Crime

See also (in alphabetic order): actus reus, case law, civil law, consensual crime, crime index, crime statistics, criminal justice, criminal law, criminology, defense of justification, detective, hate crime, inchoate crimes, insanity defense, international crime, law, mala in se, mala prohibida, mens rea, organised crime, piracy, police, sexual crime, social control, social policy, statutory law, strict liability crimes, Supreme Court, victimology, war crime.

See crime fiction for a survey of the fictional treatment of crimes and their detection and criminals and their motives.

'Fortunato!'

No answer. I called again --

'Fortunato!'

No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!

One of the early developments started by Poe was the so-called locked room mystery, in which the reader is presented with a puzzle and encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution. A "locked room" in this narrow meaning of the word -- also referred to as a "hermetically sealed chamber" -- is a room in which a murder is committed. There is a limited number of suspects, some of them possibly even without a watertight alibi. So far so good. But on closer inspection it turns out that no one could possibly have done it because at the time the murder was committed there was definitely no way of entering and/or leaving the room unseen or without leaving a trace. The prima facie impression invariably is that the perpetrator has vanished into thin air: The only door, locked from the inside, has to be forced open (and the position of the body clearly suggests that the victim could not have locked it after being struck down by the killer); there is no fireplace or chimney through which the murderer might have escaped; the only window is barred from the inside, or there is virgin snow on the window sill outside; there is no secret passage leading to, or trapdoor anywhere in, the room; the murder weapon is nowhere to be found although the victim has clearly been poisoned, stabbed, shot, strangled, or whatever (with the cause of death established beyond doubt in an autopsy some time later); if the victim has been electrocuted, no live wires can be found anywhere near the corpse; if they have been shot, no one within usual hearing distance remembers hearing a report; etc. etc.

In many locked room mysteries, plausibility was neglected in favour of ingenuity, suspense and a maximum of reader involvement. Among avid readers, heated discussions ensued after the publication of a particular novel on whether it is really possible to commit the perfect murder the way it is described in the book. For example, if the victim is found stabbed in a locked room on one of the upper floors of a building, no murder weapon is found and a window giving onto a backyard has been left open, could they have been killed by a professional knife-thrower from the building across the yard by means of a knife to which a long cord was attached? (This is a variation on the "dagger with wings" idea.) Can eye-witnesses be deluded into thinking they have seen a particular person enter or leave a room when in fact what they saw was just an image in a mirror? Can you gain access to a house by posing as someone else, wearing clothes made of paper, and then get rid of them -- as they would be evidence if you did not -- by burning them in the open fire? And are there really murder weapons that dissolve over time one way or another?

Lots of authors tried their hand at new and far-fetched yet eventually plausible locked room scenarios, with one of the underlying principles always being that supernatural powers or any form of magic must be ruled out from the start. American writer Anna Katharine Green (1846 - 1935) wrote Initials Only (1911), Margery Allingham (1904 - 1966) exploited the same motif in Flowers for the Judge (1936), and many more joined the ranks. The undisputed master of the mystery surrounding a hermetically sealed chamber is John Dickson Carr (1906 - 1977), whose novel The Hollow Man (1935; published in the U.S.A. under the title The Three Coffins) has frequently been hailed as the best of all locked room mysteries. According to the evidence presented at the beginning of the book, one wintry night in London two murders are committed in quick succession. In both cases, the murderer has seemingly vanished into thin air. In the first case, he has disappeared from Professor Grimaud's study after shooting the professor -- without leaving a trace, with the only door to the room locked from the inside, with people present in the hall outside the room, and with both the ground below the window and the roof above it covered with unbroken snow. In the second case, a man walking in the middle of a deserted cul-de-sac at about the same time is evidently shot at close range, with the same (!) revolver, but there is no one else near the man; this is witnessed from some distance by three passers-by -- two tourists and a PC -- who happen to be walking on the pavement. It takes Dr Gideon Fell, scholar and a pompous pain in the neck who keeps hinting at the solution without giving it away, some 200 pages to finally condescend and minutely reconstruct the two crimes and thus solve the mystery.

Rather an interesting thing about The Hollow Man is Chapter 17, which consists of a theoretical digression entitled "The Locked-Room Lecture". In it, Dr Fell gives an extensive explanation of how the murderer is able to deceive everyone else (at least until the riddle is finally solved). How, for example, Fell asks, can the perpetrator create the impression of a hermetically sealed chamber when in fact it is not? What means are there of tampering with a door so that it seems to be locked on the inside? This is just one of the answers -- and, as it happens, a most simple one -- given by Fell:

[...] An illusion, simple but effective. The murderer, after committing his crime, has locked the door from the outside and kept the key. It is assumed, however, that the key is still in the lock on the inside. The murderer, who is first to raise a scare and find the body, smashes the upper glass panel of the door, puts his hand through with the key concealed in it, and finds the key in the lock inside, by which he opens the door. This device has also been used with the breaking of a panel out of an ordinary wooden door.

Watson also serves the important function of catalyst for Holmes's mental processes. [...] From the writer's point of view, Conan Doyle knew the importance of having someone to whom the detective can make enigmatic remarks, a consciousness that's privy to facts in the case without being in on the conclusions drawn from them until the proper time. Any character who performs these functions in a mystery story has come to be known as a "Watson".

The 1920s and 30s are commonly known as the "Golden Age" of detective fiction. Most of its authors were British -- Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), Josephine Tey (1896 - 1952), Anthony Berkeley (aka Francis Iles) (1893 - 1971), and many more -- , some of them -- John Dickson Carr, for example -- American, but with a very British touch. By that time certain conventions and clichés had been established which limited any surprises on the part of the reader to the twists and turns within the plot and of course to the identity of the murderer. The majority of novels of that era were whodunnits, and several authors excelled, after successfully leading their readers on the wrong track, in convincingly revealing to them the least likely suspect as the real villain of the story. What is more, they had a predilection for certain casts of characters and certain settings, with the secluded English country-house at the top of the list.

A typical plot could go like this: A body, preferably that of a stranger, is found in the library by a maid who has just come in to dust the furniture. As it happens, a few guests have just arrived for a weekend in the country -- people who may or may not know each other, people who may or may not have a skeleton in the cupboard. Who knows? They typically include such stock characters as a handsome young gentleman and his beautiful fiancée who, as everyone knows, will be the sole heiress to her father's vast fortune; a heavily made-up actress who has seen better days, pretending that her comeback to the stage is imminent, and her husband, who is unable to hide his drinking problem; an aspiring young author, middle-class to the core, bespectacled, self-conscious, maybe even with a slight stutter, and shabbily dressed anyway; a retired Colonel in a Harris tweed jacket who has spent many years in the Colonies and has met Indians there who poison their arrows with curare; a quiet middle-aged man no one knows anything about who is said to be an old school chum of the host's but who has not been seen talking to the latter at all; and, last but not least, a famous detective who, as the police are either unavailable or incompetent, is assigned to lead the investigation for the time being.

As the detective soon finds out, the household staff consists of an old butler who has faithfully served his present employer ever since the latter was a little boy; a well-nourished female cook who, for some reason or other, knows all about strychnine, arsenic, and food poisoning in general; a gardener, slow on the uptake, who has just informed the butler that a bag of weed-killer, several pruning shears with razor-sharp blades, and a canister of some highly inflammable liquid are missing from the garden shed; a chauffeur who is an ex-convict; and one or two maids secretly in love with someone and possibly pregnant. Finally, there is the host, who has been busy welcoming his guests and tending to his second wife, who has not made her appearance yet due to a spell of migraine. The detective also finds out that, as the couple have just recently got married abroad and then gone straight on their honeymoon to some exotic place, none of their guests has actually ever come face to face with her.

Who the hell has dumped the corpse of a total stranger in the library? How could they have done so without anyone noticing? Who is the man anyway? Does anyone too afraid to say so know him after all? Is a case of mistaken identity at the base of this mystery? While the detective is pondering these questions, weird things start happening. One of the maids almost faints when she sees the young author for the first time, but she quickly regains her composure. The Colonel complains that several pages have been torn from his diary while he was having a bath or dressing for dinner or whatever. The ageing actress is seen near the garden shed, gesticulating in an exaggerated manner while arguing with the seemingly imbecile gardener. A slip of paper with some cryptic message is found. Some time later, just as the guests are having supper, the lights go out. There is commotion in the darkened room. When the blown fuse has been mended and the lights come up again, it is only to find the beautiful young heiress stabbed in the back with a pair of pruning shears, her face in the bowl of soup in front of her, her eyes wide open. Now it suddenly occurs to all the people present that the murderer is still in the house: He (or she) is one of them. People now start talking behind each other's backs, suspecting, fearing and denouncing each other.

As the noose around the murderer's neck tightens, he (or she) is prepared to bump off anyone who has found out his (or her) guilty secret. A third and fourth murder may be committed anytime. Just before the worst comes to the worst, the detective, having made use of his "little grey cells" (as Poirot calls it), assembles the whole party in the library and minutely reconstructs the real chain of events from beginning to end. At first what he says sounds absolutely incredible. Of course everyone accused vehemently objects to all the allegations. At the end of his closing statement, the detective zooms in on the only person -- very often the least likely suspect -- whose actions cannot be accounted for. Often the detective admits having no evidence of any kind to prove his theory; sometimes he bluffs the murderer by pretending he does. Eventually, the murderer is trapped and has just three options left: be arrested without further resistance, try to escape, or commit suicide on the spot.

The rules of the game -- and Golden Age mysteries were considered a game -- were codified in 1929 by Ronald Knox. According to Knox, a detective story "must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end." His "Ten Commandments" (or "Decalogue") are as follows:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues upon which he may happen to light.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

was a long time a-dying. Indeed, one could argue that it still is not dead, since its mannerisms have proved stubbornly persistent in writers one might have expected to abandon them altogether as dated, or worse. Yet the Second World War marked a significant close, just as the First World War had marked a significant beginning. Only during the inter-war years, and particularly in the 1920s, did Golden Age fiction have the happy innocence, the purity and confidence of purpose, which was its true hallmark.

Even by the 1930s its assumptions were being challenged. [...] Where it had once been commonplace to view the Golden Age as a high watermark of achievement, it became equally the fashion to denounce it. It had, so the indictment ran, followed rules which trivialized its subject. It had preferred settings which expressed a narrow, if not deliberately elitist, vision of society. And for heroes it had created detectives at best two-dimensional, at worst tiresome.

A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police. On the one hand, he realizes that both the "cops" and he himself are fighting on the same side. On the other hand, especially where police corruption and foul play are involved, it is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself. Also, as Raymond Chandler's protagonist Philip Marlowe -- immortalized by actor Humphrey Bogart in the movie adaptation (1946) of the novel The Big Sleep (1939) -- admits to his client, General Sternwood, he finds it rather tiresome, as an individualist, to fit into the extensive set of rules and regulations for police detectives:

'Tell me about yourself, Mr Marlowe. I suppose I have a right to ask?'

'Sure, but there's very little to tell. I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there's any demand for it. There isn't much in my trade. I worked for Mr Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator once. [...] I'm unmarried because I don't like policemen's wives.'

'And a little bit of a cynic,' the old man smiled. 'You didn't like working for Wilde?'

'I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination, General.'

even if Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers [...] had not written the way they did or Knox had not formulated his rules. The impetus came from the conditions of American life and the opportunities available to the American writer in the 1920s. The economic boom following the First World War combined with the introduction of Prohibition in 1920 to encourage the rise of the gangster. The familiar issues of law and lawlessness in a society determined to judge itself by the most ideal standards took on a new urgency. At the same time, the pulp magazines were already exploiting a ready market for adventure stories -- what Ronald Knox would have called 'shockers'-- which made heroes of cowboys, soldiers, explorers and masked avengers. It took no great leap of imagination for them to tackle modern crime and detection, fresh from the newspaper headlines of the day, and create heroes with the same vigour [...].

It is only natural that all this should be reflected in the fiction of the day. As early as the turn of the century -- almost a century before the BSE crisis hit Europe -- , Upton Sinclair attacked the U.S. meat-packing industry in his muckraking novel The Jungle (1906). In this powerful exposé‚ Sinclair depicts the capitalist entrepreneurs who own the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants of Chicago as criminals forming giant trusts and syndicates and exploiting virtually everyone who works for them, whether office clerk, foreman, farmer, simple labourer, or animal. It is the big bosses who are responsible for the lack of safety measures, which results in frequent accidents among their employees who operate machinery, with able workers turning into useless invalids within seconds, and also for the lack of hygiene in the stockyards, which causes innumerable cases of food poisoning and death all over the country. The Chicago of The Jungle -- this is the Chicago before the days of arch-villain Al Capone (1899 - 1947) -- is a city certainly beyond control and almost beyond hope: The unemployed, the sick, the homeless, the evicted, many of them immigrants, crowd the dirty streets of the slum districts; con men, thieves, robbers, rapists, quacks performing illegal abortions, loan sharks, greedy landlords, illegal prostitutes, and corrupt policemen and government inspectors are everywhere and are never brought to justice. Everyone has their price, everyone can be bought, everyone who is in a position of power "takes graft", including the judges and the local politicians. (As Sinclair sees it, the only solution to all these problems is socialism, but that's a different story.)

Novels and journalism written by muckrakers informed the U.S. public about the plight and the grievances of certain portions of the population. At the same time, they set the stage for the writers of the hard-boiled school. It was city life of the sort described in The Jungle which formed the background to many a novel to be published in the years to come. If we leave the big city, however, and travel into the country, the idyllic picture we have been expecting vanishes when we become aware of all the misery that can be found there as well. Very soon on our trip we encounter the tramp, or hobo, who roams the country, carrying all his worldly possessions with him, a man willing to work wherever he is needed -- for a meal, a bed, or a few cents. John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968), a U.S. author of mainstream fiction, described two itinerant farm workers in his novel Of Mice and Men (1937), and James M. Cain (1892 - 1977) made use of the hobo tradition in his classic novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934): A tramp comes across a small service station situated somewhere along a lonely country road and gets a job there from the owner. The proprietor, a middle-aged Greek, is either too stupid, or too drunk, or both, to realize that his beautiful young wife, bored stiff by the life she is forced to lead in the middle of nowhere, very soon is more than just on friendly terms with the tramp. Together, the two lovers start planning the Greek's murder. Unforeseen events intervene, and they have to start scheming against her husband all over again.

Another author who enjoyed writing about the sleazy side of life in the U.S.A. is Jonathan Latimer. In his novel Solomon's Vineyard (1941), private eye Karl Craven aims to rescue a young heiress from the clutches of a weird cult. Apart from being an action-packed thriller, the novel contains open references to the detective's sex drive and, worse still, allusions to, and a brief description of, kinky sexual practices. The novel was considered "too hot" for Latimer's American publishers and was not published until 1950, and then in a heavily Bowdlerized version. (The unexpurgated novel came out in Britain during the Second World War though.) From an early 21st century point of view, the reasons for declining publication of Solomon's Vineyard seem absurd. For example, these are the opening lines of the novel, with Karl Craven, the narrator, describing his first encounter with a young woman called Carmel:

From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed. The silk was tight and under it the muscles worked slow and easy. I saw weight there, and control, and, brother, those are things I like in a woman. I put down my bags and went after her along the station platform.

She walked towards the waiting-room. She had gold-blonde hair, and curves, and breasts the size of Cuban pineapples. [...]

'I like big men,' she said.

Her voice was raspy, like she had a cold. She came up to me and grabbed my arm. Her fingers hurt the muscles. I could smell her perfume. She came close to me. I thought I knew what she wanted. I tried to kiss her. She jerked away.

'No.'

'I'm sorry.'

She slapped me. She was strong; my cheek stung. She moved in, swinging both arms. Now she had her fists closed. She hit my arms and my chest. I tried to hold her.

'Hit me!' she said.

It was goddam queer. I held her arms, but she got loose. She struck my chest.

She said: 'Hit me.'

[...]

I ripped the shirt off her, she fighting all the time and liking it. I ripped at her clothes, not caring how much I hurt her. She squirmed on the dirty floor, panting. There was blood on her mouth. I don't know if it was mine or hers. It tasted sweet. Suddenly she stopped moving.

'Now,' she said. 'Now, goddam you. Now!'

Later we lay on the floor.

The other author is Kenneth Fearing (1902 - 1961), not necessarily a hard-boiled writer, whose novel The Big Clock (1947) exemplifies the individualism prevalent in American society around the middle of the 20th century. In addition, The Big Clock is remarkable in regard to the narrative technique employed by Fearing: A multiple first-person narration, the novel presents the same events seen from various perspectives and angles.

