Caroline Crampton

Not everybody agreed, though.

In The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler praised the work of Dashiell Hammett precisely because it took the act away from the hidebound conventions of the previous age.

He felt that the hard-boiled style Hammett practiced showed crime as it was, not as people might hope it would be.

He wrote, Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse, and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols.

He put these people down on paper as they were.

I'm not here to litigate the relative attractions of noir crime fiction versus puzzle mysteries, far from it.

But I do think there's something fascinating about how different critics, from different places and times, keep coming back to this same question.

Why do we prefer to read about certain types of murders, real or otherwise, and not others?

Why is Crippen's dismemberment of his wife entertaining, whereas the cleft chin crime is just sad?

On one level, this is a question about storytelling and the lure of cohesive narrative, no matter what its subject matter.

Crippen killed his wife to be with another woman, and then tried to flee across the Atlantic with her in disguise.

They were caught via an exciting technological first, shipboard wireless telegraphy, and brought back to face justice.

There's a beginning, middle and end to the story, with points of tension and release.

Seeing order made out of confusion is always satisfying.

By contrast, the violent and purposeless actions of two nihilistic young people during the worst war the world had ever seen, who may not have even exchanged names before setting out on their murderous adventures, has no plot or puzzle to it.

There's nothing standing between us and the sheer horror of what they did.

The background brutality of war has bled any strong emotions from the crime itself.

So was Orwell right?

Was there something fundamentally better about the genteel English murders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries?