Eating the rich (with extra relish)

Why we love to hate the criminally elite...

“One should not, he considered, take shortcuts uninvited, especially when one was the guest of people of social importance.” 

Arriving for lunch at The Hollow, an idyllic country estate, detective Hercule Poirot discerns it better to stick to the main path, rather than taking a quicker route through the woods. He’s there at the bequest of Lady Angkatell, who has invited Poirot as a diversion from the doldrum of her routine English upper class privilege. Boredom, however, is soon to be the least of her worries: Poirot is about to walk straight into what I consider to be one of Christie’s best murder tableaus.

The Hollow, Agatha Christie

And so, we get to investigate the demise of Dr. John Christow within the confines of a property and social circle into which most of us (unless you’re a talented Belgian detective) will never receive an invite in real life.

We have, unlike the meticulously be-mannered Poirot, taken the shortcut.

Crime writing, in particular murder mysteries and thrillers, pairs very well with a good dollop of social satire. It’s no coincidence that Christie, an expert in characterisation, more often than not gravitates towards the elite: class stereotypes land best when punching up. There’s also an expectation for comeuppance, which, when served to people unbothered by the lowly worries of the hoi polloi, is all the more satisfying.

So far, so unsurprising. Rousseau’s famous “eat the rich” slogan (“when the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich!”) is a sentiment so well-iterated that it’s reached near-saturation in popular media over the past few years. Audience exhaustion, despite predictions, seems some way off yet, given the retained popularity (and renewal) of T.V. shows like White Lotus, and literary heavy weights like John Lancaster leaning into class commentary with his latest Look What You Made Me Do, to name but a couple of examples.

I think there’s more to reading “eat the rich” stories than simply a gleeful (perhaps green-eyed?) schadenfreude, particularly in times of economic strife. Whilst the crime genre offers the comforting hug of justice in troubled times, it can also, when its sights are set on the wealthy, offer a darker sort of escapism.

The White Lotus, Season Three

As with The Hollow, crime fiction focused on the top one percent gives us access to otherwise off-limits places (the Michelin restaurant in Herman Koch’s The Dinner, the exclusive Greek island in Ivy Pochoda’s Ecstasy, pretty much all of Lucy Foley’s mystery thrillers). Much as I might not like to admit it, I can’t be the only one who finds the invitation an ego-boost.

Since the narrative is framed by a crime or many (through the eyes of a sleuth, an omniscient narrator, or perhaps the characters themselves), a cushy moral distance is formed: we’re here strictly to judge, to investigate, not to covet, nor admire. We are not one of them… even though we quite like hanging out here.

This experience manifests figuratively in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. Tom Ripley, the somehow despicable, yet sympathetic anti-hero, whittles a nook into a social space he’s only ever previously spied from afar. He hates Dickie Greenleaf, more so his girlfriend Marge, yet he hates himself more for idolising them, wanting to be accepted into their world, and failing. His realisation that he has talked his way in, emulated as best he can, yet is still an observer, not a valued player, is the thriller’s deepest catalyst:

“They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike.”

Obviously (thankfully), as readers, there’s no chance of us reacting like Tom Ripley does, but an eat-the-rich crime novel scratches our itch in a similar way: we can enter these dream-like worlds and wreak carnage casting aspersions on the morally corrupt, all the while enjoying the scenery with a glass of (metaphorical or not, that’s up to you) champagne.

The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

But there’s another reason why you picked up the book, accepted the invitation, took the shortcut, or, if you’re Tom Ripley, committed identity fraud in the first place. Rich people are just as (if not more) alluring as their homes, and the reason for this is because they have very few limitations, which is utilised to great effect in crime writing.

Let’s take a recent (highly enjoyable) read of mine, Amanda Chapman’s Mrs Christie at the Mystery Guild Library. As the title suggests, this is an homage to Agatha Christie, whose ghost arrives in our main sleuth’s, Tory Van Dyne, top floor library (yes), a section of the townhouse in which she lives as the most down-to-earth member of her eccentric old money New York family. This is eat-the-rich in only the most sugared sense, with a sprinkling of “all in good fun” satire. As a cosy mystery, we galavant mainly around Greenwich Village and society events on the hunt for our perpetrator. 

Mrs Christie at the Mystery Guild Library, Amanda Chapman

The point is that Tory (although extremely likeable) is largely unrestricted. She has a job as a book conservator, but her social situation allows her to make decisions and meet certain people that would be out of anyone else’s league. Her status is not only essential to solving the mystery, but makes for a thrilling ride. However, unlike Tory, who is somewhat of an outlier, the heinously rich are often heinously bad.

Financial liberty feeds crime in a way it does no other genre. Mr Lippincott warns in Christie’s Endless Night:

"Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody."

He’s absolutely right, of course. Madness, or at least a propensity for the unhinged, is often caused by unlimited wealth; just look at the world’s billionaires. I think it must be the drilling lack of purpose, a yearning for the mundane, the fact that nothing is ever a treat, but just is. Everything's the best, but nothing's ever good enough. This special type of opulent monotony allows for the most demented sort of motives: think of all the grandiose villains, the cartoonish cackles, the blank-faced, steely-stared killers. Wealth, or proximity to it, creates a lurid and unique landscape for dastardly deeds.

A fictional murder amongst the elite is entertaining, yes, but it’s also our way in: to homes we’d never otherwise enter, to the sort of parties we sniff at but would drop everything to attend were we invited, to the people we hate but a dark part of us admires, to the characters we know we could become if we stayed around too long. 

Perhaps, this is why Poirot works so hard to keep a professional detachment.

Thank you so much for reading! If social satire and murder are your things, then you might be interested in my latest mystery thriller, Seven Bodies, which released in January with Bloodhound Books. Available in paperback, ebook, & audiobook (narrated by Julia Eve).

Seven Bodies, V. J. Randle