As George Orwell pointed out in his 1946 essay The Decline of the English Murder, the perfect murder is chiefly a middle-class pursuit, the motive invariably involving sex, status or money, and “should be planned with the utmost cunning.” Orwell blames the decline on American influence, citing as symptomatic the random crime spree of a US army deserter in wartime England (dramatised in Bernard Rose’s 1990 film Chicago Joe and the Showgirl) though ironically it seems that Americans are just as responsible as Brits for the current retro-mystery revival.
Why does this formula appeal to 21st century audiences? The most obvious reason is that mobile phones, social media and surveillance footage have changed the nature of crime and its detection, enabling murderers to be tracked or even filmed committing their crimes, their alibis easily dismantled, and internet search histories examined for “untraceable poisons” or “how to chop up a cadaver”. Setting your murder in the past, or ignoring modern technology altogether, absolves you of having your characters constantly complaining about poor cell phone reception, or of short-circuiting the narrative by looking everything up on Wikipedia.
But maybe, too, we’re growing weary of real life being so hard-boiled. Poirot, or Philip Marlowe, or Nick and Nora Charles would have despaired (or, in the case of Nick and Nora, felt compelled to order another round of dry martinis) at today’s real-life murders, more likely to be a result of squalid opportunism, toxic masculinity or gross stupidity than cunning plans by criminal masterminds.
Just as conspiracy theorists cling to disproved theses because they find the alternative – that life is chaos – more frightening than the idea of some unfeasibly efficient agency pulling the strings from the shadows, it’s more fun to think of Professor Plum dead in the library with a candlestick than to imagine the poor old geezer dying from internal bleeding after having been pushed to the ground by a member of the Metropolitan Police. Which brings us to another source of retro-crime comfort: the idea that there is a deductive genius who will step in like a deus ex machina and summon all the suspects to an accusatorium in the drawing room, where he will talk us through the case, showing his reasoning every step of the way, and we won’t be left forever wondering who killed who, or how on earth you can foment a treasonous insurrection and not end up behind bars.
The retro-detective is righteous and incorruptible. He is there to speak truth to power, not uphold the status quo, or manhandle protestors, or enforce unjust laws. So long as modern whodunnits tip their hat to the old school, we can bask in the illusion that the cops are on our side, that they would never, ever pose for selfies with a murder victim’s corpse, or be themselves the direct cause of someone’s death. Unless, of course, it’s the murderer who pretends to be a cop in that Agatha Christie story I shan’t name, in case you’re one of the few people left who hasn’t yet read or seen it.
Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist and photographer