|
1997 | 19.3 |
Michael Cohen
Inside the Murderer
When fifth century B. C. Athenians in Sophocles' audience identified with Oedipus, detecting his father's murderer and simultaneously discovering himself to be the murderer, they experienced a convergence of spectator, detective, and villain that would later prove one of popular fiction's most potent devices. From its beginnings crime fiction has exploited the appeal of imagining oneself inside the brain of the culprit. Caleb Williams (1794), which critics such as Stephen Knight, Régis Messac, and Julian Symons consider the first detective novel, puts its narrator into the position of the hunted, convincing him that he is responsible for the death of his nemesis-idol Mr. Falkland. The nineteenth century then opens up the psychology of the subject. Edgar Allan Poe's and Arthur Conan Doyle's detectives hunt antagonists disturbingly like mirror images of themselves. For Poe's Dupin, getting inside the criminal mind is the detective's most valuable skill, and precisely that which the official police lack. In "The Purloined Letter," Dupin tells of a schoolboy who wins all his schoolmates' marbles in the guessing game of "even and odd" by accurately assessing his opponents' intelligence:
"For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, 'the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second. . . .' Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even. . . .' Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed 'lucky,'--what, in the last analysis, is it?"Dupin manages such an identification of his own intellect with that of the Minister D----, who has stolen an incriminating letter from a woman the police prefect calls only a "royal" or "exalted personage" (919). "My measures were adapted to his capacity," says Dupin, who proceeds to imagine how the thief would anticipate the police search of his house and his person. Dupin confidently details entire mental sequences as those of his opponent: "I felt that this whole train of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister" (928)."It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent." (925)
Much nineteenth-century fiction depends on a character facing his nemesis as if staring into a slightly distorting mirror. Doppelgängers are everywhere. Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde really is Dr. Jekyll. While Marlow's Kurz is only one aspect of Marlow, The Secret Sharer whom Conrad's young captain helps and then sheds is perhaps an earlier self. And Count Dracula is only the worst imagined form of Dr. Van Helsing or any of those who become the Count's victims. When we think of doubling within crime fiction, we are likely to think immediately of Holmes and Moriarty--either locked in a deadly embrace at the Reichenbach Falls or facing each other in that earlier encounter when they get inside each other's minds. In "The Final Problem" Holmes reports to Watson the visit paid to him by Moriarty:
The identification of the detective hero with the villain and the exploration of the latter's mind is not limited to the fiction of Poe and Doyle in the last century. Wilkie Collins's hero, an unconscious thief, narrates his own experiences in The Moonstone; Collins's unctuous villain Fosco gives us a first-person account in The Woman in White. Dostoevsky explores the psyche of a character contemplating, performing, and attempting to conceal murder; then he invents a detective who follows all the labyrinthine twists of his murderer's mind. Before he can prove it and because he cannot yet prove it, Porfiry Petrovitch tells Raskolnikov of his suspicion--really his conviction--that Raskolnikov is the murderer. "Your heart and character," he says, "I flatter myself I have to some extent divined" (387). Porfiry Petrovitch goes beyond understanding Raskolnikov to identifying with him in some respects: "I, too, have felt the same," he says of the Nietzschean ideas in Raskolnikov's journal article (389). Porfiry Petrovitch has staged small Hamlet-like scenes to provoke Raskolnikov and get him to reveal his guilt, although Petrovitch's motive is more compassionate than Hamlet's."You evidently don't know me," said he."On the contrary," I answered, "I think it is fairly evident that I do. Pray take a chair. I can spare you five minutes, if you have anything to say."
"All that I have to say has already crossed your mind," said he.
"Then possibly my answer has crossed yours," I replied.(472)
The motiveless crime, if it is to be detected, requires a detective of the mind, who can travel the same mental roads as the criminal. Thus, once Dostoevsky invents Raskolnikov, he must invent Porfiry Petrovitch. And Petrovitch affirms that someone who is not a murderer can think like one. In telling us every thought and hesitation of Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky shows how a writer can go inside the mind of the murderer, and the reception of Crime and Punishment continues to demonstrate how much readers want to go there, too.
