The cover image

A short introduction to Crime & Psychology using the cover image as aguide.

Bring your laptop, your phone, maybe a camera. We’ll explore these bookshelves together. Let me be your guide.

Left-middle of the lower row: The human brain stands the centre of the map. Of course!

Eastwards along the bottom row, we encounter first of all a classic Harvard University text by the once-notorious Earnest Hooton. Crime & the Man is a strange old book. No one writes anything like it any more. Also, it contains a whole bunch of horrifying cartoons. I’ll tell you all about them.

Next up, a pair of stone classics by some of the best-known names in Psychology. Each deserves a couple of posts to itself. Pioneers in Criminology is one of my favourites.

Venture further east. Here are three books that offer straightforward introductions to different aspects of our subject. Crime & Human Nature is an epic controversy in itself. That’ll be fun to think about. Next come a couple of scholarly works by the psychologist David Canter, best known for his work on geographical profiling.

Our own geography steadily expands. More scholarly works as we venture on. Here we find a terrific volume on degeneration theory, ( I can’t wait to tell you about it); Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish; and finally a book about criminals by one of Freud’s top lieutenants. History, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis dominate the easternmost edge of our map.

And what about the intrepid north? I’m glad you asked.

The next shelf is piled high with books. We’ll be constructing a sort of Rogues’ Gallery out of the snapshots and postcards we bring home. That’s why I chose a book of that title.

On top lies the Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, not to mention The Mammoth Book of the Best Crime Comics. Did you know it was a psychologist who invented Wonder Woman, and another one who came close to destroying the entire comic-book industry?

Finally, The Mind: because, well, Psychology.

Go west. We begin with a classic of Marxist criminal history and then cross terrain that’s familiar to anyone who’s studied our subject before. Our North Pole lies deep with texts on Criminology and Psychology. (One of them was the work of a Nobel-Prize winning, Nazi-Party-joining ethologist. Even so, it keeps honorary-Psychology status.) These books deal with theories of crime; the influence of the media, poverty, and slums; family violence; gender; eyewitnesses: all the topics that brought you here in the first place.

There’s a book, too, on the Psychology of Evil, and four Very Short Introductions from the Oxford University Press. These are about Crime Fiction, The Devil, Forensic Psychology, and Witchcraft.

Now, like every true explorer, we hit the Far West. Beware. Here be dragons. Monsters of some sort, anyway. Witches and demons, too- even Vampires, Burial & Death? That excellent book helped me develop some interesting ideas when I was doing research into a psychologhical process called Othering.

Here, on the far dark side of our map, I have an epic waiting for you. We’ll discuss a conspiracy theory from the edge of Psychology. The material is as disturbingly unfamiliar as travel itself.

Finally, a book about jazz and crime next to one of the very first books on prisoner psychology. This Substack covers a lot of ground.

In the south west you’ll discover a big old biography of Jesse James. Next to it, yes, that really is an encyclopedia of gunfighters. We’ll try to bring a little bit of psychology to some exotic topics.

Economists like their titles self-explanatory. On our way back to the centre, we cross through Narconomics and the Economics of Good and Evil.

Speaking of self-explanatory, titles don’t come clearer than Making Sense of Criminology (we’ll try to do exactly that) or In the Minds of Murderers (we’ll get there, too).

And now - by way of The Execution of a Serial Killer - we come home again! Here is the human brain, the place from which we contemplate it all: our point of departure and our point of arrival. Take some trips from here out into our Substack. I hope you like it. Have a look around, let me know what you think, and whether there are any other places you’d particularly like to go.