Keynote: We’ll All Be Murdered In Our Beds!

Duncan Campbell, in conversation with Zubeida Malik talk about why crime reporting is so vital and how it has changed – both for the better and the worse – in the last fifty years. The following excerpt from the introduction to his latest book: We’ll All Be Murdered In Our Beds! explain why he think it’s so important.

A day of court reporting provides as illuminating a snapshot as any lengthy think-tank report or ministerial briefing on the state of education, immigration, unemployment, mental health and popular culture, not to mention policing, the criminal justice system and the failures or successes of government policies. Nor is it a grim beat; the phrase “gallows humour” did not come from nowhere. Life and death. Human nature. Drama. As Edgar Wallace, himself a crime reporter before becoming the best-selling author in Britain, remarked: “truth is stranger than fiction and has every need to be since most fiction is founded on truth.” No wonder the television channels overflow every day with fictional – and a few non-fictional – criminals and detectives.