Historical and Cultural Overview

The roots of the crime film go back far beyond the invention of
the movies. Criminals have exercised a particular fascination
for the literary imagination whenever social orders have been
in flux. Shakespeare’s great villains – Aaron the Moor, Richard III, King
John, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth – are self-made men who seize opportunities
for advancement that would never have arisen in a medieval
world whose divinely ordained sense of social order seems to reign,
for example, at the beginning of Richard II.1 Criminals, even if they
end up as kings, are precisely those people who overstep the bounds
appointed by their status at birth, striving each “to rise above the station
to which he was born.”2 With the waning of the notion that the
social and economic status of kings and peasants alike reflect an eternal,
God-given order comes the suspicion that some people may be
occupying social places they have no right to – a suspicion that produces
the rise of the criminal in literature.
Criminals in American literature are as old as American literature
itself. The first important novel to appear in the United States, Charles
Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), is a supernaturally
tinged tale of crime that goes far to anticipate the anxieties
of film noir in its sense of gathering doom. Half a century later Herman
Melville produced an even more memorable portrait of a protean
riverboat swindler in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). The
early American writer most immutably associated with crime, however,
is Edgar Allan Poe. Only a few years after Sir Robert Peel began
England’s Bow Street Runners as the world’s first official police force,
Poe presented the ideally cerebral detective in three short stories:

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rôget”
(1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). These stories, all featuring
the reclusive Chevalier Auguste Dupin, have made Poe universally
hailed as the father of the detective story.
Dupin, though the only recurring character in Poe’s fiction, nevertheless
plays a minor role in that fiction as a whole. The Poe of the
popular imagination (and the Poe of innumerable Hollywood horror
extravaganzas) is the high priest of Gothic horror. Although horror in
Poe has many sources – the fear of being watched by a malign presence,
communication with the dead, states of consciousness between
life and death (dream, hypnosis, suspended animation, possession by
the dead), the possibility of burial alive, the horror of maiming or dismemberment
– none of them is richer than the psychopathology of
the criminal mind. Poe is the first writer to explore systematically the
proposition that the ability to imagine an action acts as a powerful inducement
to complete it, regardless of the disastrous consequences.
Hence his criminals, from Egaeus, who breaks into his fiancée’s tomb
to extract her teeth in “Berenice” (1835), to the anonymous killers of
“The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), are typically
driven to crimes they neither understand nor assent to; when these
crimes succeed, they are driven, equally irrationally, to confess, as in
“William Wilson” (1839), “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), and “The
Cask of Amontillado” (1846). It is no coincidence that Poe is noted
both as the inventor of the detective hero and as the preeminent
American literary explorer of criminal psychology. In Poe’s nightmare
world, Dupin, who is given many of the characteristics of Poe’s criminals
(misogynistic reclusiveness, a love of night and mystery, an ability
to identify with the criminals he is seeking), represents a uniquely
successful attempt to impose through a strenuous effort of will what
his author calls “ratiocination” on an imaginative world that is generally
irrational in its cosmology and criminal in its morality.
One reason Dupin, unlike his successor Sherlock Holmes, spawned
no imitators and no immediate legacy is that his import is so abstractly
philosophical, so little rooted in a particular time and place that Poe
can substitute a minutely detailed Paris, in “The Mystery of Marie Rôget,”
to stand in, street by street and newspaper by newspaper, for the
scene of the actual crime on which the story is based: Hoboken, New
Jersey. But crime films have from their very beginning attempted to
link criminal behavior to specific social settings both in fulfillment of
Hollywood’s general tendency toward sensationalizing abstract con-
flicts and as part of its generic project of casting a metaphoric light on
the workings of the social order crime challenges. Broadly speaking,
the history of the crime film before 1940 follows changing social attitudes
toward crime and criminals; the 1940s mark a crisis of ambivalence
toward the criminal hero; by 1950, it was following changing
attitudes toward the law and the social order that criminals metaphorically
reflect.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org