All posts filed under: true crime

45. Bloody borderlands

Amexica is the name journalist Ed Vulliamy has coined for the 2,000-mile-long borderland between the US and Mexico. It’s a land that has fascinated him for the past thirty years – “repelled and compelled”, as he puts it in the interview. “Charismatic,complex, irresistible” is how he describes it in his new book, Amexica, which he discusses with me in this podcast. The US-Mexican border is the busiest such crossing in the world – a million people use it every day. And some of them are engaged in the trafficking – of people, arms, drugs, and dirty money- which gives this land its often brutally violent character. In the interview we talk about that violence, where it comes from, the ways in which it mirrors developments in the global economy and – perhaps most worryingly – the fact that “children are growing up along the border with this as their world”.  

2. Don’t Go Down to the (Vienna) Woods…

If mention of Vienna makes you think of Mozart, cream cakes and Gemütlichkeit, John Leake’s new book will make you think again. John Leake is a young Texan writer who found himself living in Vienna. The city captivated his imagination (his favourite film is The Third Man) and he soon began searching around for a Viennese subject for his first book. That was when he stumbled upon the grisly case of Jack Unterweger… John’s debut is a tale of murder and mayhem so bizarre that in a novel it would be dismissed as too far-fetched to be believable. In fact, it is all true. The book tells the story of Jack Unterweger, son of an Austrian prostitute and an anonymous GI. Jack grew up to be a small-time hoodlum, pimp, and thief, and was sentenced to life imprisonment for a brutal murder in 1974. So far, so predictable. But after Jack began to writing children’s stories and had them broadcast on Austrian National Radio, the country’s intelligentsia sat up and took notice: here was living …