‘Alice Diamond, giant—queen of the terrors’: female gangsterism, violence and criminal mythmaking in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century London ‘underworld’.

Alice Diamond—leader of the interwar Forty Thieves gang—was portrayed by the contemporary press as an inhabitant of the London ‘underworld’. The ‘underworld’ is denoted within scholarship as a narrative tool used to place ‘othered’ individuals who did not fit the stringent perceptions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century social ideology. Despite this, the ‘underworld’ was often presented as a real locale within South London, gaining widespread attention and condemnation. By framing Diamond as an ‘Underworld Amazon’, ‘Giant’, and ‘Queen of the Terrors’, the press was able to link female gangsterism and the female body to deemed ‘masculine’ criminality, allowing for commentary over criminal behaviour—namely atavism, violence and ‘the born criminal’. This article shows that the mythmaking surrounding Diamond, the Forty Thieves gang and the ‘underworld’ was used to project female gangsterism as a form of ‘internal terror’ to fuel fears over gender, post-war brutalisation and the changing interwar landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]