The criminal as artist

Thomas de Quincey’s essay on murder considered as a fine art, perhaps? According to this (http://www.pataphysics-lab.com/sarcophaga/daysures/De%20Quincey,%20Thomas%20-%20On%20Murder%20Considered%20as%20One%20of%20the%20Fine%20Arts.pdf) that would be 1827.

It’s a strong element in many of Buchan’s thrillers, both the disguised German who floats through the World War I Richard Hannay books and the half-Irish half Spanish Medina (who has rather strangely been called an anti-Semitic charicature) in some of the books from the 20’s. I suspect Buchan was a large influence on Fleming (whom I confess to being unable to read) as clearly also on Hitchcock.

Perhaps Milton’s Satan? Though I suppose there would have to be Classical precedents, then.

In The Blue Cross, the first Father Brown story, Chesterton has detective Valentin reflect, thinking about master criminal Flambeau, “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic”. The later story The Flying Stars starts with the following passage:

“The most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last. It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of the Cafe Riche. Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his riches (which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame him, if I make myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some cathedral town. Similarly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich and wicked peasant (which is almost impossible), it gratified me to get his indignant head relieved against a grey line of clipped poplars, and those solemn plains of Gaul over which broods the mighty spirit of Millet.

“Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens. I did it in a good old middle-class house near Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey tree. Enough, you know the species. I really think my imitation of Dickens’s style was dexterous and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening.”

Perhaps it is inspired by De Quincey, but if I remember correctly De Quincey discusses crime as an art from a third person’s point of view only. I can’t think of an example of a master criminal thinking of himself as an artist before Chesterton, though there may be one. (Arsene Lupin perhaps?)

De Quincey took it from Wordsworth’s character Rivers in The Borderers who took it from Milton’s Satan. That’s one line of descent, at least.

Shakespeare’s Richard III certainly has elements of the artist of crime, particularly in those parts of the play before the death of King Edward where Gloucester invites the audience to admire his cleverness, daring and skill, and indeed almost makes them accomplices in it. There’s Iago too.

Francois Villon was a real one. Quite a few hundred year ago.

When Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt I think the perpetrator was taking some artistic license. From the time I first heard that story as a child until today I’ve always gotten it backwards as to who was the villain and who was not.

”
The artist-criminal is an intriguing figure, but one with very few nonfiction counterparts. In real life, most criminals scarcely have enough brainpower to use a flush toilet unassisted, let alone give thought-provoking speeches.
”

Of course someone (I forget who) caused tremendous outrage when, asked to comment on the 9/11 attacks, said they were the greatest artistic achievement of all time.

An explanation of the point quoted might be found in the old
“Traitors never prosper; what’s the reason?
For if they prosper, none dare call it treason.”
I imagine that in the details the works of people like Gould, Morgan and Prescott Walker Bush probably show plenty of artistry, and that they conceived themselves as such.

“What an artist dies with me!”
Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus

to what extent this is true and to what extent it’s fictionalized by Suetonius and Tacitus for propaganda reasons remains an open question.

Goodness, Radek–great minds think alike!

“How is Nero a criminal?”

He was notorious for animal cruelty, of course–look what he did to all those lions . . .

Re #8: Yes, De Quincey is writing about someone else. Nor is he a fictional character. I mentioned him as an answer to the question “when did the romantic notion of the artist-criminal first appear in literature?”

To continue on Shakespeare, Shylock as well. (“The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.”) Which I guess brings us back to racism.

28: That was Caligula and the honorable Senator was named Incitatus.
Actually one of my favorite poems is by Zbigniew Herbert entitled “Caligula Speaks!” – I can’t find an English translation online but it begins:
“Of all the citizens of Rome
I loved only one.
Incitatus, the horse.”

(why is it always a he?)

Women don’t enjoy metaphysics as much as men do. As a result marriage is dead and the carpets go unvacuumed.

I clicked post before it occured to me to end with “…but gardens well cultivated”

So I’m cheating.

Quit braggin’

John I want to flip this, and ask you which HERO in world literature was allowed to do immoral things in pursuit of the goal, without somehow paying for it in story terms, before James Bond? So along with the criminal artistry of Auric G. came a hero who slept around a lot… Just prior to him, on the old TV serial the Lone Ranger, if the Lone Ranger had to shoot a guy or take some sort of advantage, he and Tonto at the end of the show took out the Bible and Nietzsche and talked about it. This ages-old attention, within the storyline, to the morals of the hero changed in the late 60’s. Not even the gibbering Rightwing has put their finger on it — of course, they all love Bond! But their critique of relativism got side-tracked onto rock-lyrical celebrations of the outlaw outlook, e.g. Dylan, although these were always tied to the nonliterate tribal “trickster” stories, i.e. to a far more reflective teacher/hero psychology. Bond is a horse of a different color: Remember the dangerous thrill to the young moviegoer of actually having a “license to kill?” Still getting that old pit in your stomach? Who feels anything now! Right after Bond came the great Charles Bronson in those vile revenge movies. Nowadays a hero can steal a candy bar on camera, and not have to pay for it in any way during the rest of the story, and the audience doesn’t even notice the story-point. Is this just about style in screenplay structure? By the early 1980’s Indiana Jones could take out a pistol and shoot a huge guy juggling scimitars at fifty paces, and the audience laughed at the throwaway joke, the throwaway life. Twelve-year-old kid in the audience, to himself: “Indiana Jones just shot somebody WITHOUT giving him a FAIR FIGHT, and Daddy is LAUGHING?” And we expect real murdering street gangs to access their reasons differently? We get our morals from (1) parents (2) religious training and (3) actions of heroes in stories. #1 loses influence once you are out of the house, and #2 has been declining since Medieval times. Of course inventing new hero archetypes is enormously difficult — perhaps the last new one was Poe’s detective/Sherlock Holmes. So part of what happened may be merely the foul wages of commerce. But #3 saw a recent change in basic morals of story heroes, and it seems historically unprecedented.

