Caroline Crampton

Orwell had a varied career between travel, journalism, politics, and fiction.

Books were always a constant, though, both his own and those written by others.

He was a prolific book reviewer, and it is in his criticism that we see some of his closest engagement with ideas of crime.

In another essay for Tribune, published in November 1945, he tackles what G.K.

Chesterton termed good-bad books, defined as the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.

The pre-eminent examples of this form, he declares, are the Raffles stories by E. W. Hornung, Sherlock Holmes, and the early Thorndike adventures.

His criteria is about what remains readable, what is moving, amusing, entertaining, way after literary fashions have passed and changed.

And because of the presence of this indefinable literary vitamin that sustains successive generations of readers, these are the books that outlast their authors' intentions or their fame.

Not all of the works he singles out are crime-related, of course, but a good deal of them are, a testament both to Orwell's own belief in the power of these narratives to hold attention and an insight into the appetites of readers more generally.

To return to Orwell's thesis of the decline of the English murder, then, there are commonalities in the nine cases he highlights in the 1946 essay that all readers of crime fiction from the first couple of decades in the 20th century will recognise.

These were domestic, intimate murders.

The killers struck those closest to them, often at home.

The victims were spouses, children, close friends, the occasional lodger.

Their habits and personalities were well known and ruthlessly exploited by their murderers.

The motives existed close to home too.

These were killings done for relatively small sums of money, or to gain a slight elevation in social position, or both.

Maintaining appearances was a major concern for most, if not all, of these perpetrators, and the way that their deeds were uncovered is a factor in the appeal of these cases too.

Entry to Orwell's elite roster of cases is only granted to instances where a deadly plan was carefully followed.

Only for coincidence, nosy neighbours or sheer bad luck to unravel matters ultimately.

From this analysis, Orwell built up the following picture of the perfect crime from this great period in murder.