Caroline Crampton

He wrote, He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch or

or a leading non-conformist and strong temperance advocate.

He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary, or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience.

Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail.

The means chosen should, of course, be poison.

In the last analysis, he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful and less damaging to his career than being detected in adultery.

With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer.

As you can see from that,

Respectability is a very important theme here.

For the consumer of a crime story, there is pleasure to be had in the contrast between the image of the upright citizen presented to the world and the murdering sinner who comes out only in private.

These stories, and the best crime fiction Orwell says, operate on a moral framework where everybody knows what right and wrong is, even if they don't adhere to it.

but there are other rules at play too, social rules.

And this is where the peculiarly English nature of his argument comes in, because it was, he says, the conditions produced by England's social norms that shaped these crimes.

Observing and critiquing these invisible yet powerful conventions

is something that had interested Orwell for a long time.

In a book review from 1936, he had written that "...in England life is subdued and cautious.

Everything is governed by family ties, social status and the difficulty of earning a living, and these things are so important that no novelist can forget them."

The crimes that he singles out for special attention demonstrate the incredible power that social status and expectation had.

Rather than countenance a divorce, for instance, with all of the stigma and potential loss of position and professional kudos that might bring, someone would rather commit a murder.

Of course, class and snobbishness is a big part of this.