Seven Bloodhounds

Shelley's depiction of Murder in The Mask of Anarchy ("I met Murder on the way") as a smooth but grim figure with a "mask like Castlereagh", culminates in an unforgettable image: "Seven bloodhounds followed him."

The verse is a satire on the Tory statesman of the early 19th century (the article on Castlereagh in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls the lines "some of the most vicious in the history of British political satire"), but other quotations on murder have seen the crime as pre-eminently a private act. (Later in the 19th century Thomas Griffiths Wainewright even gave "She had very thick ankles" as his justification for poisoning his sister-in-law.)

A century afterwards, Alfred Hitchcock commented that "Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs."

In literary tradition, at least, murder has often been spoken of in terms of art or style rather than morality. In 1827 Thomas De Quincey, Shelley's contemporary, published an essay entitled "Murder considered as one of the fine arts." Sherlock Holmes, consulted by his friend Watson in the matter of The Naval Treaty, was found completing an investigation into what he described as "a very commonplace little murder".

Tom Sawyer, assembling his Gang, was clear that its business would be "only robbery and murder" and not burglary: "We ain't burglars. That ain't no sort of style." In the 20th century, Nabokov's Humbert Humbert showed a fellowship with De Quincey: "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."

For a book with a more serious approach to one aspect of murder, see John Emsley's Elements of Murder: A History of Poison.

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