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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1888 | London

Red Ink

Jack the Ripper taunts the public. More

c. 1775 | London

Sops for Seberus

Does the punishment fit the crime?More

c. 30 | Golgotha

Sign on the Cross

They led him away and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor.More

Charts & Graphs

Thou Shalt Not…

Laws on the books in the United States.

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Greek dramatist Sophocles.

Woman with short gray hair seated with a book open in her lap

Classical engraving of Aristophanes with a long beard.

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

Painting of Thomas Hobbes

Black-and-white photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. with his right hand lifted

Daniil Kharms looking serious with an intent stare

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

—John Huston, 1950

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

American lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Friedrich Nietzsche & Clarence Darrow

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