Review: Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, by Ernest Mandel

Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 152.

Ernest Mandel, whom I was surprised to see writing about crime fiction (as a scholar he is known in the main for his work in economic theory and political economy), promises in the subtitle of his book a specifically social history of the genre to which he here turns his attention.

He delivers on that promise, detailing what now seems the familiar "main line" of the crime story while explaining its development in terms of changes in social life. As Mandel tells it, the genre's beginning in early modern times with the criminal as a hero, oft a romanticized one, such as we see in picaresque fiction like Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, expressed a sense of revolt on the part of the bourgeoisie (among other groups) against the feudal order of the day.

That changed as the feudal order declined and fell. The result was that by the nineteenth century there was less tendency to romanticize the criminal. There was, however, still a measure of sympathy, sufficient that the crime story was presented not as a mere tale of individual villainy, but as a social criticism--as in William Godwin's Caleb Williams, or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. As Mandel explains it, in an era where people were locked up for debt bourgeois anti-statism didn't just mean an unwillingness to pay their share of the tax burden, but a genuine suspicion of state police power and military establishments as well; while the comfortable and even the conservative had not yet become Panglossian about capitalism. (Balzac was a conservative "legitimist"--a monarchist who favored the rule of the traditional Bourbon house--but reading Pere Goriot one can see a robust, critical social understanding that made him Karl Marx's favorite novelist, and which two centuries later Thomas Piketty found it worthwhile to cite in his formidable analysis, Capital for the Twenty-First Century.)

Of course, the nineteenth century was the time when the bourgeoisie, as they grew richer, more powerful, more established, with society increasingly remade in their image and organized around their needs, made a Great Leap Rightward, from revolutionary to conservative and even reactionary. And crime fiction reflected that shift, the social criticism falling away, and the genre's sympathies instead increasingly with those who upheld an order they took ever more for granted as right and good--the detective who uncovers and punishes crime--while the criminal was demonized. (One might say that Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean switched places, certainly by the time that Sherlock Holmes appeared on the scene.)

The crime story was touched, too, by the rise of organization, bigness, professionalism--on both sides of the law. The police became bureaucratized, their vast, scientific machinery, with its files and forensics, routinely grinding out the truth in "procedural" fashion. At the same time crime became larger-scale and more sophisticated, an illicit equivalent of the Big Business so evident and powerful elsewhere, which itself increasingly partook of the illicit: "Legitimate business," seeing laissez-faire replaced by an increasingly high-tax, high-regulation state, increasingly broke the law as a matter of course; as in an age of international conflict and domestic unrest, of formally and permanently institutionalized spy and counterspy, the state's activities in turn became criminal in character; with each associating with, aligning itself with, corrupting, the others, all as organized crime reinvested its profits in legal endeavors and illegally bought politicians, and as business and government in their turn looked to crime for special services.

Lone detectives, lone heroes, were increasingly out of their depth in all this. The cops no longer needed the services of a Holmes, his genius superfluous, while anyway he could hardly be pictured taking on an Al Capone. Indeed, as the corruption of business and government proceeded, such an enemy became too big even for such as Red Harvest's Continental Op--big enough for the local corruption of Personville ("Poisonville"), Montana (after setting the gangsters on each other, he advised Old Wilson to send in the National Guard), but not what seemed an increasingly rotten global system (the Governor's cleanness in the matter a thing that could no longer be assumed). In the fiction of the '70s, by which point this sense of a corrupt system had come to be something close to conventional wisdom, the prevailing note was a cynicism that inclined writers to a different sort of hero, and a different sort of ending--heroes who were disaffected, but able to do only so much about the situation that left them so. Trevanian's Shibumi (1979) seems a notable example. Its protagonist Nicolai Hel may be the most skilled assassin on Earth, but even he cannot rid the world of the oil syndicate's conspiracy. The best he can do is exact a personal revenge on his enemies, and restore his little bit of peace in the world--a purely individual revolt that in Mandel's view is all rather "petty-bourgeois" and necessarily negative in contrast with genuine political, social change. Thus the genre seems to have hit a dead end.

Having published his analysis in 1984 Mandel's tracing of the history ends there. And one can only wonder what he would have made of the development of this still quite salable genre three decades since. But as it stands it is a formidable and, I think, extremely useful, analysis. Shorter and less comprehensive in its survey of the material than, for instance, Julian Symons' Bloody Murder, it is far more rigorous in tracing the genre's evolution, to say nothing of presenting a picture of the social factors shaping it. It is interesting, too, for having a somewhat more international perspective than works like Symons (the Belgian Mandel casually referencing a good deal of French, German and other continental work English-language readers are unlikely to have even heard of, but which adds to the strength of his historical analysis). The result seems to me indispensable for anyone looking for the big picture of the history of this important genre.