Hitchcock’s Rope is explicitly about crime as art. That doesn’t get you back very far into history, though.

There’s also this passage from Charles Francis Adams, Chapters of Erie:

Over all this wealth and influence, greater than that directly swayed by any private citizen, greater than is absolutely and personally controlled by most kings, and far too great for the public safety either in a democracy or in any other form of society, the vicissitudes of a troubled time placed two men in irresponsible authority; and both these men belonged to a low and degraded moral and social type. Such an elevation has been rarely seen in modern history. Even the most dramatic of modern authors, even Balzac himself, who so loved to deal with similar violent alternations of fortune, or Alexandre Dumas, with all his extravagance of imagination, never have reached a conception bolder or more melodramatic than this, nor have they ever ventured to conceive a plot so enormous, or a catastrophe so original, as was now to be developed.

So financial crime may be a place to look.

Lupin has already been mentioned, which is fantastic, so I’ll only add by saying that French Pulp literature had popularized the idea of the super-villain quite thoroughly by the 1930’s. As in the chronicles of the Nyctalope

E.T.A. Hoffmann should not go unmentioned in this context. His “Mademoiselle de Scudery” describes a jeweller, René Cardillac, an artist so jealous of his own works that he murders his customers to get them back.

Pirates have been (popular and literary) heroes at least since the 17th century, and their whole schtick is offending against laws of religion, morality and state. Robin Hood provides a (possibly) older example. Note that both of these cases are Anglophone; King Monkey in Journey to the West is more equivocal, though clearly still a heroic protagonist. Odysseus, of course, beats them all in terms of recorded longevity.

Nero was an artist (singer) and an alleged criminal (arsonist); I’m not sure he counts, or that his apochryphal dying words imply that he saw the two activities as unified. Those who saw him perform may have connected them: Suetonius claims that when Nero was performing his audience was routinely locked in, and that people would jump out of windows to escape.

I can’t now remember who it was that famously said “art is crime,” and google’s not helping me. The association seems to come from the idea that art is excessive, and therefore (by some lights) an immoral temptation. It’s tendentious communication, and therefore ‘untrue;’ a re-presentation of nature for personal gratification. Both ancient Greek and Islamic condemnations of art have focused on its attempts to mimic nature, trespass on divine creation and fool the wise.

Perhaps, then, the criminal-as-artist is just a later inversion of the artist-as-criminal.

If you want to count emperors, kings, czars and presidents as criminals, then this whole thing is a trivial matter.

Also, since someone mentioned Hitchcock’s Rope: the 1948 film is based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play, which was (although the author often denied it) inspired by the real life Leopold & Loeb murder of 1924. Since Leopold & Loeb killed without any real motive, their crime has been described as a “thrill kill” — that is, a murder committed for the pleasure of it. The notion of a motiveless “aesthetic murder” also appears in Lafcadio’s Adventures (1914) by Gide.

1) Robin Hood, for sure

2) Gargantua and Pantagruel?

No. 49, I think your comment might be more true of Seneca’s Medea (Medea nunc sum and all) than of Euripides.

Which brings us to all the references to Nero. I actually think he’s a bad example since he’s a criminal emperor who happens to (irresponsibly according to all our not unbiased sources) coincidentally indulge in “art” as an escape from his imperial role, rather than one who thinks of his imperial role as an art form. In fact many other emperors, particularly in the later years of the empire, who cultivated the imperial role and ritual might be better examples.

Well it might be fiction but for the purposes of the discussion that’s irrelevant: Nero set fire to Rome for the sake of inspiration, to enable him to envision the sack of Troy. Crime as art. Art as crime. He works. I agree some of the others don’t fit though.

An emperor IS a criminal, by definition.

In response to the comment above…

There’s no true tension in most of the Bond films because (with a few exceptions) they became self-parodying self-pastiches after 1965. The original novels are completely different in tone, and mostly dead-serious. (When Fleming saw North By Northwest he said the film would be a good model for the Bond films but objected to Hitchcock supposedly putting in too much humor–what he’d have made of the Roger Moore era isn’t hard to guess.)

As for internal conflict, an entire chapter in Casino Royale, the very first Bond novel, is devoted to Bond’s ethical conflict about his job. He admits in a moment of relativism that the brand of conservatism around “today” (1953) would have been considered communism 50 years ago, and that heroes and villains change places so rapidly nowadays that it’s hard to really know which is which. Fleming’s solution was to acknowledge this ideological messiness and instead of having Bond simply taking on communist spies, made him take on the spies that made them spy (i.e., SMERSH). This later extended into ideologically freelance terrorist organizations such as SPECTRE. And Bond often experiences remorse over being a killing machine–he spends the first chapter of Goldfinger moping over having ruthlessly killed a man in Mexico, and similar moments can be found throughout the series. By the time of the final book in the series, Bond has become nearly incapable of killing in cold blood.
I don’t think comparing Graham Greene’s spy novels with Fleming’s is an especially useful pursuit–both men were after different things. Fleming’s books are more akin to fairy tales, or romances (to use the older sense of the word), even though they do occasionally have their moments of realpolitik, and a sense of Britain’s decline as a world power.

Post 52. 1) Robin Hood, for sure

I don’t think Robin Hood qualifies or Panurge, the most relevant character in Rabelais’ work. Both were proud of their tricks (e.g. Pantagruel, Chap 22, How Panurge served a Parisian lady a trick that pleased her not very well) but I think the reader is meant to see the tricks as justified or appropriate, a fortiori for Robin Hood.