Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story

by Ernest Mandel

Book by Mandel, Ernest

Genres: Crime, Nonfiction, History

152 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 1984

About the author

Ernest Ezra Mandel was a German born Belgian-Jewish Marxian economist and a Trotskyist activist and theorist. He fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium and he became a member of the Fourth International during his youth in Antwerp. Mandel is considered to be populariser of marxism.

Reviews

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ernest Mandel was the most brilliant Marxist thinker of the second half of the 20th century (and also, unfortunately, an inveterate opportunist); he was also an avid reader of detective novels. Toward the end of his life, he used the method of dialectical materialism to analyze how crime stories evolved over two centuries. While Sherlock Holmes represented the aspirational phase of the bourgeoisie’s rule — a single wealthy man using rationality to solve the world’s problems — the characters of John Le Carré represent late capitalist decline, where cops and robbers, as well as bourgeois politicians and Stalinist bureaucrats, are morally indistinguishable and there is nothing to believe in. Mandel’s combination of dry erudition and nerdy enthusiasm are a joy to read here. He laments that while some crime novels criticize bourgeois values, they never present an alternative, socialist vision for society. It’s a shame Mandel died at just 72 or he might have written some Marxist detective stories himself. I’m not much of a fan of the genre but I’ve noted down some titles mentioned in this book that I want to check out.

[Sally Sugarman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written in 1984, but its analysis stands up as if it were written more recently. Mandel uses a Marxist perspective to examine the evolution of the crime story. There are so many perceptive insights into the relationship between the stories and society. There is nothing superficial about his discussion which is the result of his having an organized perspective from which to examine books, not only from the United States and Great Britain, but from European countries as well. He asks good questions, such as why did the crime story become popular when it did? He traces the detective from the outlaw who changes from a hero to a villain and from a villain back into a hero, but during these changes the character loses purpose in challenging the social order. The outlaws are no longer rebels with a cause. They reflect the failure of society under capitalism. “Their rebellion stems not from hope, but from bitterness; not from love of the oppressed but from hatred of oppression; from a rejection of society as it is, but not from any notion that it might be possible to replace it with a better one.” (p.133) The crime story emerges from capitalism. Under capitalism, life is a mystery. You work hard at your job, but you still get fired. Your work is monotonous and you need an escape into a world which is set right. Mandel says that in the first stages of individual capitalism you have the brilliant detective fighting the brilliant criminal; Holmes versus Moriarty, but in monopoly capitalism, you have the police versus the gang. The changes in the life of criminals is an important factor. As the criminal gangs had surplus capital from their prohibition earnings, they needed to launder the money by investing into businesses like banks. It is, as Brecht says, “Don’t rob a bank, own one,” so you can legally rob people. The blending of the criminal and the state happens which is why the spy story emerges. The spy is the agent or the double agent of the state. The nature of violence changes. Initially the violence was people killing people that they knew for a specific reason, but the serial killer and the mass murderer represent violence as a reflection of the violence of the state as shown in wars. Impersonal contract killings are a part of the business model of doing what is necessary to achieve the stability that crime and the state need. My highlighting particular points like this detracts from the complexity of the convincing argument Mandel makes. After reading this book, one’s reading of mysteries will never be simple.

[Georgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Δοκίμια-αναλυση σχετικά με το αστυνομικό μυθιστόρημα. Must read για όποιον ενδιαφέρεται για το είδος, το τελευταίο κεφάλαιο- ανάλυση αφορά το néo polar 🔥

[Deniz]

Ernest Mandel polisiye tarihinin izini sürerken ilginç tespitlerde bulunuyor:

"Polisiye romanın tarihini, edebi olmaktan çok toplumsal tarih olarak ele aldığım için, en azından bir önemli boyutunu, yazarların çoğunun kişiliği, karakteri ve hayatını bilerek atladım." (sf.25)

"Böylece ilk dedektif romanlarının gerçek konusu suç veya cinayet değil, muammadır. Sorun analitiktir, toplumsal veya adli değil, Profesör Dove'un işaret ettiği gibi, dedektif romanının klasik biçimi, ilkin Poe ve Conan Doyle tarafından yaratılan yedi aşamalı bir sıradan oluşur: Problem, ilk Çözüm, Düğüm, Karışıklık Dönemi, ilk Pırıltı. Çözüm ve Açıklama." (sf.50)

