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The Moral Dimension of
the Crime Novel
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P. D. James
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Any consideration of the
moral dimension of the crime novel inevitably raises a number of questions,
not least, what do we mean by the word ‘morality’ in relation to a work of
fiction, and whose morality are we concerned with, the writer’s, the
detective’s or the murderer’s? The moral world which the characters inhabit
and which the author explores is also defined by the type of novel under
consideration. There is, I suggest, a difference between crime writing
generally, which can range over an extraordinarily wide spectrum both of
books and writers, and its more structured and conventional form, the
classical detective story. The latter has at its heart a mysterious crime,
usually murder, a closed circle of suspects with motive, means and
opportunity for the deed, a detective who comes in rather like an avenging
deity to solve the crime and, by the end of the book, a solution which the
reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues
incorporated in the plot with deceptive cunning but essential fairness.
The form has, in fact, been described as a successor to the old
morality plays and it certainly works most successfully if the detective,
whether amateur or professional, can be seen by the reader to be in some way
the embodiment of justice. The traditional English detective story has never
condoned murder, nor indeed has usually expressed any sympathy for the
murderer, and part of its attraction, particularly in turbulent and uncertain
times, has been its comforting reassurance that we live in a moral and
comprehensible universe, with virtue as the norm and crime an aberration, in
which it is the duty of reasonable human beings to bring order out of
disorder. To that extent, of course, the detective story stands in the
tradition of the canon of the British novel of social realism.
In other forms of crime
writing, of which Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is an example, the
reader may know from the beginning who is guilty of the crime and the
interest is less in ratiocination than in the effect of the deed on the
perpetrator and on society and whether, in fact, he or she will be finally
caught. Here the moral compass is less fixed. There may indeed be some
authorial sympathy for the murderer, borne perhaps of the writer’s
understanding of his character’s early deprivations and experiences, the
compulsions and the lack of love, which have led him to destroy life. Some
writers have even shown sympathy verging on approbation. Patricia Highsmith,
for example, has a psychopath as hero and we are hardly invited to condemn.
And in the so-called hard-boiled crime novels, particularly in America,
the detective may be as much at war with the criminal justice system as he is
with the villain. As Georges Simenon, creator of the Maigret books,
said in a 1960s interview, ‘Deep down the policeman understands the criminal
because he can see easily how he became one. They inhabit the same
underworld.’
This moral ambivalence
was hardly true of the detectives or the moral dimension of the so-called
golden age of detective fiction. Even allowing for the social attitudes of
the 1930s, the inter-war detective story was simplistic in its treatment of
morality and there is some justice in the criticism that it was the product
of a class-ridden and basically puritanical society defending the inalienable
right of the possessor to protect his possessions against the greed and envy
of predators, and one in which the working-class, including many policemen,
were treated as buffoons or simpletons. There was small, if any, sympathy for
the murderers and it was accepted that when caught they would hang, although
Agatha Christie, arch-purveyor of cosy reassurance, is careful not to allow
the dark shadow of the public hangman to fall upon her essentially comforting
pages. The novels were, of course, written as entertainment and, particularly
during the war, as a necessary antidote to danger and death, and to be too
stringent in criticism now is probably as unrealistic as criticising Jane
Austen because she did not deal with the Napoleonic Wars or the brutality of
the criminal justice system.
Today the detective
story, like many other crime novels, combines an age-old fascination with
mysterious death and violence with a concern for less atavistic emotions and
the circumstances which give rise to them. The murderer is not commonly
admired and he is still seen as someone whom the agents of the State are
justified – indeed required – to hunt down. But he is less a convenient
stereotype for a simplistic battle between good and evil than a complicated
and possibly suffering human being, as much at the mercy of his genes, his
upbringing and his experience as is the detective who is nominally his enemy.
In the detective story murder remains the unique crime, the one for which no
reparation can ever be made, but the reader’s horror or disgust can be tinged
with understanding or even pity. The detective remains the hero, that symbol
of triumphant individualism, who may – indeed must – be fallible but never
corrupt. To that extent the morality is still the age-old conflict between
good and evil, fought out in the contemporary world with all its shibboleths,
its convenient compromises, its smudged morality, its suspicion of too
apparent virtue. We can be confident by the end that the murderer will be
caught and justice vindicated, if only the imperfect justice of fallible
human beings. To that extent the modern detective story, with its moral
ambiguity, its greater realism and its preoccupation with issues which go
beyond the process of ratiocination, can claim to fulfil what Henry James
wrote is the business of fiction: to help the heart of man to know itself.
P. D. James is an
award-winning crime writer. Her latest novel is The Lighthouse.
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