A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

We may feel that Wells must have been a singularly naive historian to believe that war was about to
come to an end. But this can be partly explained by his ignorance of what we now call
sociobiology. When Tinbergen and Lorenz made us aware that animal aggression is largely a
matter of ‘territory’, it suddenly became obvious that all wars in history have been fought about
territory. Even the murderous behaviour of tyrants has its parallels in the animal world. Recent
studies have made us aware that many dominant males, from lions and baboons to gerbils and
hamsters, often kill the progeny of their defeated rivals. Hens allow their chicks to peck smaller
chicks to death. A nesting seagull will kill a baby seagull that wanders on to its territory from next
door. It seems that Prince Kropotkin was quite mistaken to believe that all animals practise mutual
aid and that only human beings murder one another. Zoology has taught us that crime is a part of
our animal inheritance. And human history could be used as an illustrative textbook of
sociobiology.
Does this new view of history suggest that humankind is likely to be destroyed by its own
violence? No one can deny the possibility; but the pessimists leave out of account the part of us that
Wells understood so well - man’s capacity to evolve through intelligence. It is true that human
history has been fundamentally a history of crime; but it has also been the history of creativity. It is
true that mankind could be destroyed in some atomic accident; but no one who has studied history
can believe that this is more than a remote possibility. To understand the nature of crime is to
understand why it will always be outweighed by creativity and intelligence.
This book is an attempt to tell the story of the human race in terms of that counterpoint between
crime and creativity, and to use the insights it brings to try to discern the next stage in human
evolution.
HIDDEN PATTERNS OF VIOLENCE
During the summer of 1959, my study was piled with books on violent crime and with copies of
True Detective magazine. The aim was to compile an Encyclopaedia of Murder that might be of use
to crime writers. But I was also moved by an obscure but urgent conviction that underneath these
piles of unrelated facts about violence there must be undiscovered patterns, certain basic laws, and
that uncovering these might provide clues to the steadily rising crime rate.
I had noted, for example, that types of murder vary from country to country. The French and
Italians are inclined to crime passionel, the Germans to sadistic murder, the English to the
carefully-planned murder - often of a spouse or lover - the Americans to the rather casual and
unpremeditated murder. Types of crime change from century to century, even from decade to
decade. In England and America, the most typical crimes of the 1940s and ‘50s had been for gain
or for sex: in England, the sadist Neville Heath, the ‘acid bath murderer’ Haigh; in America, the
red-light bandit Caryl Chessman, (he multiple sex-killer Harvey Glatman.
As I leafed my way through True Detective, I became aware of the emergence of a disturbing new
trend: the completely pointless or ‘motiveless’ murder. As long ago as 1912, André Gide had
coined the term ‘gratuitous act’ to describe this type of crime; the hero of his novel Les Caves du
Vatican (which was translated as Lafcadio’s Adventure} suddenly has the impulse to kill a total
stranger on a train. ‘Who would know? A crime without a motive - what a puzzle for the police.’
So he opens the door and pushes the man to his death. Gide’s novel was a black comedy; the
‘motiveless murder’ was intended as a joke in the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s essay about the loiter who
murdered his sister-in-law because she had thick ankles. Neither philosophers nor policemen