"Polis memurları polisiye romanların kahramanı olabildiler çünkü bu edebi türe de yansıdığı üzere, burjuva değerlerinde bir değişiklik olmuştu. Sınıf mücadelesinin şiddetlendiği Birinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası dönem, üst sınıfın, on dokuzuncu yüzyılda düşman olduğu sürekli devlet aygıtına karşı tavrının değişmesine tanık oldu. Artık, zorunlu bir bela sayılmayan polis, burjuvazinin gözünde toplumsal iyiliğin cisimlenişi haline gelmişti. Böylece polis memurları dedektif romanlarının kahramanı haline geldiler ve bu kaçınılmaz gecikme giderilmiş oldu.
...
Polisin, polisiye romanlardaki yıldızının parlamasının bir başka açıklaması da polisi halkın gözünde meşrulaştırma ihtiyacıydı. Polis memuru artık yalnızca en kaba düzeyde yasa ve düzen savunucusu, hırsızlara ve yankesicilere karşı özel mülkiyetin muhafızı değil, giderek en yüce düzeyde, özel mülkiyetin bir kurum olarak savunulmasında, düzenin savunucusudur. Savaş, kriz ve devrim tarafından tehdit edilen özel mülkiyet piyasa güçleri tarafından artık otomatik olarak yeniden üretilememektedir ve dolayısıyla sürekli bir baskı mekanizması ile desteklenmelidir." (sf.112)

"En ünlü klasik dedektif romanı yazarlarından bazılarının biyografilerini incelemek, bizi önemli sonuçlara götürebilir. Bu biyografiler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc, Agatha Christie, Dorothv Savers ya da G. K. Chesterton gibi yazarların, kurulu düzenin ne ölçüde aşırı tutucu savunucuları olduklarını göstermektedir." sf.215

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ernest Mandel in addition to being a Marxist thinker, was also a crime novel enthusiast. I stumbled across this book by Mandel, thinking it might be interesting to read his angle on the development of the crime novel - from Sherlock Holmes, to Agatha Christie, to the thrillers (up to 1984, when Mandel's book was published). Mandel was quite thoughtful and certainly well-read on the topic of the development of the crime novel, and as expected, interpreted its developed through his particular socialist world-view (the overall interpretation of history as one of class struggle, the bourgeoisie being today's "enemy" as much as the feudal/monarchic/noble class was yesterday's "enemy"). For all I know, this may be true; but it does seem at times a sociological simplification of complexity. For one thing: If monarchies were always wrong or bad, then the institution would not have survived as long as it did. There must have been good as well as bad aspects to monarchy, even feudalism. Today, we certainly decry absolutism and feudalism as unfair, oppressive and backward - but why were these systems the rule for thousands of years? How was it possible for a handful of nobles or kings to subjugate the masses generation after generation unless there was some sort of "benefit" of the system for all, even the lowliest. Something that kept the masses supporting the king, paying taxes, flocking to the banner of the lord of the manor. Otherwise the system should have been overthrown long ago. Of course there were peasant revolts in Europe during the Middle Ages. Still, in most parts of the world, the typical system was someone - a king, chieftain, warlord, you name it - running things, with various layers of society arrayed beneath him. The system tended toward absolutism - which is the most oppressive in terms of individual rights. Yet the system seemed to spontaneously arise in most areas of the world in one form or another. Although there might be gradations of input from the lower ranks - such as councils - in general, an "exalted" layer imposed its rule on the rest of society. And in general, the rest of society accepted its position within the established system. From our perspective, it was all wrong. Human history was one long mistake because the subjects of such systems were literally at the mercy of their "betters" the nobility etc. The concept of human or civil rights was non-existent. The pushback against the monarchic system hadn't yet begun, or was only in embryonic form by the time the Enlightenment took up the issue of natural rights of man and so forth. The result, as decades passed, was the overthrow of absolutism more or less worldwide. Instead there is rule by the bourgeois/liberal class - in "managed" democracies, which are run by an elite - at least the professed goal of the system today is that the system exists to benefit the masses, rather than to benefit the elites/ruling class. However, facts tell another story. Income inequality is perhaps just as extreme today -- under democracy -- as under monarchic (i.e. one-man) rule. Perhaps the bourgeois/liberal democracies keep the system in place as much as the prior system kept the system in place - a system that enables the accumulation by a few of monstrous amounts of capital, while millions of others worldwide struggle. Still, I'd rather not take an entirely dim view of developments - since capitalism does seem to have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty worldwide. The point I am trying to make is that considering any social system through an ideological prism, such as Marxism, tends to simplification - since social systems are complex and Marxism (basically) is like a blunt tool. It lacks nuance. In the end, every system is imperfect. Certainly, the form of socialism practiced in E. European was overthrown five years (or so) after Mandel wrote his book, and while Mandel was writing his book, China was in the process of dismantling strict communism in favor of capitalism. After all, the communist systems that arose in E. Europe and China were based on the dictatorship of the proletariat - with a loyal cadre ensuring the continuity of the regime. What makes this so different than any dictatorship or monarchy? In such a system, does the individual really have any rights? The weakness of communism is exactly the imposition of a dictatorship after a revolutionary overthrow of a bourgeois or monarchic system, because such an imposition ignores what's basic about human nature. People will not necessarily agree with giving up property in the name of communism. The poor might go for communism - since they have little or nothing to lose. But the layers that that are owners, some of them will reject the system. Marx thought he had the answer - but time and again it was an answer that idealistic revolutionaries imposed on their neighbors, whether the neighbors wanted to join or not, wanted to give up property or not. It was therefore coercive - and of course the communists felt that the ends justified the means, since they felt they were right and had the answer. This was certainly injustice - probably why the system backfired and collapsed just about everywhere it was tried. The idea of communism is a Utopian idea, similar to that of monastic life, or that of the primitive Christians. There have always been communes and Utopian communities - the difference is these social experiments were voluntary. Voluntarily joining a commune or collective, just like joining a monastery, is one thing, but forcing everyone to give up property for the sake of a collective is another. This is the fatal flaw of what Marx was espousing, and why the rest of the ideology - which supports the idea that people should lose their property for the sake of equality etc. - rings false, as if it's a justification of a basic injustice. On the other hand, with respect to the book under discussion, Mandel refrains from laying it on thick. The book is generally non-ideological and does give an interesting overview of the development of the crime novel - deriving from legends about the "good rebel" such as Robin Hood, but eventually tending toward nihilistic anti-hero types - perhaps a reflection of the cynicism of the Cold War era. Certainly, Mandel knew a lot about the development of the crime story, that is unmistakable in the heavily-referenced narrative.