The psychological detective invented by Dostoevsky is a kind of middle man who stands between the "derangement" of the criminal's mind and the "normality" of the reader's. But part of the interest in Dostoevsky's tale lies in the way Petrovitch convinces us that Raskolnikov is not deranged, and that the criminal mind is not an aberration, not profoundly different from our own. He allows for our identification with the villain, an identification that has always been mediated before by an exceptional man--Oedipus, Hamlet, Dupin, Holmes. Porfiry Petrovitch is not exceptional and is much more like us. Thus he makes easier a feature of much crime fiction in the twentieth century in which the reader identifies with the villain and the detective drops out of the middle. This century has taken a special direction toward complicity--with stories inverting the traditional order of narration, first-person narration by the culprits themselves, and a movement beyond empathy and identification toward implication of the reader.
Crime literature viewed from the culprit's angle got a new beginning in the new century with the stories in R. Austin Freeman's The Singing Bone (1912). "A surprising amount of nonsense has been talked about conscience"--with this opening of Freeman’s first story we are inside the mind of Silas Hickler, and in the succeeding pages we watch him forsake his ordinary trade of burglary for premeditated murder (9). Freeman's inverted detective stories give us first a careful account of the perpetrator's thoughts as the crime is planned, committed, and covered up. All this occurs before we even meet Freeman's detective, Dr. Thorndyke. The pattern is that of Crime and Punishment, but a novelty for the kind of popular fiction that Poe's and Doyle's detective stories had made familiar to readers. Freeman gives up those elements that had seemed most vital to the detective story of Poe or Doyle: the concealment of the identity of the criminal and the method of the crime until they would be dramatically revealed by the detective at the end of the story. Freeman aimed at another sort of concealment and dramatic revelation:
Freeman assumes that the reader's interest is still with his detective, and so he spends only about two-thirds as much time with "The Mechanism of Crime" as with "The Mechanism of Detection," to use the section titles for the first story in The Singing Bone, "The Case of Oscar Brodski." He is probably right, but his stories open the possibility of a crime narrative that is written solely from the point of view of the malefactor, and in the next decade, Agatha Christie writes such a narrative in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).The reader has seen the crime committed and is in possession of all the facts. It might seem that there is nothing left to tell. But I calculated that the reader would be so occupied with the crime that he would overlook the evidence; and so it turned out. The second part, describing the investigation of the crime, had to most readers the effect of new matter. All the facts were known; but their evidential quality had not been recognized. (5)
Part of the interest in Christie’s tale is in the narrative skill with which the narrator is made to tell the truth and still conceal his guilt. Our appreciation of the skill comes only after we have finished the book, and then another sort of interest arises: we think of the character of James Sheppard as both murderer and innocuous village doctor. One of our defeated expectations has been that Sheppard would be the detective's sidekick, would act as Hastings, whom he seemingly replaces in narrative function. Interest in the detective is diminished by these other interests; some readers cannot even recall that the detective in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is Hercule Poirot rather than some other Christie puzzle-solver. Some critics alleged that Christie broke the "rules" about playing fair in detective fiction with this book, but what Christie violated were expectations that have nothing to do with concealing clues. That the detective ought to have the largest role in a mystery is one such expectation; another is that when we look inside a criminal mind what we find there should be "such black and grainèd spots / As will not leave their tinct"--marks so distinctively evil that we would never mistake the mind for an innocent person's. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd suggests at once the possible interest and the possible banality of the criminal mind. After this book writers frequently stay within such a consciousness for the whole of a crime novel, and, as if to answer the criticism that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd plays unfairly by concealing the murderer's guilt, later books simply have the murderer reveal that guilt and proclaim it (if the killer is consciously aware of it) in a first-person narrative.
Mystery classics of the 1930s, forties, and early fifties do not hesitate to take us inside the mind of the culprit. In Malice Aforethought (1931), Francis Iles creates a character who is both self-deprecatingly funny and unabashedly murderous. Dr. Edmund Bickleigh kills his very unpleasant wife with a complicated plot. First he secretly gives her a patent medicine that causes headaches. Then he gives her increasing doses of morphine for the headaches. When he pretends concern at her growing addiction and stops the morphine, she begins stealing it from him. He makes sure that others are aware of her habit and then kills her with an overdose. There is no mystery in Malice Aforethought, although there are some surprises at the end. Bickleigh is an engaging character, but he does not really have the reader's sympathy. We are curious about him and interested in his dealings with a domineering wife and two mistresses. Because he is clever and imaginative, he seems to have a chance of getting away with murder, and the only suspense in the book surrounds Bickleigh's arrest and trial.
