`Negative Creation'

When I woke Saturday my copy of The Dyer’s Hand, a collection of reviews, essays and lectures by W.H. Auden, rested on my nightstand with a business card marking pages 148-149, near the start of an essay on detective stories titled “The Guilty Vicarage.” I’d reread only three pages of the piece Friday night before going to bed, stopping at a sub-section titled “Why Murder?” which includes this memorable sentence:

“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.”

When I fetched the newspapers from the driveway Saturday morning, I was pleased to resume my interrupted meditation on murder when I found in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal a Five Best titled “Behind the Plots,” assembled by Theodore Dalrymple. Of the five books he recommends I have read only On Murder, a collection from Oxford University Press of Thomas De Quincey’s writings on the subject. Dalrymple writes:

“Everyone loves a good murder, so long as it happens at a distance. The English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was most likely the first person to express the thought in print.”

The good doctor modestly omits his own So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer, a brief and nasty novel published in 1996. It’s a satire of contemporary English morals masking as the supercilious confessions of a psychopath. Dalrymple seduces us into sympathizing, on occasion, with the logic of Hannibal Lecter’s English cousin.

In 1985, I interviewed in his jail cell a murderer convicted of kidnapping a stripper in Indianapolis, killing her in a cornfield, and raping and sodomizing the remains. He, too, was convinced he had rendered a public service and deserved our gratitude. Auden writes in “The Guilty Vicarage”:

“Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer.”