 However, I've now spoken so many times here that I'm rather afraid of repeating myself because I have, like most people, only a very limited repertoire of ideas. But I console myself with the possibility that if I have forgotten what I said before, you almost certainly will have done so. Well, I do remember, I think, that I pointed out before that practically everyone is interested in murder. I think I took a straw poll. I asked people to put up their hands if they found murder a boring subject. And, of course, nobody thought that murder was a boring subject. And I think I also mentioned that the literature of most countries would have been very much poorer if no murder had ever been committed, and if murder was not part of the spectrum of human conduct. Well, murder, of course, is the subject of an entire genre of fiction. Indeed, any large bookshop will have a section devoted to crime novels, and by crime, of course, is meant murder because no one really is interested in petty pilfering. And there's no crime that approaches murder for interest. But in most bookshops, the section devoted to murder is almost certainly one of the largest and probably larger than that devoted to the history of the world. Now, the evolution of crime novels, by which I mean, of course, murder novels, over time, and that are produced in the same country, may tell us something significant about the evolution of the society of those countries. Of course, fiction is fiction, and we should not make the elementary mistake of supposing that because many of Dostoevsky's characters spent an inordinate amount of time discussing philosophy, that philosophical discussion was the principal activity in the Russian Empire during his lifetime. Nevertheless, no student of Russian history could or would dismiss Dostoevsky's novels altogether as evidence. And I think the same might be said of crime novels, though, of course, we shouldn't expect them to be of Dostoevsky in depth or levels of merit. Although, of course, murder was by no means unimportant in Dostoevsky's work. Well, I'm just going to compare an early crime novel by Agatha Christie, the murder of Roger Ackroyd, published in 1926, with Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin, published 87 years later in 2013. Both authors are immensely popular. Indeed, it is often said that Agatha Christie has sold almost as many copies of her books as have been sold of the Bible, which actually attests to her much greater popularity than the Bible, given the Bible's considerable start in time. And I should imagine also that Ian Rankin very considerably outranks the Bible in sales. Well, the first and overwhelmingly most important thing that one notices in making the comparison is the totally different social atmosphere described by the two authors. Agatha Christie, of course, tends to be rural and Ian Rankin is absolutely urban, but the difference is not simply that of the urban rural divide, nor is the difference attributable to the fact that Christie is writing about England and Rankin is writing about Scotland, because the differences between England and Scotland, not withstanding the Scots nationalists who rely on what Freud called the narcissism of small differences, they are very similar. The social degradation in Scotland is absolutely the same as the social degradation in England. Well, Christie in general describes a cosy, stable, superficially almost timeless, upper middle class and aristocratic world into which murder intrudes in a most unlikely fashion. And thanks to the investigations of her amateur detectives, Cule Poirot and Miss Marple, this temporarily disarranged world, the world disarranged by murder, is restored to what seems almost like the natural order of peace and tranquility, and so we are relieved. And in fact, so well-ordered is that world that it has occurred to me that actually Poirot and Marple must be themselves serial killers, because no other hypothesis explains why wherever they go, murder soon follows. By contrast, Ian Rankin describes a gritty, violent and generally degraded social reality in which murder is only to be expected and which there is no good order to restore. So when the murderer is found, you just know that there's going to be another murder very soon. His city is Edinburgh, which is a good deal less violent than the other large Scottish city, Glasgow. And I remember some time ago, in the days when it was still quite well-ordered, it's actually 50 years ago now, when I lodged with a friend in a rather grand Edinburgh house, there was Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion in the bookshelves, and we breakfasted on a boiled egg, and I mean one boiled egg between two. And to ask for more was regarded by the landlady as a sign of habitual riotous living, or at least as having been spoiled as a child. But Rankin's Edinburgh is certainly not that of this persliped Calvinist propriety, which hardly exists anymore, but that of a city in which the rich are vulgarly hedonistic and the poor are in pursuit of the most brutish pleasures, but the only difference really between them is one has more, the rich have more money than the poor. Now of course Mrs. Christie has been accused of, or at least been described as, having described a world that never really existed. She is a fabulous writer of what in effect are fairy stories, a kind of Hans Christian Andersen of detection. And insofar as murder is, and has always been a sordid affair, this is probably true. We find her stories delightful precisely because we think they are so unrealistic and because in the last analysis they are therefore unthreatening. They lull us rather than call us to think sociologically or criminologically. Good is good and evil is evil. The world and human conduct has moral meaning. Ian Rankin by contrast is a social realist. His is a world of drug taking, thugs, bent policemen, violence, disabused lawyers who use corrupt methods, corrupt businessmen, a world in which success is obtained only by the most dubious methods. There is a moral ambiguity and complete relativism. There's nothing of the fairy story in his books. They are if anything hyper realistic, confronting us with the most sordid aspects of modern existence, which are