Moll Flanders: Paving The Way For Crime Books

"My Favorite Murder" Podcast embroidery

I'm really into true crime. Like REALLY into it. My favorite podcast is "My Favorite Murder" One of my favorite TV shows is Criminal Minds, I'm seriously considering the Zodiac Killer for this year's Halloween costume, I read this book book called Cold Cases: Unsolved Mysteries with one of my roommates and fellow murderinas at night for bedtime stories. When I saw that my category of book was crime, I was stoked.

Moll Flanders bounces from marriage to marriage to affair to discover strange things ie, one of her husbands is her brother etc. She struggles to stay financially stable and bounces around with these different husbands some of whom are frauds, like herself until she decides to create her own financial network. She begins to steal and she's good. In fact, she's legendary. She avoids the police for years and then is eventually caught.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks in Catch Me if You Can

As I was reading about Moll Flanders I was reminded of one of my favorite old crime movies Catch Me if You Can. In this movie, Leonardo DiCaprio cons his way into thousands and thousands of dollars and he is so good. Just completely excellent. He's able to manipulate and create ways out of situations right on the spot. Even when he his backed up against a wall and it's just him and the man who's been chasing him for months and months, he's able to escape. I'm excited to read this book because obviously I'm into that kind of stuff, because I respect people who are creative and can think quickly and it's totally fascinating to me, and because it shows a real cultural shift as far as entertainment goes for the Enlightenment period. 

Moll Flanders is scandalous, there's no other name for it. It's a shift from the more virtuous books and print that we first saw originally. Moll is not a traditional heroin and this book seems to be one of the very first of it's kind. Moll Flanders paved the way for Crime books, I'm excited to see where it started and compare and contrast crime reading back then to now.

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