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About the Author Duncan Campbell is a senior correspondent with the Guardian, where he has worked as the paper's crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent. He has written five non-fiction books. He has previously worked for Time Out and contributed to OZ, IT and The Rising Nepal. He is married to Oscar-winning actress Julie Christie. On Writing IF IT BLEEDS 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 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. Many of them have been plundered for this book. Reading Group Discussion Guide
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