The ‘perfect crime' and punishment

In a brief comment in 1946, 'Decline of the English Murder,' George Orwell, with a dose of his satirical genius, laments the 'Americanization' of crime in his country, comparing a murder that gripped the public imagination at the time with the traditional, English 'formula.' A deserter from the US Army and an unemployed 18-year-old English woman met by chance, and, in a six-day spree of murder and fun, killed a taxi driver and attempted to murder two women, having come upon all their victims by chance. 'Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who had become partly americanized,' Orwell commented. And what was the right kind of English murder that hitherto had enthralled readers of popular newspapers? 'The murderer should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist or solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs,' Orwell wrote. 'He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Noncomformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny, unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison.' And, Orwell concludes: 'With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer.' (Here we wonder whether Agatha Christie, at the height of productivity at the time, helped determine readers' appetite for murder or whether public preferences shaped her stories). In Greece, we can't say that we have a 'national predilection' for some type of murder. Endowed with rich imaginations, empathy and hot blood, all murders enthrall and sadden us. We live by the dogma of the 'evil hour,' according to which we are all one unpredictable step away from becoming victims or murderers. So, let's look elsewhere for the 'perfect crime,' the one that betrays a national trait: in basements and flower beds across the country, where every so often remains emerge of some dead parent, sacrificed to the need for a descendant to survive (or live better) on this mortal coil. For a society that for weeks has been anxious as to what promises of benefits the prime minister was to make in Thessaloniki over the weekend (which could affect the lives of many and the electoral prospects of others), the effort to keep a late parent's pension from following him or her into the black hole of deprivation could be seen as an attempt to keep the beloved among the living, still providing parental care, even if from a shallow grave. As many of us don't consider what goes into our pocket as coming from another's, benefits fraud, tax evasion etc, are generally seen as victimless crimes. It is possible that those who deprive their dead of the dignity demanded by all human customs are of limited mental capacity, cynically indifferent, or in existential panic. In any case, they place their personal interests above everything else. Custom, the 'right thing,' the law, awe in the face of death, society itself, do not matter to them. This loneliness is their punishment. Even before it is uncovered, the 'perfect crime' has only victims.