From the early development of crime fiction, instances of often sensationalist and emotive media coverage of the crime cases under investigation feature frequently within the narrative, serving a range of functions. In E.A. Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue the vivid newspaper reports can for instance be seen to highlight the emotional impact of the horrendous murders in the public sphere, as well as the superiority of Dupin’s method of ratiocination. Reflecting the conditions of our mediatized experience of the world, the representation and construction of the strong emotions surrounding violent crime in the media is an important concern in the genre today.
This paper examines how these issues are explored in Iraqi-Austrian author Susanne Ayoub’s historical crime novel Engelsgift (2004). Based on the sensational real-life case of a woman who in Vienna in 1938 under the newly installed Nazi-regime was sentenced to death for the poisoning of her husband, her baby daughter, her aunt and a lodger, the narrative is set in the present. Here, script writer Marie Horvath plans to write a screenplay about the sixty year old case and is presented with a very different, if no less gruesome version of events by the son of the alleged murderess. His gradually unfolding version, which claims to tell ‘the full truth that was never told in the newspapers’, implies that his mother fell victim to the sensationalist press coverage. The paper will discuss in what ways the novel with its emphasis on the media construction of the glamorous red-haired angel/demon as a projection of stereotypical fantasies about female transgression, provides a critique of the media and in how far it itself participates in an exploitation of emotions around crime.