O true crime no Brasil : o caso dos livros-reportagem de Ullisses Campbell.

Abstract

This study aims to investigate whether the work of the writer Ullisses Campbell embodies the characteristics associated with the category of qualified media known as true crime. To this end, the study is based on the theoretical assumptions of Intermediality, with the aim of characterising this type of media, as well as on the theoretical and methodological proposal developed by Punnett (2018), which systematises a set of elements that constitute real crime narratives, namely: Justice, Subversion and Crusade, Geographic, Forensic, Vocative and Folkloric. Based on these references, a descriptive-qualitative analysis of the writer-journalist's production is carried out. The research corpus consists of Campbell's entire body of work, comprising the non-fiction books Flordelis: a pastora do diabo (Flordelis: the devil's shepherdess) (2022), Suzane: assassina e manipuladora (Suzane: murderer and manipulator) (2024) and Elize Matsunaga: a mulher que esquartejou o marido (Elize Matsunaga: the woman who dismembered her husband) (2024). The results indicate that the selected corpus can be understood as a type of media classified as true crime, since three narrative codes were identified, namely: Forensic, Vocative and Folkloric. Furthermore, the analysis showed that some of these codes manifest themselves partially, insofar as they present substantive divergences in relation to the conceptualisation proposed by Punnett (2018), highlighting differences between Brazilian and English-speaking true crime narratives.