravels the crime, the investigation, and the trial, in which Leopold and Loeb were defended by the era's most famous attorney, Clarence Darrow. Higdon's razor sharp account of their chilling act, their celebrity, and their ultimate emergence as folk heroes resonates unnervingly in our own violent time.
 
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cover of Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century

Leopold and Loeb

The Crime of the Century

Hal Higdon

University of Illinois Press, 2024

The razor-sharp account of a notorious murder

The 1924 murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb shocked the nation. One hundred years later, the killing and its aftermath still reverberate through popular culture and the history of American crime.

Hal Higdon’s true crime classic offers an unprecedented examination of the case. Higdon details Leopold and Loeb’s journey from privilege and promise to the planning and execution of their monstrous vision of the perfect crime. Drawing on secret testimony, Higdon follows the police investigation through the pair’s confessions of guilt and recreates the sensational hearing where Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous attorney, saved the pair from the death penalty.

In-depth and definitive, Leopold and Loeb tells the dramatic story of a notorious crime and its long afterlife in the American imagination.

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cover of Lily White

Lily White

Christian Schünemann and Jelena Volic

Haus Publishing, 2021

A thrilling crime novel set in Belgrade that dives into Serbia’s troubled history.

Jelena Volić and Christian Schünemann’s latest thriller follows a case for criminologist Milena Lukin, the protagonist of their previous novels Cornflower Blue and Peony Red. Set in Belgrade, a city of flux between East and West, Lily White is a complex and riveting new story that once again will take Lukin to the dark heart of Serbia’s past.
 
Bouquets of white lilies are mysteriously laid in a Belgrade street where, years earlier, a small Romani boy was beaten to death by two youths. One of the attackers was apprehended and imprisoned. The other was allowed to flee and, after twenty-five years on the run, he returns to Belgrade to confront his past. Days later, his corpse is found floating in the Danube River. After a cursory investigation, the police declare it to have been suicide and close the case, but the dead man’s lawyer and the criminologist Milena Lukin begin an investigation of their own. They soon stumble upon a clue that leads them into the darkest recesses of Serbian politics and to the root of a murder that shaped the fate of a country.
 
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