SPOILER ALERT: Warning, the issue I am discussing/question I
am asking deals with the endings of books. So if a book or
movie title comes up and you don't want to know it, assume I
am going to discuss the ending and look away.
I just finished Lionel White's The Killing (very, very good,
by the way) and it made me wonder about endings of caper
novels -- when did criminals start "getting away with it" in
crime novels?
I know the Motion Picture Code did not allow crime to be
glamorized or for criminals to be shown sympathetically (were
there successful thieves pre-code, wasn't Raffles a thief,
did he get away with it?). The Ratings system loosened things
up a bit -- the first successful criminal I remember was
Thomas Crown and, of course, all the blaxploitation heroes. I
know the TV code did not allow criminals to get away with it
until much later -- the first time I saw Altman's Long
Goodbye on TV, they ended it with a freezeframe after Marowe
pulled his gun, before he blew Terry Lennox away, giving the
impression Marlowe might be arresting him.
Anyway, this is a long preface to asking if it was also
understood that criminals in paperbacks must pay for their
crimes or, at least, not profit from them? The track robbery
is successful in The Killing, but there are doublecrosses and
falling outs, so no one profits. Earl Drake is caught at the
end of Name of the Game and the money burns up at the end of
One Endless Hour; the caper in Operation Fireball is for the
government, so it's okay in an It Take a Thief kind of way.
Westlake has written that he conceived The Hunter as a
one-shot at the end of which Parker got his comeuppance. He
knew the rules, it didn't even occur to him that his criminal
might get away with it until an editor suggested making it a
series.
So was this the beginning of getting away with it in
books?
Mark
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