Here are some quotes:

"...I have dealt with the history of the crime story as social rather than literary history..."

"To a large extent, the genre...involves no small amount of 'mechanical writing,' when authors compose, decompose, and recompose story lines and characters as if on a conveyor belt."

"The modern detective story stems from popular literature about 'good bandits': ...Robin Hood... But there has been a dialectical somersault. Yesterday's bandit hero has become today's villain, and yesterday's villainous representative of authority today's hero."

"...although the 'good bandit' expressed a populist and not a bourgeois revolt against the feudal order, the revolutionary bourgeoisie could nevertheless share the bandit's sense of injustice in the face of extreme forms of tyrannical and arbitrary rule."

"Balzac... related the rise of professional criminals to the rise of capitalism and the consequent emergence of unemployment."

"In the classical detective story, the triumphant bourgeoisie celebrates the victory of its [rationality] ... over the forces of obscurity. But the victory is never final or complete."

"...bourgeois society...is based upon a functional division of labor within the ruling class."

"The subjective need to be filled by the classical detective story of the inter-war years was that of nostalgia."

"For the mass of the petty bourgeoisie...the first world war marked a watershed. ...linked to "Paradise Lost:" the end of stability, of the freedom to enjoy life at a leisurely pace and acceptable cost, of belief in an assured future and limitless progress. The war and its destruction, the millions killed, the ensuring revolutions, and the inflation, economic upheavals, and crises, meant the end for ever of that douceur de vivre which serious bourgeois authors ...as Proust...Zweig, Galsworthy, and Scott Fitzgerald expressed with so much sensitivity. When the war ended and stability failed to return, the petty bourgeoisie, still essentially conservative, was consumed with nostalgia."

"The coming of age of organized crime tolled the death knell of the drawing-room detective story."

"Social corruption...now moves into the center of the plots, along with brutality, a reflection of both the change in bourgeois values brought about by the first world war and the impact of organized gangsterism."

