The title of If It Bleeds comes from that old news maxim, ‘if it
bleeds, it leads’, which is to say that, if it’s about a violent crime,
it’ll be on the front page or the top of a news bulletin. And that’s
how it always was until the recent days when crime is sometimes
pushed aside by the clammy hand of celebrity news.
The origin of the book itself goes back to when I first started covering
crime in the mid-seventies. It was a lively time: bank robberies, bent
coppers, mad judges, charming drug smugglers, vice raids. What
interested me then and now was the symbiotic relationship between
villains, police and crime reporters and that’s what I explore in If It Bleeds.
Crime reporting is, after all, the first – see the Book of Genesis for coverage
of the earliest instances of theft, threatening behaviour, grassing and the death
penalty – and purest form of journalism.
But If It Bleeds is set in the present day and at its centre is a crime reporter, Laurie
Lane, who is under pressure from his over-cologned news editor – a completely
fictitious character – both to come up with exclusives and to explain some alarming
discrepancies in his expense accounts. Meanwhile, one of the old-school gangsters
is looking for a pliable soul to ghost his memoirs in as flattering a way as possible. Other
ingredients in the book have come from stories I have worked on: the emergence of
Pattaya in Thailand as the new Costa del Crime for villains on the run; the arrival of the
Russian Mafia in London; the legacy of the Krays; and the fate of
old armed robbers who took Open University degrees in
sociology while in Wormwood Scrubs and need to find an outlet for all that knowledge.
The Old Bailey remains the finest free
theatre in the country and days spent
there, sometimes betting on how long a
jury will stay out in a murder trial, have been
compressed into a chapter here. Finally, a
guilty plea: whenever two or three crime
reporters are gathered together, there
are always tales.