The murder narrative can be handled lightly, as in Iles's book, or more grimly, as in roman noir versions, generally first-person narratives, such as James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) or Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952). These two books are character studies of marginal types, a genre of fiction that both Cain and Thompson polished into a peculiar American art form. Though the characters of the Cain and Thompson book are poorer, the settings more ramshackle, and the going grittier, these books have more in common with Iles's than simply using murderers as protagonists. The downfall of the murderer in each results from ironic plot developments, and the three books are anything but deadly in style with humor that grows directly from absolute stylistic control.
Generalizing very broadly, we can divide the psychological crime narratives of this period into three categories. In one category are the light treatments of murderous intent or accomplishment, as in Iles and in Richard Hull's The Murder of My Aunt (1935). Where the first category is predominantly British, the second, roman noir treatment of the subject is primarily American is at its peak in works by Cain and Thompson. Finally there are the studies of schizophrenia in murderers who are not really aware that they are murderers. There is a touch of this in Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, whose narrator occasionally mentions "the sickness," but his narrator's lethal sadism is a different pathology from the paranoid schizophrenia explored in John Franklin Bardin's The Devil Take the Blue-Tailed Fly (1948) and Margaret Millar's Beast in View (1955). These novels have well-turned plots joined with well-observed case histories; they are absorbing and frightening as well.
There are, I suppose, two desires in us that drive the interest in getting inside criminal minds: we want to see something like ourselves, and we want to see something different from ourselves. When we watch Oedipus, Aristotle says we identify with him enough to experience some of the terror of being him, but the terror is purged as we watch his suffering. Finally Oedipus is one singled out for special suffering; he is not us, and Joseph Addison says part of the aesthetic pleasure of such a tragedy is in the realization that we are not Oedipus. When we live for those hours with Bardin's Ellen/Nelle, we know she is not a monster, that her wishes to have her world clear and stable are our wishes, and we become less sure we are not her. Bardin's Ellen and Millar's Helen can be kept at a distance from us by our insistence that they are first of all fictions, and that finally even within a fictional world they would be aberrant. But they do grow on us. Margaret Millar says of Beast in View:
Near the end of the book my involvement with it was complete. I was Helen Clarvoe. Every sound was a threat, its volume exaggerated. The telephone no longer rang, it shrilled. People didn't talk, they screamed. A dog's bark would make me jump out of my chair. Creator and creation had become one. When this happens the result may be a strong and unforgettable book.There is an occasional attempt to bridge categories during the mid-century period. Nicholas Blake's The Beast Must Die (1938) is partly a case study of an obsessive murderer (told in first-person narration) and partly a traditional mystery of the English drawing-room type. And among detective stories proper, as distinguished from psychological thrillers, the Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon are very much concerned with the detective's psychological identification with malefactors. It is Maigret's genius and his curse to be able to get into the mind of those who have committed crimes, to see their motives and to feel their fears.The experience of writing it had a profound effect on me. Readers' letters indicated it had the same effect on them. I was threatened with a libel suit, informed by a patient in a mental institution that at last she had found someone who really understood her, invited to join a coven of witches, asked to address a meeting of psychiatric social workers, and presented with the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award. . . . Helen Clarvoe and I made a good team. I hope we never meet again.(1-2)
The real category breaker is Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Before this book, those who told us candidly of their lust, those whose malice we watched, those who concealed, more or less, their sicknesses--all of these came to a sticky end. After Ripley anything may happen.
