Caroline Crampton

No, of course not.

He says that Jack the Ripper's killing of working-class women is, quote, in a class by itself, but removing this case from the analysis does not mean it and other such murders didn't happen.

Of course they did.

What Orwell's decline of the English murder essay does is crystallise a narrative that was and is enormously influential.

It shows how matters of class, respectability, nostalgia and media consumption came together to produce a way of thinking about crime that crossed over from non-fiction to fiction.

As someone highly skilled in both kinds of writing, Orwell was well placed to observe this cross-pollination.

Ultimately, the decline that he identified was not a trend in murder itself, but in the way that people wrote and thought about it.

The world had changed.

Two wars had made society and people more direct, more brutal, less interested in observing elaborate, unspoken rules.

The golden age of detective fiction, with its love of puzzles and rarefied closed circles, was over.

A justified criticism of the puzzle mystery is that it made the unspeakable crime of murder into a palatable intellectual enterprise, sanitising the horrifying details to make a neat little narrative for readers to consume for fun.

At times in the essay, Orwell seems to regret the passing of an era when real-life crimes too came ready-packaged with logical motives and abundant clues.

Many decades later, I can't help feeling the same way as we plunge ever further into a moment when awful deeds generate millions of real-time analysis videos and yes, podcasts too.

Underneath it all, though, is the same crime and the same competing reactions, the salacious and the sympathetic.

All we can do is try and remember that violence is still violence, even when it comes to us in a beguiling disguise.

This episode of She Done It was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

There are links to all the books and stories referenced in the episode description and at shedoneitshow.com slash decline of the English murder.

I also publish transcripts of every episode, including this one.

Find them all at shedoneitshow.com slash transcripts.

And production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.