But, according to Fiedler, it was also up to the critics to reassess already existing literature. In the case of U.S. crime fiction, writers that so far had been regarded as the authors of nothing but "pulp fiction" -- Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and others -- were gradually seen in a new light. Today, Chandler's creation, private eye Philip Marlowe -- who appears, for example, in his novels The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940) -- has achieved cult status and has also been made the topic of literary seminars at universities round the world, whereas on first publication Chandler's novels were seen as little more than cheap entertainment for the uneducated masses.

As far as the history of crime fiction is concerned, it is an astonishing fact that many authors have been reluctant to this very day to publish their crime novels under their real names -- as if they were ashamed of doing something "improper". A few examples may suffice: In the late 1930s and 40s, British County Court judge Arthur Alexander Gordon Clark (1900 - 1958) published a number of detective novels under the nom de plume Cyril Hare in which he made use of his profound knowledge of the English legal system, for instance in Tragedy at Law (1942). When he was still young and unknown, award-winning British novelist Julian Barnes (born 1946) published some crime novels under the assumed name of Dan Kavanagh. Other authors take delight in cherishing their alter egos: Ruth Rendell (born 1930) writes one sort of crime novels as Ruth Rendell and another type as Barbara Vine; John Dickson Carr also used the pseudonym Carter Dickson.

At the beginning of the new millennium the output of crime novels in both Great Britain and the U.S.A. is enormous. As far as many authors writing today are concerned, crime fiction is still seen as a distinct literary subgenre, but it is no longer regarded as automatically inferior to "mainstream" fiction. However, there is a certain amount of overlapping. Lots of novels cannot really be categorized, a fact which is gradually being recognized. For example, Patrick Redmond's (born 1966) first novel The Wishing Game (1999) certainly deals with both capital and petty crime, and has been advertised as "a powerful psychological thriller of haunting suspense", but it could just as well be subsumed under mainstream literature. Similarly, Helen Zahavi's novel Dirty Weekend (1991) about a frustrated woman on a three-day killing spree can either be seen as a fresh voice in radical feminism or as a thriller, or as both.

In addition to the kind of humour that pervades practically all genre novels, parody and pastiche have had a long tradition within the field of crime fiction. (A pastiche is a piece of writing in which the style is copied from someone or something else, in particular one which contains a mixture of different styles.) Shortly after Conan Doyle had published his first stories, Sherlock Holmes spoofs appeared. Similarly, there have been innumerable Agatha Christie send-ups. The idea is always to exaggerate and mock the most noticeable features of the original and, by doing so, amuse especially those readers who are also familiar with that original. One of the earliest parodies of a whodunnit is Englishman E.C. Bentley's (1875 - 1956) novel Trent's Last Case (1913), which introduced (!) Philip Trent, a detective who gets everything wrong right from the start: Assigned to investigate the murder of English millionaire Sigsbee Manderson, who is found shot in the library of his country house, Trent makes his first major mistake when he falls head over heels in love with the main suspect. In the course of his investigation he jumps at the wrong clues, in his reasoning he carefully eliminates the wrong suspects, and finally he arrives at a conclusion concerning the identity of Manderson's murderer which turns out to be completely false. At the end of the novel, the real perpetrator casually informs him during dinner that he/she has shot Manderson. These are Trent's final words to the murderer:

'[...] I'm cured. I will never touch a crime-mystery again. The Manderson affair shall be Philip Trent's last case. His high-blown pride at length breaks under him.' Trent's smile suddenly returned. 'I could have borne everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason. [...] I have absolutely nothing left to say, except this: you have beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of self-abasement. And you shall pay for the dinner.'

A piece of practical advice to the reader

Reading anything about a piece of crime fiction (such as a blurb or an Introduction) before reading the text itself should generally be avoided. Even if they do not mean to, advertisers, reviewers, scholars and aficionados have a habit of giving away details or parts of the plot, and sometimes -- for example in the case of Mickey Spillane's novel I, the Jury -- even the solution. (After the credits of Billy Wilder's film Witness for the Prosecution, the cinemagoers are asked not to talk to anyone about the plot so that future viewers will also be able to fully enjoy the unravelling of the mystery.)