Caroline Crampton

Even outside of detective fiction fans, far more people will recognise the name Crippen than those of Carl Houlton and Elizabeth Jones, the Cleft Chin Perpetrators.

Houlton was a US Army deserter and Jones an 18-year-old Welsh waitress, who met by chance in a tea shop and together went on a six-day bout of robbing and killing that resulted in two women being assaulted and a man being killed.

Orwell declared their exploits to be pitiful and sordid, and in every way indicating that the era of great or satisfying murders was now over.

There was no respectability to what Houlton and Jones did, at all.

They met randomly, they killed random people for no clear reason other than petty cash, and then they were caught because they made no serious attempts not to be.

Jones actually spontaneously confessed to the police, and Houlton kept the car they'd stolen from their victim.

Everything they did was about short-term gratification, spending the £8 they stole from the murdered taxi driver with the cleft chin at the dog racing track the very next day, with little concern for who might see them doing it.

For Orwell, this was all emblematic of the way that the world had changed, probably for the worse.

The whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance halls, movie palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period, he wrote.

He criticises the Americanness of the Cleft Chin murder, a quality he locates in its anonymity and its individualism.

It's not a product of a rules-based system, but an artefact of chaos.

It makes me wonder whether this was ever really about murders.

Is this anxiety about the lack of perfect murders simply a proxy form of nostalgia for the now vanished stable society of yesteryear?

Change, even a change in the pattern of killing, is uncomfortable.

It's worth noting that Orwell was very far from the first person to make this kind of observation.

Maybe this is as generational as saying the kids these days.

In 1869, Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, had complained that the murders were becoming simply gross, stupid and brutal.

He went on to bemoan that where once a killer had been something like a skilled duelist who observed conventions and proprieties in order to get their murder done, they were now something more like a stupid prizefighter, indiscriminately battering away at their victim.

No finesse, no decorum.

Just as Orwell preferred Raffles, who sat down to a formal dinner with a Martianess and then shinned down the drainpipe to steal her jewels, Stephen wanted his murders to have a touch of class and a sense of purpose about them.