ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the portrayal of crime fiction’s most vital character type: The criminal. In contrast to criminals, the fictional detective figure is typically a positively connoted one, even if inevitably somewhat conflicted. Where ideal criminals are strong, evil and blameworthy, ideal victims are weak, respectable and blameless. The genre’s preferred, and most significant, criminal archetypes are the “monster”, the “vampire” and the “spoilt child”. Even though crime fiction has evolved to embrace more progressive politics of identification, the fictional portrayal of killers is persistently characterised by various contradictions. The correlation between supposedly bad mothering and the child’s ultimate criminal behaviour is not the only problematic connection made by fictional crime narratives. And while the genre’s preferred criminal archetypes force us to examine the extent to which criminality is socially produced, they also lay bare several contradictions, myths and problematic correlations which writers often draw upon in their attempts to explain criminal motivation.
