Here There Be Killers

Things least to be believed are most preferred
All counterfeit as from truths sacred mint
Are readily believed if once put down in print.
John Clare, "St. Martin's Eve"

In 1866, early in that period of violent social change known as Reconstruction, a paper carried in its column of curiosities a snippet of news from Mobile, Alabama. In a vacant apartment a headless body had been found. Accompanying the corpse was a note that read: "To prevent identification I have hidden my own head where you will never find it." This anecdote is a perfect example of the conundrum of murder: the story of the lively corpse or the blithe murderer. The report provides no resolution to the mystery, its wry brevity attesting to the publishers' confidence in a reader's love of the paradoxical quality of the tale of murder — not necessarily the more orderly satisfactions gained from the narrative of crime, detection, apprehension, punishment, and redemption. By the "lyrical fiction" of this particular "murderer's song," the body in the vacant room becomes at once murderer and victim: a sign of its own disappearance. Any layperson knows that the best evidence of murder (upon which to hang a prosecution, at any rate) is a corpse, yet the modern tale of murder turns attention away from the victim to the murderer — the corpse becoming little more than a relic of another's transgression and transcendence. The metaphysics of modern murder makes the victim a sign of the murderer.

The cultural resonance of the narrative of murder arises from its uneasy position at the borderline of ethics and aesthetics. In a culture wherein the communication and entertainment media are more varied and accessible than ever before, the "fact" of murder and its representations grow close indeed: "That murder is the most unrepresentable and yet one of the most represented of acts in our culture points to the fact that rather than take one out of discourse, murder ironically leads one back into it, with a vengeance, to which the vast and ever-expanding plethora of murder literature bears witness: horror stories, detective stories, criminological literature, video nasties, and so on." Murder as a fundamental expression of immanence and abjection has a presence that consumes the corpse of victim and murderer alike. And yet the visceral, brute fact of murder is itself a false, or insufficient, foundation for narrative. All that is given in the tale of murder is the corpse; everything else remains to be found.

Murder belongs only partly to the juridical and penological realm, where it becomes, in the discourses of the modern social sciences, a "problem" effected by period and place, evidence of the changing relationships of power between classed, raced, and gendered actors. The disciplines of sociology, criminology, penology, law and, not least of all, forensic psychiatry have traditionally laid claim to scientific status (with the exception of the law, for which quite other truth claims are made). The positivistic assumptions at the root of the development of these disciplines are quintessentially ethical and implicitly political. The quest for topology and classification that underpins the disciplines of criminology, penology, and psychiatry can exist only on a discursive landscape against which the "discovered" object can have its form defined and its shadow cast. Every psychological classification for the "insane" murderer; every analysis of the degree or gravity of the crime; every determination on gradation, technique, or site of punishment for murder; and every study of the environmental milieu of the violent individual makes a decision about the meaning of murder: its origins, its impact, its "nature."

The crime story is a critically significant narrative frame in modern Western culture — whether the scripted broadsheet "confessions" of the murderer on the scaffold in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, or the compendium of sensational trials in the Ordinary of Newgate Account, or the detective fiction of Poe, Dickens and (later) Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane. The true crime genre that has enjoyed an unsurprising renaissance since the 1940s (and not only in the United States) is the direct descendant of a genre of crime reporting that treats the "facts" at issue as a good deal less important than the narrative rules of the genre.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there could not be said to be a clear demarcation between a high and low literature of crime, nor between the stories of actual and fictional murder. Thackeray satirized the style of the Newgate Chronicle, and Henry Fielding, in Jonathan Wild, drew on the Chronicle for a panoply of characters and crimes. The vogue of the crime story by the mid-nineteenth century should not be underestimated. What contemporaries perceived as the degenerative horrors of urban culture were enthusiastically chronicled from the 1860s in both Britain and the United States. By the later nineteenth century, eugenic thought — haunted by the spectre of the "born" criminal and atavistic degeneration — existed side by side with more progressive social analyses of violence. As the century waned, the tale of murder as fact or fiction moved progressively further from its description of the murderous act to an analysis of the murderer.

Between the early part of the nineteenth century and its apogee, the murderer grew in stature; the meaning of murder, its metaphysics, was no longer evident in the event but in its main actor. That discursive shift belongs to a more general historical process within which the individual subject grew more complex, and more affecting: the subject a synecdoche for the greater social "whole." As part of that epistemological shift inward from the world to the soul and psyche of the subject, the "murderer" was invented — along with (and, often, part and parcel of) the "hysteric," the "homosexual," the "adolescent," the "criminal," and the "psychotic."

In the following chapters I will be examining both the representation of actual murder and murder in fiction. By dismantling various narratives of murder it will become possible to expose the cultural meaning given to murder, that irreplaceable taken-for-granted quality of a murder that, when narrated, says so much about what a culture knows and what it will not let itself know. While this work is in part a general analysis of the compelling quality of murder narratives in the West, it is also an investigation of the interestedness of...