Thomas De Quincey, made famous by his controversial Confessions of an Opium-Eater, was an important influence in the Victorian Sensationalism literary movement, which primarily consisted of novels containing the shocking subject matter of insanity, illegitimacy, suspected wills, bigamy, seduction and murder … just to name a few. Ironically, while this genre was then considered to be composed of “trashy novels,” many of these books are now studied in academia as canonical literature, such as The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens.
De Quincey’s major contribution to both this genre and to the later birth of detective fiction, however, was a series of three non-fiction essays, known collectively as On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, detailing famous murders as the transcripts of addresses made to a gentleman’s club concerning the aesthetic appreciation of murder, evaluating their artistry as a connoisseur would judge a performance. He writes in the satirical style of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, a parodic hyperbole suggesting that the solution to Irish poverty lay in the poor selling their own children as food for the wealthy. De Quincey writes, “Something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed –– a knife –– a purse –– and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.”
This club president affirms, however, that murder is certainly “an improper line of conduct –– highly improper” and that he is “for morality and for virtue and all that.” In fact, so far from being an innocent hobby, murder can act as a sort of gateway drug into other vices, thus leading the unwitting gentleman in a downwards spiral into disrespectability and “general waspishness,” explaining, “From Murder, you will soon come to highway robbery; and from highway robbery it is but a short step to petty larceny. And when once you are got to that, there comes in sad progression Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and late hours; until the awful climax terminates in neglect of dress, non-punctuality, and general waspishness. Many a man has begun dabbling a little in murder, and thought he would stop there, until from one thing to another he has been led so far that in a few years he has become generally disrespectable.”
On the other hand, De Quincey’s character maintains that if a murder has been already committed, with the poor victim dead in his grave and the rascal either escaped or imprisoned, why not turn an artistic eye to the occurrence and try murder by its “aesthetic handle” when the moral side is so decidedly against it? “A transaction, which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance,” he shares.
The massacre that fascinated De Quincey most was the Ratcliffe Highway murders, which terrorized all of England in the early 19th century. Committed 12 days apart presumably by John Williams, they constituted of two senseless, brutal attacks on the families running a linen shop and a tavern respectively, resulting in seven casualties. De Quincey writes that Williams makes “a connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied with any thing (sic) that has been done since in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his … This is the real thing — this is genuine — this is what you can approve, can recommend to a friend.”
Just as A Modest Proposal exposed the English’s heartlessness towards impoverished Ireland and the poor in general, so do De Quincey’s essays uncover the hypocrisy in the detached entertainment of relishing a “good murder” mystery story, even when the blood and gore are kept tactfully off stage, as in Columbo or an Agatha Christie novel. Mysteries are rarely about solving a theft — where is the excitement in that?
I must confess that this depressing conviction is not strong enough to keep me from curling up with a good murder mystery, and that is exactly what I found in renowned thriller author David Morrell’s spinoff novel, Murder as a Fine Art. In studying De Quincey, Morrell was struck by the fact that he wrote about the Ratcliffe Highway murders as if he had been there. It occurred to him that if it had entered a sadomasochist’s head to recreate the trauma of the Ratcliffe Highway murders decades later –– both for the enjoyment of the ensuing panic and for the purpose of inciting a revolution –– De Quincey would be the perfect suspect based on his detailed writings about the original attacks. He would also be the perfect detective, having already put himself in the murderer’s head once before and assumed his line of thinking.
This novel is certainly not for the faint of heart or the delicate of stomach, as the gruesome murders are described in shocking detail. But while this gore is disturbing, it serves a check to enjoying a murder tale too much.