many and seem almost to be the only aspects that there are. Now, Poirot Christie's amateur detective in the murder of Roger Ackroyd, as I'm sure you all know, I don't need to tell you this, is a fastidious little Belgian dandy who finds even a speck of dust on his sleeve of his impeccable suit highly disturbing and who lives very neatly among well-chosen antique furniture. Rebus, Rankin's professional detective, is slovenly, of course, because almost everyone is slovenly. A heavy drinker, a chain smoker, Poirot smokes, but of course discriminating the only fine cheroots and not the kind that Rebus smokes. And Rebus lives in an untidy flat that he barely keeps clean. Rebus chews gum and drops it on the ground when he has finished with it. And like a quarter of British smokers, he does not consider that cigarette ends our litter. Or if he does, he doesn't mind just spreading it. Something that is inconceivable that either Poirot or Miss Marple would do. Poirot is an epicure while Rebus subsists on a diet of unhealthy British proletarian fast food. And there are parts of Glasgow, incidentally, where the life expectancy is barely of Soviet length. Where Poirot may play subtle tricks, Rebus bends the law when he does not actually break it. In Christie, the British police may be stolid and rather stupid, but they are honourable. In Rankin, they are shrewd, unscrupulous, brutal, and almost always verging on the corrupt. In Christie, the local head of the police, called the Chief Constable in England, is public spirited of high social class. He is usually a retired senior officer in the army who consorts with aristocrats and upper middle class. While in Rankin, he is a successful careerist aparachic, much more concerned with preserving his position by means of public relations and politicking than with catching criminals and protecting the public order. How far does the difference in character and atmosphere of the two authors reflect real social difference and change? Both writers are often witty and humorous, and there is irony in both of them. But the irony is of a very different kind. In Christie, it tends to be feline in Rankin, it's reflective of a savage existence. Here, for example, is the narrator of the murder of Roger Ackroyd who turns out to be the perpetrator describing his sister, the spinster Caroline, with whom he lives. Caroline can do any amount of finding out about what goes on in the village by sitting placidly at home. I suspect that the servants and tradesmen constitute her intelligence corps. When she goes out, it is not to gather information but to spread it. At that, too, she is amazingly expert. Here is one of Rankin's character, a policewoman described at home. She was stretched out along her own sofa, a cookery program on TV, and a microwave meal on a tray on her lap. This is an observation, incidentally, rather of the kind that Michel Werbeck makes in his novels. This absurd situation where someone is watching a cookery program and eating a disgusting, prepared meal. In Christie's world, it's inconceivable that anyone should use foul language. In Rankin's, it's inconceivable that anyone should not do so. And this is actually a true reflection of the language of my country now. Christie's world is, as I've said, one of settled social hierarchy. Give or take some social climbers. Rankin's is at least, in theory, a meritocracy that is more just and open to all. But despite the superior justice that we associate with meritocracy, in which people rise or, of course, sink, we usually forget the sinking part of it, to their deserved level, nothing can disguise the fact that Christie's world is infinitely more attractive than Rankin's with its crudity and vulgarity. There is absolutely nothing whatever that is attractive in Rankin's world. In Rankin's world, intimate personal relations are almost impossible. Divorces the norm, that is, if people get married in the first place. Illegitimate birth is rampant. It's accepted both morally and as a kind of fact of nature. Whereas in Christie, divorce is spoken of as something almost unthinkable. And an illegitimate child would be the social catastrophe of social catastrophes. Not coincidentally, I would say, that Rabus is continually playing the horrible British popular music of the 1970s and 80s whenever he can. His tastes never progressing beyond the adolescent. And we are, incidentally, entering the first age of the geriatric adolescent, or the adolescent geriatric, whichever way you want to put it. One can't really imagine Poirot or Miss Marple sitting down to listen to the productions of a musical group called Spooky Tooth. But Rabus listens to this kind of thing as much as he can, all the time at home or in his car. And silence, with which everyone in Christie's world would have been familiar, is anathema to him, as it is actually in reality to many people nowadays. In Christie's world, even the evil characters maintain the outer social proprieties in beautiful surroundings. Not for nothing did Miss Marple once remark that there is a great deal of evil in an English village. But in Rankin, the evil is raw and undisguised, and all surroundings are ugly and squalid. Cramped offices, meaningless bureaucratic tasks, unmade beds, alcoholic fumes, traffic jams, cigarette smoke, the constant beat of this terrible music. One has difficulty remembering that it is Rankin's world that is several times more economically prosperous than Christie's, as measured by economic output per head. In Saints of the Shadow Bible, one of the minor characters called Kennedy is a thug now dead, and Rankin describes him. He was a housebreaker, that's the Scots word for burglar, who always carried a knife with him on jobs, scaring the daylights out of anyone who happened to find him in their home. And the elderly and frail were a specialty. Sheltered housing was never quite sheltered enough from one of Kennedy's nocturnal visits. He would often follow his victims home from the post office on pension day. In those days, pensions were paid to people in post offices, and he would then kill them. Now, in the days, Kennedy was actually killed by the police in this book, and it was covered up with the help of a crooked forensic pathologist. So in Rankin, even