Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice

Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice (edited with Donna Hale) is a volume that offers an introduction to criminal justice as depicted in popular culture/mass media. The book was published by Wadsworth in 1998, and includes chapters by well-known scholars on topics such as violence in popular films, comic books and censorship, the “criminalizing” of popular culture, media and the police, and movie images of police women, of female attorneys, and of prisons. Incidentally, in the introduction, Donna and I mention Murder, She Wrote. Since writing that introduction, I’ve heard a lot - as a writer of traditional mysteries with an amateur sleuth - about the “Jessica Fletcher syndrome.” Wherever Jessica went, murder followed. In the introduction, Donna and I discuss Jessica and the other television sleuths who have had such an impact on popular culture images of crime.