Highsmith never smoothes over or romanticizes Ripley, but our involvement with him grows throughout the book. At the beginning, he is a small-time grifter in New York expecting to be arrested at any moment. He is hired by Richard Greenleaf's father to go to Italy to try to persuade his son to return. He ends up killing Richard, impersonating him for a time, killing one of Richard's friends, and ultimately getting away with both murders. These heinous acts are not excused by the narrative, but are made fascinating by Ripley's characterization. Ripley is an orphan raised by a cruel and stingy aunt who has left him a kind of moral imbecile. Ripley has an abbreviated list of emotions: he can feel fear and hatred, but he's apparently incapable of remorse or anything like compassion. Ripley is a sexual innocent--probably a homosexual--with a talent for mimicry and acting that has helped him fill in for his emotional gaps. When Richard tells him at one point that Ripley needs to be nicer to Richard's friend Marge Sherwood, Ripley thinks that he must be more convincing when he pretends to be nice to her. Ripley has a brain in which the technical has taken over all the moral functions. Here, for example, is the moment when he begins thinking about killing Richard:
Our horror at this murder and at the nearly motiveless one of Richard's friend Freddie Miles does not alienate Ripley from our interest, however. His character is compelling precisely because of what it lacks and the kinds of substitutions that Highsmith makes plausible. For Ripley the enjoyment of possessions, however they are obtained, takes part of the place of sex; gradually we come to realize that brushes with danger also have a sexual frisson for him. Just after he has fooled the Italian police for yet another time, for example, he rejoices in an almost postcoital way:
Tonight he was going to have a dinner. And look out at the moonlight on the Grand Canal. And watch the gondolas drifting as lazily as they ever drifted for any honeymooner, with the gondoliers and their oars silhouetted against the moonlit water. He was suddenly ravenous. He was going to have something luscious and expensive to eat--whatever the Grand Hotel's specialty was, breast of pheasant or petto di pollo, and perhaps canneloni to begin with, creamy sauce over delicate pasta and a good valpolicella to sip while he dreamed about his future and planned where he went from here. (180)After the second murder Ripley has to negotiate one crisis after another: his forged signatures on Richard's monthly maintenance checks are called into question, the Italian police accuse him of having killed Richard when he is being himself and accuse him of having killed Ripley when he is impersonating Richard, and eventually Ripley has to confront Marge Sherwood, Richard's father, and an American detective the father has hired.
All of these crises look as if they are building to Ripley's entrapment, but suddenly he escapes the last threat and is free. We reach the last page and there has been no retribution. But the effect is very different from imagining Raskolnikov without Porfiry Petrovitch. Ripley looks out at the clear skies of Greece at the end of the book with his conscience--what there is of it--unclouded as well. Are we outraged at his escape or happy for him? Highsmith cannot make us love Ripley, but she has involved us in his fortunes and made him interesting, she has let him get away with murder, and she has changed crime fiction. The Talented Mr. Ripley, like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is a watershed book. It is not so much that other writers try the Ripley plot of letting the culprit live (or even giving us his further adventures in sequels, as Highsmith did), but rather that the nature of our involvement with the killer gets more complicated and more complicitous.
Ripley turns into a murderer for gain, and Highsmith risks the reader's alienation from her main character because of the baseness of his motives. But an author can try to preserve sympathy for a character by justifying killing as rightful vengeance or self-defense. The vengeance theme was working well before Shakespeare used it in Hamlet; the usual formula includes shedding a lot of blood without much subtlety of plot or characterization. Some authors create avengers who relish the bloodletting as much as any psychopath: the Mike Hammer of Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury (1947), My Gun Is Quick (1950), and Vengeance Is Mine (1950) has not the slightest hesitation in taking over for the Law or the Lord. As William Ruehlmann points out in Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye, "the problem . . . is distinguishing Mike from his enemies" (94). But Spillane sells millions of books, and Ruehlmann believes that his audience identifies with Mike Hammer:
Such an appetite for Spillane material implies that there is a wide audience for vengeance stories offering a hero whose scruples are invisible, though the lack of them may be obscured under an occluding cloud of conservatism. . . . Hammer, middle class and anti-intellectual, embodying the middle-class man's suspicion of government and faith in the will of "the people," is easy for an American to identify with; his vendettas are his readers'. Another apostle of popular violence, film actor Clint Eastwood, was once asked about the massacre in his movies, and Eastwood explained the audience for it this way: ". . . it's not the blood-letting or whatever that people come to see in the movies. It's vengeance. Getting even is a very important thing with the public. They go to work every day for some guy who's rude and they can't stand and they have to take it. Then they go see me on the screen and I just kick the shit out of him." So does Spillane.(98-99)Spillane's hero kills in the heat of battle; justifying a premeditated killing is a greater challenge for an author. T. H. White did it in a 1932 book that was half detective story and half thriller, Darkness at Pemberley. In the first part of the book, White's Inspector Buller discovers that three murders in a Cambridge college were done by a man with the sinister name of Mauleverer. Buller resigns his inspectorship when he cannot convict Mauleverer. He goes to Pemberley and Mauleverer follows him, obviously intent on killing Buller, his friend Charles, and the woman Buller loves, Charles's sister Elizabeth Darcy--White makes her the descendant of Austen's Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Buller and the others at Pemberley make a pact to kill Mauleverer and attempt to do so with poison gas. Finally Buller kills Mauleverer in clear self-defense, in a death struggle at the end.
