I think this is also a mythic archetype about Ye Englisshe, Eric
Further to the discussion on Saturday apropos of the English Country House Murder Mystery (have there actually ever been any, as opposed to massive amounts of bedhopping, and occasionally A Chap Like That shooting himself in the library?). I think of it as a literary trope which may tell us something about Ye National Psyche, perhaps, but it is not Troo Crime, is it?
Anyway, I thought about Orwell on the Decline of the English Murder, which is happily available online, all hail the Orwell Foundation for its efforts, because Mr O located the Archetypal English Murder in the Drear Respectability of the Suburbs: [O]ne can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader’s point of view, the “perfect” murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class - a dentist or a solicitor, say - living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. Most of the crimes mentioned above have a touch of this atmosphere.
I.e. the argument is that, He Killed For Respectability (rather than PASSION).
Except that he cites: Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period... between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson.
hardly any, if any, of whom, actually conform to his model, do they, George? He does exclude the Ripper ('in a class by itself').
Okay, they involved sex, money, the difficulties of divorce, and in most cases the means was poison (but not in Thompson and Bywaters, in which Bywaters made a lethal assault on his lover's husband). In some cases they were not, actually, English. Cream, who poisoned prostitutes, which already puts him into a different class of criminal, was Scottish-Canadian. Crippen was an American quack doctor married to a music-hall singer, which is already slightly veering from the very lace-curtainy, no?
Unfortunately The News of the World does not appear to be one of the periodicals available in the online British Newspaper Archives (chiz to the max) so one is unable to undertake an interrogation of what cases did actually garner massive reportage.
Orwell then went on to claim the growing pernicious influence of Hollywood Movies on murder (?surprise - we think not, really), alluding to a case in which 'The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film'. (Horrors.)
Like the Country House Murder Mystery, surely this notion of the Respectable Suburban Poisoner is a similar narrative about people who are prepared to kill to preserve a particular vision about a particular way of life. And also, like the CHMM there are assumptions about stability and security of the milieu which the trope undermines. ('There are dark things lurking....')
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