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cartoonmicah 's review for:
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
by Thomas De Quincey
A quality little comic farce, but one that leaves the reader pondering more deeply than perhaps even the author intended.
De Quincey, most famous as the original drug addiction memoirist, writes a little pamphlet supposedly stolen from a society of what would today be entitled true crime addicts. A gentleman’s club for the perusal of murder cases in terms of form and artistry. This paper is supposedly made public to shame the group, but the article itself makes a penetrating argument to separate the morality of a thing from its aesthetic value (This is a really complicated question, especially in light of Ruskin’s arguments in the Traffic volume of this same Black Book series).
If we fans of true crime and Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie are willing to admit that a murder can be viewed with some questions of aesthetics, it then opens the question to what types of murder are done with the best taste? From here, there is commentary on various methods and cases throughout history, along with a comic retelling of all the famous philosophers murdered, threatened, or fearful of murder throughout history.
While De Quincey is adroit as a comedian and capable of putting just the right twist on things, he leaves me feeling terribly unsure of the voyeuristic attitude we take so lightly in true crime and other murder genres. His comic approach is unsettling when coming from a narrator so intrigued by murder that he would almost go so far as to plot one himself. It makes one ask in all seriousness when the laughter subsides, where is the line between what I observe, what I invest in, and what I partake in?
De Quincey, most famous as the original drug addiction memoirist, writes a little pamphlet supposedly stolen from a society of what would today be entitled true crime addicts. A gentleman’s club for the perusal of murder cases in terms of form and artistry. This paper is supposedly made public to shame the group, but the article itself makes a penetrating argument to separate the morality of a thing from its aesthetic value (This is a really complicated question, especially in light of Ruskin’s arguments in the Traffic volume of this same Black Book series).
If we fans of true crime and Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie are willing to admit that a murder can be viewed with some questions of aesthetics, it then opens the question to what types of murder are done with the best taste? From here, there is commentary on various methods and cases throughout history, along with a comic retelling of all the famous philosophers murdered, threatened, or fearful of murder throughout history.
While De Quincey is adroit as a comedian and capable of putting just the right twist on things, he leaves me feeling terribly unsure of the voyeuristic attitude we take so lightly in true crime and other murder genres. His comic approach is unsettling when coming from a narrator so intrigued by murder that he would almost go so far as to plot one himself. It makes one ask in all seriousness when the laughter subsides, where is the line between what I observe, what I invest in, and what I partake in?