Caroline Crampton

These are not killers simply for financial advantage.

If they were, they would be attacking much bigger targets and greater sums of money.

These are killers who want to achieve a certain status, to have others look at them a certain way, and to look down on those who have not risen to such heights themselves.

There's an inherent frisson, Orwell argues, between higher social status and the committing of a crime.

In 1944, he published an essay titled The Ethics of the Detective Story from Raffles to Miss Blandish, in which he contrasts the restrained, upper-class morality of E. W. Horning's Raffles stories with the 1939 novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase.

Both are crime narratives that focus on the criminal rather than the victim or detective, but they are vastly different in what he calls moral atmosphere.

Raffles, like the murderers in Orwell's personal rogues gallery, targets relatively low amounts of money in his burglary ventures.

prioritising the maintenance of his social position that allows him to continue living at the Albany and playing cricket.

That someone of his class should have a criminal career at all is what makes him interesting.

As Orwell points out, a West End clubman who is really a burglar, that's almost a story in itself, is it not?

But how if it were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar?

Would there be anything inherently dramatic in that?

No.

This is the snobbery of Orwell's great period of murder.

It simply isn't as surprising or interesting if someone lower down the social ladder commits a crime.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by contrast, is an American gangster novel from 1938, full of explicit descriptions of sex and violence.

At the start of World War II, this book was wildly popular, something that Orwell sees as a turn away from the previous era and a new development in collective taste and psychology.

Orwell's great period of murder is also defined via comparison.

He contrasts the likes of Florence Maybrick and George Joseph Smith with a case from 1944, the so-called cleft chin murder, so-called, perhaps absurdly, because the murder victim had a cleft chin.

In an echo of Orwell's thesis from his Good Bad Books essay, this case is much less well-known today than some of the earlier Golden Age ones.