the forensic pathologists are crooked. And this is, with the possible exception of forensic pathologists, all that Rankin here describes is absolutely realistic. I had many patients when I was practicing who had suffered precisely these kinds of crimes. Indeed, it was so normal that the attitude towards it by the police is revelatory in itself. In another part of Saints of the Shadow Bible, a man appears to have been murdered in the course of a break-in in his house. One of the detectives investigating the crime says, looks like a house breaking gone badly wrong. This, in fact, is precisely what the British police spokesman say to the press after someone is murdered in the course of a burglary. Though just as Have a Nice Day has been transmuted into Have a Great Day, so they now say that the burglary went tragically wrong rather than badly wrong. In other words, the police are now so impotent that they accept that there are burglaries that go happily right. The burglar breaks in, doesn't do too much damage to property, escapes with whatever he wants, and no one is hurt. And these, of course, are the burglaries that the police don't have to investigate. Their function in such a burglary is merely to give the victim a crime number so that he can claim his insurance. There are no similar crimes of this kind of crude brutality or sordid kind in Christie. Not merely because she was writing about a different social class or because she was writing a fairy story. In fact, she was in many respects a very shrewd and realistic observer of the human condition and human psychology. And I'll give you one example. This is from the murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the narrator and perpetrator of the crime says, it is odd how when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial. I burst immediately into indignant speech. And this surely, this is a very shrewd observation of human character, I think, and explains some of the extraordinary vehemence of so much modern discourse about public affairs where the most evident realities are denied with absolute fury. Christie was very shrewd, for example, about the value of the practice of medicine in her days. The narrator and perpetrator, as I might have mentioned, of the book is a doctor. And one of the characters in the book, a Miss Russell, an unmarried woman in those days, was still unashamedly miss rather than moose, goes to him with a painful knee. Miss Russell's account of vague pains was so unconvincing that with a woman of lesser integrity, I should have suspected a trumped-up tale. Well, thank you very much, sir, for this bottle of liniment, doctor, she said. Not that I believe it will do the least good. I didn't think it would either, but I protested as duty-browned. Now, it's been estimated that at about the time when the murder of Roger Ackroyd was written, that a visit to the doctor was about, had changed from more likely to do you harm to doing you, having as good a chance of doing you good as of doing you harm. So Mrs. Christie had a very, very shrewd appreciation of the value of medicine in those days, which was, apart from giving people comfort, almost nil. And she was much more shrewd about it than the vast majority of doctors or the population in general. The reason no such crimes as those described by Rankin do not appear in Christie is not because she was writing fairy stories about the upper and middle classes, but because they didn't happen in the lower echelons of society in which she was writing. If we take the case of interpersonal violence of murderous proportions, it is easy to work out that it is probably now 20 to 50 times as common in Rankin's Britain as it was in Christie's. The homicide rate has actually only doubled, but it has been estimated that such are the advances in medical and surgical treatment that if we were to use the same techniques as we used in 1960, up to five times more people would die of violence than new. Moreover, great advances had already been made by 1960 by comparison with 1926, so that it is clear that many of the people who died of violence in 1926 would not have died had they been treated with modern methods. This ratio of murderous violence, comparing 1926 with 2013, when the two books I have considered were published, is equal by the rise of other kinds of crime, for example street robbery. There were more crimes of such robbery in one London borough in 2000 in a single month than in the whole of Great Britain in 1925, in a year in 1925. And in my childhood I experienced the tail end of the historically short period when Britain was a well-ordered society, well-ordered in the sense that people obeyed the law to a very large extent. As a child of 10 or 11, for example, I could wander the streets of London without anyone supposing that I was either neglected or abused. In other words, the comparative gentility of Christie's crime stories is accounted for, not merely because she was writing fairy stories, but because in the world in which she wrote, such gentility actually did exist, though she was shrewd enough to recognize also that it was breaking down slightly. In Rankin's world, no such gentility exists, and social class differences, as I've said, boil down more and more to the possession of money or the absence of money, with tastes and conduct otherwise coalescing into a very unrefined way of behaving. In Christie, it's the traditional vices linked to greed and lust, to money, sex power, that lead people to commit murder, and they continue to operate in Rankin's world, of course, but there's an added layer of sociological explanation. Crime is no longer merely the result of individual human decision, but of social conditions, and it's my belief, though you'll be pleased to know I don't have the time to go further into it, that sociological, criminological, and psychological modes of thought actually conduce to an increase in crime by putting a kind of intellectual screen between people's thoughts and their own actions. So crime novels, whether they intend to do so or not, tell us something about the era in which they were written, and I therefore grant you intellectual absolution for reading them if you feel you need such absolution. Thank you very much.