Introduction: the ‘murder mystery’

A staple feature of crime fiction, especially familiar no doubt to readers of Agatha Christie novels, is the quest for the ‘perfect crime’. Usually, though not necessarily, it involves the murder of an unwanted spouse. The motive may be sexual jealousy, the desire for a more precipitate inheritance of the family fortune, or perhaps an unusually lavish insurance policy. The murderer surrounds the crime with false clues to conceal the motive, to cast the blame on another and, crucially, to outwit the master-detective called in as a foil to the methodical but inevitably plodding police detectives. The real criminal is, of course, discovered because of some chance inconsistency in the evidence or some overlooked detail. They confess, remorsefully or cheerfully, and are carried off by the waiting police. The sword of justice inexorably, unerringly, falls on the transgressor. The moral of the story is that crime does not pay. There is no such thing as the perfect crime.

This chapter is also a kind of murder story, for it will be argued that the law of homicide has been fundamental to the development of modern criminal law theory. It has been the ‘perfect crime’, providing the central point around which the modern theory of the criminal law has been constructed. The conventional history of the criminal law sees the origins of the individualism of the modern law in the great projects of codification in the period of the Enlightenment. These, it is argued, sought to systematise the law around a philosophical conception of the individual as rights bearer and property owner.