1. Mediatization, modernity and globalization: crime and law in media culture? -- Approaching media, crime, and culture -- Thought-crime prevention? Early conceptions of the mass and the media -- Media messaging in modernity -- The global soul? Globalization, identity and media culture -- The emergence of the media hybrid -- The academe and the study of media, crime and law -- Modern media and the criminological project: dichotomies and dilemmas -- 2. Real crime/crime stories: the collapse of fantasy and fact? -- Crime: metaphorically speaking, a practice? -- Crime dramas: the collapse of the 'real'? -- Will the missing context please stand up? 'Implosion' and its problems -- 3. Novel forms, dramatic scenes: crime and law in popular culture -- Reading crime fiction: crime in popular culture -- Reading law film -- Reading the fictive: doing the culture -- 4. Does splatter matter? Representing violence, regulating consumption -- A passionate cause: the splatter effect -- Representing violence and the body -- Contestation and cultures of violence -- The political and the aesthetic: gendered violence -- Does splatter (still) matter? -- 5. (S)talking in cyberspace: virtuality, crime and law -- Cyberspace and cybercultures: approaching the prosthetic -- Crime, law and the cyber -- The virtual/real: where does it leave crime and law? -- 6. Crime, law and media futures -- Cartographic convolutions? The media mapping of crime and law -- Beyond and outside the postmodern -- Crime and law in media culture -- Entailments, ethics and crime, law, media, futures