The key to getting the reader's full assent to the protagonist's decision to kill a villain is in the portrayal of that villain. He must be depicted as an irrational (yet tremendously cunning), unstoppable monster who always represents a threat by his mere presence, by his continued existence. The technique is one used not only by White but by Margery Allingham in her Jack Havoc character in The Tiger in the Smoke (1952). But no work has been quite as successful in making us want to kill someone as Cape Fear since most people now know its title from two successful movies of that name (J. Lee Thompson's in 1961 and Martin Scorsese's in 1991), although John D. MacDonald's 1957 book on which they are based was originally titled The Executioners. In that book Sam Bowden's family is threatened by a clever, vicious ex-convict named Max Cady, who wants revenge for Bowden's testimony that convicted him of rape fourteen years before. Cady stalks the whole family, poisons the Bowdens' dog, threatens the children, and then wounds the eleven-year old boy, Jamie.
At Cady's first appearance, Bowden is an idealistic lawyer who makes speeches about his belief in the law and about how vigilantism will take us all back to the jungle. "We females are more opportunistic," says Bowden's wife Carol. "I would be capable of taking that dear rifle of yours and shooting him right off our stone wall if he ever comes back" (14). Jamie suggests first that Cady ought to be framed by the cops (31); later, on his way to the camp where Cady shoots him, Jamie tells his parents that he and his campmates could stone Cady and then put him through the kitchen meat slicer (140). The reader is slightly behind Carol and Jamie but way ahead of Sam in opting for murder as the only way to deal with Cady. Sam tries the police, who give him no help at all. He tries a private investigator, who slows Cady down by having him beaten up. Finally after Cady shoots Jamie, Sam gives in and tells Carol what he wants to do:
"I want to kill Cady."But then Bowden loses his nerve and asks the police for help one more time. They are no more willing to help than before until Carol makes a scene; then they assign a man to assist the Bowdens. The trap for Cady becomes part vigilante action and part police stakeout. Cady goes for the bait--Carol--kills the policeman, but is fatally wounded by Sam as he tries to escape."Of course. So do I, but. . ."
"That was not a figure of speech. I mean that I want to plan it all out and lay a trap and kill him and dispose of the body. I want to commit murder, and I think I know how it can be done."
She stared at him for what seemed a long time. And then she looked away, as though in shyness. "Not murder. Execution."
"Don't help me rationalize. Murder. And it may go wrong, but not if we're careful. Have you got guts enough to help me?"
"I have. It would be doing something. It would be something besides waiting around and looking at the children and wondering which one you're going to lose. Yes, Sam. I can help and you can depend on me. . . . (178)
The three versions of MacDonald's story deserve comparison from our perspective of the protagonist's complicity in Cady's killing and how the reader is implicated by going along with it. MacDonald's book and both movies do a good job in building our fear, loathing, and murderous impulses toward Cady. Finally they all three duck the very issue they raise about the deliberate killing of this menace. In none of the three does Bowden confront Cady and simply kill him. In the book Cady has already escaped after his attack on Carol and the police agent; Bowden fires after him into the dark, one of the bullets happens to hit an artery, and Cady dies later as he climbs the hillside toward his car. The death scene is anticlimactic and Bowden's role seems accidental, though he seems to think of it as if he had killed Cady in cold blood:
He had killed this man. He had turned this elemental and merciless force into clay, into dissolution. He searched through himself, looking for guilt, for a sense of shame.The 1961 film is faithful to the book until the ending, where the trap for Cady is moved to a houseboat on the Cape Fear River. Gregory Peck's Sam Bowden has the chance to shoot the unarmed Robert Mitchum's Cady in the middle of a fight. Cady says, "Go ahead. I just don't give a damn." Bowden starts to pull the trigger and then stops:And found only a sense of savage satisfaction, a feeling of strong and primitive fulfillment. All the neat and careful layers of civilized instincts and behavior were peeled back to reveal an intense exultation over the death of an enemy. (207-208)
"No! That would be letting you off too easy. Too fast. Your words, do you remember? Well, I do. Oh, no, we're going to take good care of you. We're going to nurse you back to health. You're strong, Cady. You're going to live a long life, in a cage. That's where you belong, and that's where you're going. And this time for life. Bang your head against the walls, count the years, the months, the hours, until the day you rot!"The speech J. Lee Thompson puts in Gregory Peck's mouth turns the Furies of revenge into the Eumenides of law, even though the rhetoric implies that he is performing a savage act. From the beginning Bowden has posited two worlds: the world of law keeps us out of the world of the jungle. But in this speech he mixes them up; Bowden can stay within the law and still have his primitive revenge. The outcome is not quite so satisfactory for the spectator--if the spectator has thought "Do it!" when Bowden points the gun at Cady.