"For the exploits of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer to be credible, they must be dealing ultimately with petty criminals."

"...the common ideology of the original and classical detective story in [the West] ...remains quintessentially bourgeois."

"The class nature of the state, property, law and justice remains completely obscured."

"Private property, law and order, must triumph, regardless of the cost in human life and misery."

"...[Graham] Greene: Sometimes I ask myself how all those who cannot write, compose, or paint are capable of escaping the absurdity, the sadness, and the panic fear which characterize the human condition."

"With the advent of organized crime on a large scale, a commensurate change in the detection and combating of crime in real life had to occur. During the thirties, eh law-enforcement establishment grew massively throughout the Western world. ... With the late thirties and early forties, the private detective is on the wane, ...ousted by the police officer supported by wide-ranging organization. A new type of crime story was born, the 'police procedural."

"The post-world-war-one period, with its intensification of class struggle, saw a change in the attitude of the upper class toward the permanent state apparatus, to which it had been hostler during the nineteenth century."

"An additional explanation for the rising star of the police in the crime story is the need to legitimize them in the eyes of the public."

"The police officer...the defender of order at the most exalted level: the defense of private property as an institution. [Private property] .... threatened by war, crisis, and revolution, is no longer reproduced automatically by market forces but must be upheld by a permanent apparatus of repression."

"...many distinguished representatives of the intelligentsia were recruited by the British and American secret services during both world wars. Somerset Maugham...Graham Greene and quite a few others."

"...the spy story...spawns the political thriller."

"The detective story becomes the opium of the 'new' middle classes...as a psychological drug that distracts from the intolerable drudgery of daily life."

"The craved security of a sheltered existence, the material ideal of the middle classes, is counterbalanced by a vicarious insecurity. Readers carry out in fantasy what they secretly long to do but never will in real life: to upset the apple-cart."

"...for the ...older generations...modern technology ...is seen as a mysterious and frightening universe that eludes human understanding and control. Fascination with space, ...myths about UFOs and extra-terrestrial aliens are mingled with anxiety about the invasion of privacy and daily life by secret mechanical devices in the service of an ever more sophisticated and pervasive apparatus of state information and surveillance."

"...meritocracy is a mystification. The best person hardly ever wins. To come out on top in the rate race...What you need is the largest capital, running into billions. Once you have that, y u can hire the best brains, assemble the drive and energy of dozens of top experts, create a collective will ('the organization') that can either harness the strongest egos or break them if they will not conform."

"The forties and fifties ...a second watershed in the history of crime in the United States, comparable to that of the twenties: the massive extension of drug addiction and the 'street criminality' linked to it."

"The roots of the new development go back to the end of Prohibition."

"What [organized crime]...needed, in place of alcohol, was another consumer good whose distribution, illegal by definition, could be monopolized."

"The vast scale of black market operations by GIs in occupied Germany and Japan, and the difficulty for many demobilized soldiers in adapting to civilian life, meant that American cities in the immediate post-war years were thronged with thousands of potential pushers, and tens or hundreds of thousands of demoralized potential users."

"The gradual replacement of a written culture by a sub-culture of techo-imagination and increasing illiteracy...a formal expression of cultural decline, corresponding...to the decline of bourgeois society... While third-world countries are struggling to eliminate illiteracy, in the West there is a growing, albeit still marginal, loss of knowledge of the written language..."

"Specialists...increasingly...argue that the replacement of written texts by images...almost inevitably leads to more primitive content, acts repressively upon the content of communication itself."

"Historical thought; deductive and dialectical through; inductive, causal and scientific thought: all are structurally linked to the written word."

"As it has carried out its role of protecting, expanding and sustaining the foreign operations of US corporations and the worldwide interests of US capitalism, the American state had had to create successive agencies for covert action on an international level: first the OSS, then the CIA (whose first director, significantly enough, was a banker and brother to a Secretary of State). A whole library of books has been published about the illegal or actually criminal operation mounted in foreign countries by these bodies, with many of the most telling revelations originating from former CIA agents themselves."

"...the socially conscious thriller strikingly confirms the inherent limitations of the genre. Because it still respects the basic ground rules of the genre - the individual confrontation between hero and villain, in this case an individual hero facing a collective villain - it can attain only partial social consciousness."

