(Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, look away now.)
A universal motive
“All of you on this train, ladies and gentlemen…, in one way or another, each of you participated in the murder. Each of you struck a blow to achieve justice.”
— Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
A wealthy man lies dead in a snow-bound railway carriage, twelve stab wounds puncturing his bloodied torso. Before the snows melt, and the train can continue its journey through the Yugoslavian mountains, Hercule Poirot must uncover the truth and unmask the murderer. Who landed the fatal blows? The butler, the secretary, the friend, the cook, the governess? As Poirot peels back the layers of his suspects’ stories and alibis, he begins to realize the awful truth behind the Murder on the Orient Express.
“Twelve stab wounds—some deep, some shallow. Right-handed and left-handed blows. Some people in great passion and some quite calm… It is justice they have sought… because the law failed them.”
The truth Poirot uncovers is that every single one of his suspects is guilty. The murder victim, Cassetti, used his wealth and influence to evade justice for the killing of a little girl, and now everyone on that train wants Cassetti dead.
Everyone, by the way, includes you and I.
They deserve it, don’t they?
It’s true. As readers, the only thing we love more than a bad person getting what’s coming to them is a bad rich person getting what’s coming to them. Agatha Christie knew it when she skewered the American gangster in Murder on the Orient Express. She knew it when she used a poison-tipped dart to do away with grisly moneylender Madame Giselle in Death in the Clouds, and later when she poisoned the wealthy matriarch Mrs. Boynton in Appointment with Death.
As a writer, killing the ghastly rich is great sport. In the Ten Worst People in New York, I took huge pleasure in hurling a wealthy real estate mogul from a skyscraper. Later, I drowned a corrupt politician in the East River, ruining his Rolex and his Zegna suit, then turned my sights on a deviant hedge-fund manager. I did all this secure in the knowledge that the reader would enjoy the end of these wealthy and unpleasant individuals as much as I enjoyed ending them.
“He was never forgiven for being too rich.”
— Fortune Magazine, reflecting on the death of John D. Rockefeller Sr (1937)
To murder a poor and unassuming individual (see Patrick Bateman’s homeless victim in Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, or Meursault’s killing of a ‘random stranger’ in Albert Camus’ L’Étranger) is the mark of a literary monster: a beast of unconscionable cruelty (Bateman) or unfathomable indifference (Meursault). But the murder of a wealthy man or woman, particularly at the start of a novel, incites different emotions in the reader. A rich man has been shot dead, and immediately we want to know, What was his dark secret? A wealthy heiress falls from a balcony… Who pushed her? we wonder. And what did she do to inspire this act of revenge?
Killing the rich—in literature at least—appears to come with a built-in motive, one that likely implicates us all.
Justice
Let’s bring this to life with some recent examples: In Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, a wealthy and influential crime novelist is murdered. We spend the book eager to discover which of the many individuals whom Pye treated disgracefully in his lifetime finally found the courage to take their revenge. Lucy Foley’s The Guest List gives us the rich, charismatic murder victim. What has Foley’s victim done to deserve his fate? We expect something nasty, and we’re not disappointed. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty introduces a wealthy man found dead at the foot of a staircase. As the story concludes, we confirm what we suspected from the start: our victim is exactly the kind of person for whom treacherous flights of stairs are designed.
The truth is that when wealthy people are murdered in fiction, we are ready to assume they deserved it. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then enormous wealth—don’t we intuitively suspect?—must corrupt enormously! Any fictional person of great wealth who ends up silhouetted in chalk on the sidewalk, or fished from the river by police divers, probably had it coming. Didn’t they?
Jealousy
Maybe there’s more to our love of a dead rich man than merely a sense of natural justice served. Perhaps we can admit to a little jealousy in the mix. In The Ten Worst People in New York, Jacob Felle watches his new acquaintance, the fabulously wealthy Henry, work a wedding reception with the smooth bonhomie typical of the privately educated, a trait that Jacob—a Londoner of humble origins—simultaneously despises and envies in equal measure.
Have you ever felt that strange and corrosive mix of disgust and envy in the presence of the very rich? I have.
Fairness
If not justice or jealousy, then perhaps it’s our innate sense of fairness that makes us cheerleaders for the fictional executioners of the financially elite. In Britain, we have a saying, Tall Poppy Syndrome: any flower that grows high above its neighbors can expect to be gleefully cut down to size. After all, the human brain is wired for fairness, and when one individual attains the kind of wealth that sets them apart from the rest of us—and uses that wealth to (for example) twist our legal system in their favor—it triggers the desire to see social order restored. We find satisfaction, don’t we, in knowing that a wrongdoer—especially a very rich wrongdoer—cannot game the system forever, and will ultimately be brought back down to ‘our’ level.
Fear
Justice, jealousy, fairness: three reasons why we love a dead rich person in literature. I will add a fourth. Fear. The 18th Century enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is credited with saying, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich,” a sentiment echoed with top-spin two-hundred years later during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, with graffiti reading, “Eat the rich before they eat you.” All the wealthy literary victims mentioned so far have one thing in common: a vast appetite. Money, sex, power, the subjugation and humiliation of others—maybe all the above. What these people wanted, they got. Usually at the expense of those around them.
We despise these people, we envy them, but we fear them too.
Justice, jealousy, fairness, and fear: all reasons to sympathize with a killer whose victim believes that great wealth places them above society, above the law, and above basic human decency. As Hercule Poirot tells the assembled murderers aboard the Orient Express, “If ever a man deserved what he got, Ratchett—or Cassetti—is the man. I must acknowledge that the crime was not without a certain cold-blooded justice.”
What a phrase! As a reader of thrillers and crime fiction, I know what I say to the offer of a wealthy murder victim and a little cold-blooded justice. ‘I’m in.’
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