Scorsese cannot let Nick Nolte's Bowden just do it, either. Bowden tries to bash Robert De Niro's Cady's brains in, but only within a bashing contest only slightly unequal (Cady has a leg handcuffed to a pipe). As Cady, who's become a jailhouse lawyer, puts it, they're just two lawyers "working out." Cady does die in this version, but Scorsese has it seem like some sort of judgment, as the fragment of broken-up boat to which Cady is handcuffed slides out into deep water and Cady is drowned. But Scorsese also has complicated the workings of MacDonald's plot in other ways. Actually, there is no evidence that he even knows about the original book; his movie is based only on the earlier movie and is partly an homage to it--even using Peck, Mitchum, and Martin Balsam, who were all in the 1961 film, in small parts. The main change he has introduced is to blur the moral confrontation. Cady is not pure evil confronting pure idealism in Bowden: Bowden was Cady's defense lawyer in the earlier rape conviction and suppressed evidence he thought might get Cady off. The moral slant in this movie is that nobody's innocent: even the Bowden's daughter is a not completely reluctant participant in Cady's attempted seduction of her (a scene that is uncomfortable to watch because De Niro and Juliette Lewis, who plays the daughter, are utterly convincing). Moreover Cady has been made into a kind of cult--or occult--threat that suggests he is more than a vengeful ex-con. Terrence Rafferty, comparing the two movies in a September 1991 review, regrets the loss of the simple, primitive blood-lust aroused by the first movie: "Our messy primitive responses have been cleaned up, rationalized away; we're guilt-free--washed in the blood of the bogeyman. The pretense of moral purity in Scorsese's ’Cape Fear’ is far more sordid than the honest, unselfconscious shock-mongering of the original" (159). Losing sight of MacDonald's original may have been the problem.
". . . I AM REALLY A MURDERER"
When G. K. Chesterton's detective, Father
Brown, explains his secret of trying to get inside the murderer, he describes
what readers wish to do, also. "I wait till I know I am inside a murderer.
thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions," says the little priest.
And then, as if "passions" were a word unlocking the very feelings themselves,
he continues, "till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched
and peering hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting
eyes, looking between the blinkers of his halfwitted concentration; looking
up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood.
Till I am really a murderer" (13). The successful writer of the murder
story taps into a desire in the reader that Father Brown identifies, a
desire to be inside the murderer. Whether it comes from an ancient feeling
of guilt or an ancient habit of shedding blood, we can be sure it is old
enough. In the stories we have been looking at, reader and murderer come
together in an atavism that transcends, even as it uses, all the sophistications
of literary art.
Department of English
Murray State University
Murray, KY 42071
Works Cited
Bardin, John Franklin. Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly. 1948. In The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Blake, Nicholas. The Beast Must Die. 1938. New York: Perennial, 1978.
Chesterton, G. K. The Secret of Father Brown. 1927. New York: Penguin, 1975.
Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 1926. New York: Pocket Books, 1939.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. 1868. Reprint: New York: Airmont, 1965.
---. The Woman in White. 1860. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Bantam, 1981.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1930.
Freeman, R. Austin. The Singing Bone. 1912. Intro. Vincent Starrett. New York: Norton, 1965.
Godwin, William. Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. Intro. Maurice Hindle. London: Penguin, 1988.
Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr Ripley. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Iles, Francis. Malice Aforethought. 1931. New York: Perennial, 1980.
Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1980.
MacDonald, John D. Cape Fear. Formerly titled The Executioners. 1957. New York: Ballantine, 1991.
Messac, Régis. Le 'Detective Novel' et l'influence de la pensée scientifique. Paris: Champion, 1929.
Millar, Margaret. Beast in View. 1955. New York: International Polygonics, 1983.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe. Philadelphia: Running Press, 1983.
Rafferty, Terrence. "The Current Cinema: Mud." The New Yorker 2 Dec. 1991. 156-59.
Ruehlmann, William. Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye. New York: New York U P, 1984.
Spillane, Mickey. I, the Jury. 1947. New York: New American Library, 1948.
Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. 3rd ed. New York: Mysterious P, 1992.
Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1991.
White, T. H. Darkness at Pemberley. 1932. New York: Dover, 1978.