"...the decay of bourgeois values does not automatically have positive results. It may [lead to] ... the emergence of higher social values. But it may equally move toward a general decline of all human values, any kind of humanism, any recognition of the basic sanctity of human life and the basic dignity of all human beings."

[Bulent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Polisiye romanın doğuş ve gelişim tarihini oldukça düzenli bir yöntem ile ele ana ve analizleri, tespitleri ile pek çok "doğru bilinen yanlış"ı faş eden bir yazar Mandel. Marksist kimliği, yöntem ve yaklaşımını dayandırdığı payanda olarak bir kitel kültürü ürününün gözler önüne serilmesini sağlıyor.
Kitabın tek eksiği, onun metodunun dışarıda bıraktığı, okuyucunun neden okuduğu sorusuna yanıt aramıyor olması.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

I once had a friend who dismissed a certain kind of literary criticism as "finding Marxist themes in Bambi". Of course, such a thing can be done, and not just by Ariel Dorfmann (HOW TO READ DONALD DUCK). In DELIGHTFUL MURDER the late Ernest Mandel, one-time leader of the Trotskyist Fourth International, applies his political skills of analysis to the detective story. (A confession: I never met Ernest but knew plenty of people who knew him personally.) Mandel concentrates on crime fiction from the Forties until the Eighties to see if they can tell us anything about the nature of the class struggle in the West. In Dashel Hammet, for instance, we find a lone wolf, Sam Spade pitted against professional thieves (THE MALTESE FALCON); a nameless but nevertheless proletarian detective who fights a violent battle against corruption during a labor strike (The Continental Op in RED HARVEST); and finally two detective patricians with lots of time on their hands (Nick and Nora Charles of THE THIN MAN). Mandel dismisses Chandler's Philip Marlowe as "one man battling villains, never a system of evil", although I personally find THE LONG GOODBYE one of the most savage satires ever written of post-war capitalist America: "We mass manufacture everything, Mr. Marlowe", one capitalist tells him, "and it's all junk." John T. McDonald is, quite rightly I believe, frowned upon as "a writer of reactionary detective stories that argue American life was better in the Fifties" than when he wrote his novels in the Sixties and Seventies. Mandel illuminates the world of British crime fiction as well. Take his stance on Len Deighton: "By the time of THE BILLION-DOLLAR BRAIN the Americans have become the villains in a Cold War that never made any sense to start with." Mandel is witty and urbane, and regardless of your politics makes you want to read or re-read all the crime lit he so expertly dissects.

[Adriano Barone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probabilmente il saggio più importante da leggere per chi scrive polizieschi. Un'analisi dell'evoluzione del genere svolta in parallelo con l'evoluzione politico-socio-economica affilata come una lama e che fa capire anche le ragioni delle minime varianti.
Se Mandel fosse vivo, non avrebbe avuto problemi ad aggiungere una chiosa sui motivi dell'esplosione del giallo storico (dove si torna - o si "reinventa" una condizione sociale semplificata in cui l'operare dell'investigatore abbia ancora un senso).
Lettura indispensabile.

[Fabrizio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gialli, polizieschi, noir sono tutti prodotti culturali che rispecchiano dinamiche e sviluppi del sistema capitalistico. Ernest Mandel ci spiega chi, come, quando, perché e come. Massimo Carlotto, nella prefazione, attualizza e spiega che per lui il noir è forse l'unica forma sopravvissuta di giornalismo investigativo.

[Eleonora Carta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una storia sociale tra vecchio e nuovo continente, che antepone l'analisi culturale a quella letteraria, rivelando in quanti modi il giallo sia stato interprete di ideologie, cambiamenti sociali, istanze e necessità.
Documento preziosissimo.

[Dan Galinko · Rating 1 out of 5]

I learned that detective fiction, such as Sherlock Holmes is a tool of the repressive capitalist world to trick people into believing they are living in a just and fair society.

Don't be fooled by detective fiction, its a tool of the repressive bourgeois upper class.

How will I ever sleep at night?

[Dave Riley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this five years ago and I wish I could find a copy to read it again.Mandel is one of the most important Marxist economists of the 20th century.

A alternative and'holistic' view on crime fiction

[Laura Newsholme · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some interesting ideas here regarding marxist interpretations of crime texts, but I question the academic validity of some of the author's sweeping statements, which he has a tendency to pass off as fact rather than supposition.

[Kyoungjin Lim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sociological anatomy of the very special opium called crime story!