Thumbing avidly through Heat magazine recently in a fevered search for the latest on the Cheryl/Liam/Naomi infernal triangle, I was startled to find a pull-out preview of a new true-crime magazine called Crime Monthly. It was aimed at an audience that is presumably satiated with seeing celebrities tormented and now wants to read about ordinary people being tortured. Heat magazine — once a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon — is often now found on free magazine stands, so the publishers, Bauer, are chasing the money. The self-important actress Kristen Stewart once compared being papped to being raped, but there’s obviously more profit now in flogging the real thing.
The preview was so crass — the words GRISLY, AGONY and SHOCKING leaping out amongst the smiling faces of young female victims — that at first I thought it might be the sort of tasteless joke that has got Heat into hot water before. I wasn’t the only one; as the Press Gazette put it: ‘News of the launch has already prompted criticism online, with some even asking if it was a joke.’ But it’s worse than making the victims of crime into a joke; a joke is short and sharp and over quickly. This is making their murders into time-killing entertainment, featuring, as it will, ‘a 16-page gore-guide to all the TV, film, book and podcast crime content that might interest readers’. Spectator-sport sex-slaughter, me-time toddler-torture, idle-moments infanticide — roll up, pay your £1.99 and take your pick.
I’m not a squeamish person but I find this totally repellent; I read a book about Charles Manson when I was a teenager and that was enough for me. It’s not so much respect for the dead; more that I just can’t help thinking of the living, left to see their beloved children become grist to the cheap-thrills mill.
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