Eighty years ago this month, in February 1946, the left-wing Tribune magazine published George Orwell’s essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ in which the writer identified a certain class of crime as most appealing to the tabloid-reading British public – and contrasted the ‘cosiness’ of this type of early 20th-century domestic murder with the brutal sadism of killings committed in Britain during the second world war.
Two years previously, in 1944, while war still raged, in another essay entitled ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Orwell specifically contrasted the ‘hard-boiled’ school of crime fiction with the gentlemanly Raffles stories of E.W. Hornung, featuring a well-mannered upper-crust jewel thief. He linked the noir fiction exemplified by James Hadley Chase in his novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish with the vicious totalitarianism that he lambasted in his political writing, noting: ‘It is important to notice that the cult of power is mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes.’
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) was the first novel in the immensely successful crime writing career of the British-born Hadley Chase. With a background in the book trade, Chase had noticed the increasing popularity of the hard-boiled school of US crime fiction in such novels as James M. Cain’s much filmed The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Having equipped himself with a dictionary of US gangster slang, Chase sat down to write his own hard-boiled novel, deliberately avoiding the gentle cosiness that had been the hallmark of English crime writing during the golden age of the genre. It was an instant and enormous success – the first of 90 crime thrillers that Chase would pen in a similar style, leading him to end his days in Switzerland in 1985 as a wealthy tax exile.
As Orwell observed, prior to No Orchids for Miss Blandish, English murders, both in fact and fiction, had been far removed from the grim and bloody reality of killing. Murder in England, in fact, was all too often a genteel activity akin to cookery or golf. The same year that Orwell wrote his essay, British murder was literally turned into a parlour game with the invention of the hugely popular board game Cluedo in which brutal crimes such as bashing someone’s brains out with lead piping were sanitised by being carried out in the libraries and drawing rooms of a country house by reassuring characters called Colonel Mustard or the Reverend Green.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that early 20th-century British crime fiction was dominated by middle-class women, rather than the hard-bitten tough guys in the US such as Raymond Chandler or Samuel Dashiell Hammett. The queen of crime on this side of the pond was Agatha Christie, but she was just the leading lady in a cast that included names such as Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey and New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh. The genteel school of lady crime writers has continued into our own times with the work of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, with some such as James and Marsh being elevated into the establishment as dames. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any prominent woman writer in Britain who has not also turned her hand to crime fiction, Antonia Fraser, Jilly Cooper and J.K. Rowling being just three of the most famous names that spring to mind.
The actual messy business of murder is kept at a safe and unrealistic arm’s length
A great gulf, then, wider than the Atlantic, separates American and British writing about crime. Typically, British crime fiction is and was, even when written by male authors such as Colin Dexter, Alexander McCall Smith or Richard Osman, ladylike: middle class, rather refined, unrealistic, and taking place in rural or exotic locations like Christie’s Egypt or on board the Orient Express. American crime fiction, by contrast, both on page and screen is urban, gritty and usually involves low life scumbag characters carrying out killings of brutish sadistic violence. The highbrow American literary critic Edmund Wilson scorned genteel British detective fiction in his 1945 New Yorker essay ‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ which mocked Christie’s early Hercule Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in which the Queen of Crime had overturned the conventional rules of detective fiction by making her narrator the killer.
British crime fiction is nevertheless more moral than its American equivalent. Usually, crimes are solved by clever detective work often carried out by private amateurs such as Poirot, or his original progenitor Sherlock Holmes. Frequently, these great detectives are from an upper class or comfortable background like Holmes himself or Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. Solving sordid killings becomes an intellectual jigsaw puzzle. The murderer who is trapped by the logic and reasoning of the detective is an immoral character whose crime has transgressed the moral standards of decent society and therefore gets the punishment that they deserve; their exposure restores the moral framework that their crime had briefly challenged. Even Chandler’s grubby private eye Philip Marlowe was famously described by his creator as a moral being; tarnished but unafraid. ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean… he is the hero.’
One serious female author who was the polar opposite of the cosy gentrification of crime, and whose books are masterpieces of amorality, was Patricia Highsmith. Her hero character Tom Ripley is a monster who turned lying, deception and murder into a fine art and whose crimes we are almost expected to admire. Another female crime writer who knew whereof she wrote was the late historical detective fiction author Anne Perry. In 1994 it was revealed that as a teenager Perry had conspired with a friend to batter her friend’s mother to death in New Zealand, and served five years in jail for her crime. Her story was screened in Kate Winslet’s breakthrough movie Heavenly Creatures.
Highsmith and Perry, however, were the exceptions that proved the rule. In general, genteel feminisation has continued to dominate crime fiction and TV crime dramas in Britain: witness series such as Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, Miss Marple and Vera. The depiction of serial killing in long-running series like Midsomer Murders, and Inspector Morse with its spin-offs, proves that for the huge audiences that enjoy crime fiction, the actual messy business of murder is kept at a safe and unrealistic arm’s length.
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