In crime fiction’s Golden Age and after, foreignness is often linked with criminality, either through the role of the perpetrator or victim, to critique common social constructions of otherness. Dorothy L. Sayers uses a culturally foreign victim in her novel Have His Carcase to emphasise and criticise a sense of xenophobia and English patriotism. Over two decades later, in her novel The Talented Mr Ripley Patricia Highsmith uses homoerotic language and violence to merge victim and murderer into one foreign, isolated identity. Moving forward another thirty-five years, Walter Mosley explores the idea of criminality as racially neutral and criticises the subject of white supremacy by using a black narrator. Despite the gap between publication dates and contextual settings, all three novels scrutinise the constructed association between foreignness and criminality.     

In her novel Have His Carcase, Sayers uses a Russian victim to expose local patriotism and xenophobia. At the beginning of the novel when the body is found to be of non-British descent, the investigation is dismissed as unimportant: ‘deceased was a Russian by birth, and therefore excitable, and liable to be overcome by feelings of melancholy and despair. […] we who enjoyed the blessing of being British might find that difficult to understand’ (p. 286). The judge’s casual stereotyping, combined with Henry Weldon’s later comparison of foreigners and dogs: ‘Like collies – lick your boots one minute and bite you the next. Don’t like collies, myself. Give me a good bull-terrier any day’ (p. 152), masks uncomfortable racism behind the humour of a community obsessed with Englishness.

Physical markers like the victim’s beard also become the catalyst for his unjustified treatment by the justice system, echoing the ideas of Cesare Lombroso, who argued that a criminal could be detected by their physical features, claiming that there is a correlation between ‘racially inferior’[i] men and criminality. Sayers criticises the closed community of Wilvercombe to highlight anxieties over industrialisation and unemployment, which they project onto this marginalised victim of murder.

In The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith uses her protagonist, Tom Ripley, to explore the relationship between foreignness, criminality and sexuality. Tom’s murder of Dickie is the climax of Highsmith’s intertwining of desire and violence: ‘he could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard’ (p. 90). He undresses just before the murder as if about to take part in a sexual encounter and urges Dickie to do the same, Highsmith’s language causing the murder weapon to become a phallic symbol: ‘He picked up the oar, as casually as if he were playing with it between his knees’ (p. 91). As Tom becomes further entangled with his victim, eventually ‘becom[ing] Dickie Greenleaf himself’ (p. 87), through the merging of criminality and sexuality, Highsmith uses Tom’s internal conflict to emphasise how foreignness, both cultural and sexual, is socially constructed as a source of danger and anxiety. 

Similarly to Highsmith, Walter Mosely’s Devil in a Blue Dress further explores the social constructions of race and criminalisation, which according to Michael Rowe are ‘mutually referential and conceptually co-dependent.’[ii] However in contrast to Highsmith, Mosely’s black private investigator, Easy Rawlins, navigates a white-dominated society where crime intersects with race and social hierarchy. Unlike both Sayers and Highsmith, criminality is not inherent in the “foreign” individual but socially imposed. Mosely highlights this through the focus on colour in his description of the weapon held by the white criminal: ‘The butt and the barrel were black; the only part of DeWitt’s attire that wasn’t white.’[iii] Mosely also shines a light on the vulnerability of black Americans when Easy is attacked by a mob of white youngsters, and even while narrating thoughts of hurting them, his actions express a subconscious fear of the youths because of their race, illustrating anxieties rooted in systemic oppression. Easy’s ownership of property is another motif used to demonstrate this, while it provides him with a sense of autonomy, yet simultaneously binds him to a predominantly white structure.

Easy’s struggle to overcome the rifts in his sense of self is closely linked to his desire to find, within the fragmented city, a space that is his own, psychologically as well as physically. […] The house, figuring placement in American society as well as a secure sense of self. […] he secures his self-respecting black identity by the possession of his suburban American house, which in turn draws him ever more inexorably into the whole white-dominated system of capitalist exchange.[iv]

Lee Horsley argues here that in his attempt to reassure himself of his belonging in society and grounding to the area in which he lives, he has forfeited himself monetarily to the white American government.

The subject of foreignness, whether it is racial, cultural, or sexual, has been used in these examples of twentieth-century crime fiction as a method of exploring socially constructed ideas of otherness. Sayers critiques xenophobic rural communities, Highsmith exposes the complex relationship between desire and otherness, and Mosely explores racial hierarchies within broader social systems. Raymond Chandler describes murder as ‘a frustration of the individual,’[v] which is evident in all three texts, in an exercising of a conscious or subconscious anxiety around the presence of foreignness. Despite differences in time, setting and social context, the authors challenge readers to recognise how fear and prejudice shape the perceptions of criminality, and the constructs of this idea are fundamentally unstable.

[i] Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 117.

[ii] Michael Rowe, Race and Crime: A Critical Engagement (London: Sage, 2012), p. 8.

[iii] Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001), p. 25. All further references will be given in the body of the text.

[iv] Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 220.

[v] Raymond Chandler, ‘The Secret Art of Murder’, EN6019 Crime Fiction Module Anthology (Chester: University of Chester, 2013), p. 52.

Works Cited

Chandler, Raymond, ‘The Secret Art of Murder’, EN6019 Crime Fiction Module Anthology (Chester: University of Chester, 2013)

Highsmith, Patricia, The Talented Mr Ripley (London: Vintage, 1999)

Horsley, Lee, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Lombroso, Cesare, Criminal Man, (eds.) Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006)

Mosley, Walter, Devil in a Blue Dress (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001).  

Rowe, Michael Race and Crime: A Critical Engagement (London: Sage, 2012)               

Sayers, Dorothy L., Have His Carcase (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2016)