Prison Courtyard, by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia.

Prison Courtyard, by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia.

Crimes & Punishments

Volume II, Number 2 | spring 2009

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Soldiers and police establishing line at door of the Morgan Bank after anti-capitalist Wall Street bombing, September 16, 1920.

Preamble

Crime Scenes

By Lewis H. Lapham

The American fondness for the dressing up of crime in the costumes of romance is an amusement priced at too high a cost.

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Depiction of Dashiell Hammett's character Sam Spade, cover of Black Mask magazine, September 1929.

From the Drawing Room to the Gutter

By Charles Taylor

Crime fiction affords its readers a way to acknowledge the world’s violence without either succumbing to despair or believing it can be made to go away.

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Map

Spider Men

The world’s most-wanted criminals.

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c. 1730 | London

Jenny Diver in Change Alley

Girls gone wild. More

1865 | Washington, DC

Following Orders

Who jails the jailer?More

1189 | England

Rules of the Road

Tarred and feathered. More

Charts & Graphs

Divine Justice

God’s punishments as recorded in the Old Testament.

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Black and white photograph of Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi.

Photograph of American writer William S. Burroughs.

Classical engraving of Aristophanes with a long beard.

American literary critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick.

Painting of Thomas Hobbes

Sculpture bust of Greek historian Herodotus.

Depiction of Greek philosopher Plato.

Punishment is a sort of medicine.

—Aristotle, c. 340 BC

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

American lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Friedrich Nietzsche & Clarence Darrow

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