Violence, Crime and Punishment

Abstract

One of the most remarkable features of British Golden Age detective fiction is its lack of violence. Though the crime is most frequently murder, neither the pain of the victims nor the pain of their relatives and friends is particularly indulged in; for a genre dealing predominantly with violent death, the traditional British detective novel is surprisingly pain- and bloodless — the latter, as some critics would say, in both senses of the word. As Dorothy Sayers points out in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime: “The victim is shown rather as a subject for the dissecting-table than as a husband and father. A too violent emotion flung into the glittering mechanism of the detective story jars the movement by disturbing its delicate balance.”¹ American hardboiled detective fiction, by contrast, has — as the name suggests — always been eager to depict violent actions, for instance in the recurring scene of the tough detective being beaten up by thugs, which serves to demonstrate the hero’s power of endurance and perseverance. A particularly good example of excessive violence in classic American detective fiction is Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, in which the detective hero “cleans up” the corrupt city of “Poisonville,” killing a major proportion of its population in the process. However, excessive violence did not become the trademark of Hammett’s writing, as in the case of Mickey Spillane, who has become known as the main representative of the detective novel of extreme cruelty.