The Originality of Evil

‘OUR GENERAL experience is that every conceivable sort of man has been a saint. And I suspect you will find, too, that every conceivable sort of man has been a murderer.’ Father Brown’s words in GK Chesterton’s The Man with Two Beards holds true for the way in which most crime fiction writers conceptualise evil. The modern day detective story sees evil in a subjective way, as something all men are capable of. The view that evil is in everyone, and given the right circumstances, each person has the capacity to murder, was less prevalent in ancient times. Then, man objectified the impulses of his soul and gave it godly shape; the devil, Satan, personified evil, an absence of good. So, in a seemingly locked-room murder, the common consensus in medieval and earlier periods would have been that it was the work of God or the devil. But a Sherlock Holmes or a Father Brown or a Peter Wimsey would examine rational and technically feasible solutions. With modernity, evil came to be perceived as being concentrated within man, as indicated by Eve who made Adam taste the apple of knowledge. Nowhere is it better expressed than in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express where all the passengers have an equal motive to murder.

With subjectivity came the realisation that evil had a more dynamic relationship with the good. Heta Pyrhonen in Mayhem and Murder writes that Christie differentiates between different kinds of evil. In Evil Under the Sun, the victim’s evil is driven by purely animal instincts, while the murderer’s evil is associated with the mind, with reason. Later we learn that the murderer has a carefully concealed bestial side, and used reason to serve bestial ends. Like Edgar Allen Poe, Christie too set the human (good) apart from the bestial (inhumanity) and also from godliness (superhumanity). A hierarchy of good and evil, not absence of good, governed the supremacy of one or the other; the good in a human being always involved the proper hierarchy of these qualities. Such a complex view resonates with the character of gods in the Mahabharata and the Puranas who are responsible for producing both good and evil. In the Vishnu Purana, evil is the will of Brahma the creator and the result of obligation created by karma. Evil is seen as inevitable and also a good and necessary dynamic factor in the universe.

Free will, redemption, shades of evil and responsibility make the characterisation of evil a very tricky affair for a crime novelist

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Not surprisingly, the murder mysteries written in the mid- 1920s and 30s, also known as the Golden Age of detective fiction, ushered in an era of cozies and a non-serial killer genre where the puzzle and its solution were to be found purely in the realm of reason, and where evil and good had multiple facets. John Dickson Carr, with his masterly locked-room deceptions, Perry Mason, SS Van Dine, Ellery Queen (the pen name of two cousins), Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, along with Christie and Sayers displayed a nuanced view of evil.

In their stories, they highlighted the degrees of evil, exemplified in the law by manslaughter, murder, and murder committed when not of a sound mind. Manslaughter is when the intent is not to murder but to harm, while murder is about harm. There is a third category where the intent to harm is suspect because the person could be non compos mentis, ‘not of sound mind’. In Curtain, Agatha Christie demonstrates the separation of the legal from the moral responsibility for murder. X is morally responsible for murder but not in the legal sense because his victims have committed the murder. So, the performer of an evil act may be a tool (and therefore less culpable) in the hands of someone who holds the moral responsibility and is therefore the source of the evil. Intentionality thus underpins the modern view of evil unlike for the Vedic seers for whom it covered a far wider area. As Roberto Calasso writes in Ardor, evil included certain involuntary acts, as well as acts that just couldn’t be avoided if mankind wanted to survive, such as the act of eating. Evil is therefore everywhere and in everything; the act of sacrifice is what brings evil to consciousness.

The source of evil in a cosy mystery is an envious desire to upend the social order or demonstrate their power. Christie’s criminals are one step below (not two or three steps) in the social ladder to their victims. The murderer is the one who camouflages his or her aspiration to ascendency. The rest of the characters wear it on their sleeve, making it possible for that want to be controlled and kept in check by those who have the same desire. That is why in so many mysteries, the murderer is introduced to us, the readers, as someone who exhibits empathy. The wronged wife who grieves in silence but is later found to be the murderess (Evil Under the Sun), the easygoing doctor who is an unreliable narrator (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), another sympathetic doctor (4.50 From Paddington), and so on. Patricia Highsmith brilliantly played with this concept in The Talented Mr Ripley where readers see Tom Ripley’s true colours but his victims don’t and pay the price.

If everybody has the propensity to commit an evil act, if the individual has deployed his or her free will to make that choice, what is the potential for redemption? The cosy and private eye mysteries diverge from the serial killer genre in their answers. Though some in the serial killer genre attribute the killer’s actions to his or her upbringing, as Caleb Carr’s alienist Dr Laszlo Kreizler does in The Alienist, others, such as the killers in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series or in JK Rowling’s Career of Evil do not have any redeeming features nor any chance of redemption. This could be because of their attitude to free will—the murderer either does not have free will or some larger forces have shaped the serial killing tendency at a very young age. But for the hard boiled genre and the cosy, redemption is a definite possibility. In Dorothy Sayer’s Busman’s Honeymoon, the murder occurs in a fit of rage. Yes, it is an evil act, but it is done by someone who has led an otherwise blameless life, and who was also a victim of the victim. Sayer’s The Nine Tailors also has a similar view of the murderer. Such an attitude to redemption may be a function of how the authors perceive the evilness of a murder.

Such a subjective conceptualisation of evil invokes the question: is every murder evil? Or is there a greater evil for which murder is the solution? In Curtain, Hercule Poirot thinks so and becomes the very thing he has hunted in his career. A murderer. Poirot thinks he has averted a worse evil by murdering X, whose murmurings in the ears of the guests pushes them towards acts of murder. Poirot performs the supreme sacrifice and saves his friend, Hastings, from becoming a murderer. In Murder on the Orient Express too, the murder of a kidnapper-killer is not perceived as an evil act by those who plunged in the knife (the kidnapper’s victims) or even by Poirot. We have similar instances in other stories where the detective gives the killer ample time to flee or shoot himself before the process of justice kicks in.

Free will, redemption, shades of evil and responsibility make the characterisation of evil a very tricky affair for a crime novelist. Unless you are Chinese where the detective novel details the process of bringing the murderer (who is identified at the beginning) to justice, the telling of the tale, and the unfolding of events, and the turning of the page depends on the author’s ability to camouflage the murderer.

The correct way to tell a detective story, according to Aristotle, is to present the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is led to create his own mesh of lies. Even the worst criminals should not be portrayed as monsters or caricatures of evil. Paralogism, false conclusion, is how Aristotle characterises the art of the detective novel. A reader must be led to believe that the criminal is honourable while a decent character is guilty. Christie’s favourite method, one that is followed by many a writer in that genre, is to create a character who is average or beyond suspicion such as a child or the narrator. GK Chesterton favoured a particular characteristic for his evil character—he does not blink, while the detective, Father Brown is a short little man with a moon face and blinking owlish eyes (the antithesis?).

As Josef Hoffmann in Philosophies of Crime Fiction points out, the modern detective story, far from adopting Voltaire’s world portrayed in Zadig as a place of crime and catastrophe where murder, greed and ideological conflicts are the driving forces, focuses on an instance of wrongdoing, and highlights the uncertainty of who is good and who is evil. Chesterton is right that the detective story is about the contest of individual free wills, not about impersonal social forces or psychological urges (which may play a part). The choice to be better or worse, to commit or refrain from doing an evil act rests with each individual. That is why we readers value a crime novel where the protagonist skillfully probes the conscience of each suspect and displays the shades of evil because we have all experienced those myriad shades.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes