Anarchism and crime fiction

This is intended as a sort of companion to my guide to anarchism and science fiction, which has now metamorphosed into anarchySF.com. I like the idea that popular fiction may be a route into anarchism, and think it's time to expand my frame of reference.

 

It's pretty clear, though, that there is no natural affinity with crime fiction, in the way that there demonstrably is with SF. For this reason, this guide is rather insubstantial.

 

Additionally, I have had to cast my net rather widely, and am including some works that seem to me to be relevant, but which can only loosely be seen as crime fiction. Some works might be viewed more as historical novels than crime novels. Others only qualify on the grounds that some historical anarchist activities would have been widely perceived as criminal at the time. There is also an unfortunate tendency for some contemporary writers to dwell on precisely these activities, in what is almost a steam-punkish take on crime fiction; this is serving mainly to keep alive the old canard about anarchist bomb-throwers and assassins.

 

NB This is work in progress. I welcome suggestions for future inclusion, especially suggestions for works in which anarchists and anarchism are presented positively. I would also welcome suggestions for films that would merit inclusion here.

Edward Abbey: The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

Abbey's famous novel focuses on the constructive use of sabotage, principally aimed at the destruction of a dam, in the South West of the United States. A committed environmentalist, Abbey's work proved inspirational for the Earth First! group.

 

The author's views were overtly anarchistic, but he attracted controversy in later life for his opposition to immigration.

 

Leye Adenle: Easy Motion Tourist (2016)

Impressive debut novel of Nigerian noir. Included in CrimeReads Radical Noir "because this book treats sex workers as workers, entitled to respect, advocacy, and organized action, which is why we have it under the labor activism category."

 

Jake Arnott: He Kills Coppers (2001); Johnny Come Home (2006)

 

He Kills Coppers follows events following the murder of three policemen in West London in 1966, then through to the '80s. Loosely based on the real case of the Shepherd's Bush murders, it is gritty and unflinching in its portrayal not just of the crime but of endemic corruption in the police. It includes a number of references to Class War, including citing a specific issue of the paper of this name [the 'hospitalised copper' issue].

 

 

Johnny Come Home is set in London in the early 70s, and one principal story line concerns the Angry Brigade.

 

Iain Banks: Complicity (1993)

Serial murders with a social justice angle. Included in the Swindon Anarchist Group's list of anarchist/resistance novels.

 

Pino Cacucci: Without a Glimmer of Remorse (2014; first published in Italian in 1994 as In Ogni Caso Nessun Rimorso)

As the blurb has it, this is

 

A fascinating dramatized fiction of the life and times of Jules Bonnot, his "gang," and associates, the individualist anarchists of the time, including the young Victor Serge. An affectionate, fast-paced, but historically accurate account of the life of the extraordinary Bonnot—worker, soldier, auto-mechanic, driver to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—a man with a long cherished dream of absolute freedom, and the first bank-robber to use a getaway car; an anarchist who felt it his duty to lash out at bourgeois society, staking his all. A tragically romantic hero, Jules Bonnot emerges from these pages as a wounded dreamer who was to deeply affect the lives of so many other unforgettable characters.

 

The novel was described in 2006, in the Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library, as "dramatic, bitter, and wonderful". It was reviewed by WTS in Green Anarchy 24 in 2007, who concluded "I recommend this historical novel without hesitation. But I do recommend reading it
without expectations and with some flexibility/forgiveness." Reviewed the following year by Don LaCoss in Fifth Estate #377 (although the review devotes more text to the historical background than to the novel itself), the viewer concluded that "Cacucci’s novel is obviously an attempt to defend Bonnot's anarchist illegalism", which "also makes an argument for the continued relevance of Bonnot's illegalism today."

 

The book is readable, but you won't learn much about anarchism.

 

Matthew Carr: Black Sun Rising (2020)

Historical crime fiction set in Barcelona during the 'Semana Tragica' of 1909. Credible anarchist characters, one of whom is the historical Francesc Ferrer.

 

Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye (1953)

Extracts from Chandler's well-known hardboiled novel take up the best part of a page in Freedom's Anarchist Review in 1977, appended to Jack Robinson's article 'Do anarchists like detective stories?'.

 

James Hadley Chase: No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939; extensively rewritten 1962)

Once controversial for its explicit depiction of sex and violence, the novel is referred to in the Robinson piece already cited, mainly on account of it having prompted George Orwell to write his 1944 essay 'Raffles and Miss Blandish', which decried the decline in moral standards in crime fiction. Robinson himself concludes that "It needs no gloss upon Orwell to point out the truth of his standpoint, and since Miss Blandish was written one has cause to believe that the barometer of public taste in crime stories [ . . . ] indicates far stormier weather than even Orwell foresaw."

 

G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

Silly story in which the members of an anarchist secret society all turn out to be police agents. One of a handful of novels that contributed to the shaping of popular concepts of anarchism.

 

Jack Robinson, in Freedom's Anarchist Review in 1977, referred to Chesterton as "the Catholic clown", and described this novel as a parable "in which the anarchist gang all turn out to be policemen (not so improbable) but this idea evaporated in haseous [sic] Catholic mystic flummery."

 

The work is treated much more sympathetically in Heather Worthington's 'Identifying Anarchy in G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday', a chapter in H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, eds, (2005) 'To Hell with Culture'. Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature. Worthington concludes that the novel "is ultimately less about anarchy, anarchism or anarchists than about a search for identity. Stereotypical contemporary images of anarchism and its practitioners function as signifiers for the mental and social chaos inherent in uncertainty of identity.' In an endnote, she observes that Chesterton actually wrote two essays directly concerned with anarchism: 'The Anarchist', in 1909, and 'The Conversion of an Anarchist', in 1919. "In both essays, anarchists are depicted as slavish followers of the ideas of others, followers who do not really comprehend those ideas. Against this unstructured chaos Chesterton advocates common sense and order."

 

Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent (1907); Under Western Eyes (1911)

The Secret Agent tells of an agent provocateur who seeks to provoke such outrage against anarchists that effective measures are taken to suppress them; he inveigles his own brother-in-law into a carrying a bomb, which explodes prematurely in Greenwich Park, killing its bearer. The novel is based on the true story of the death of French anarchist Martial Bourdin in 1894, the circumstances of which, and the motives, remain unclear. Conrad's character Verloc is based on Bourdin's brother-in-law H.B. Samuels, who was indeed an agent provocateur employed by Scotland Yard. Other characters may have been inspired in part by Johann Most and Peter Kropotkin. [See Sarah Wise.]

 

Under Western Eyes is set against revolutionary activity in early 20th century Russia, and begins with a bomb assassination. One of the leaders of the revolutionists, Peter Ivanovich, was reportedly largely based on Bakunin.

 

Didier Daeninckx: A Very Profitable War (1994; first published in French in 1984 as Le Der des ders); Éthicque en Toc (1998); Nazis in the Metro (2014; first published in French in 1997 as Nazis dans le Métro); La Route du Rom (2003)

In A Very Profitable War a private detective in 1920 Paris exposes a wartime cover-up.

 

According to Martin Hurcombe, in his 2016 'Roman noir et drapeau noir: Didier Daeninckx and the libertarian legacy',

 

. . . depictions of anarchism in Daeninckx's work are ambiguous and sometimes even deeply unflattering. In Le Der des ders, for example, a novel which details the French military's part in suppressing a revolt amongst Russian soldiers stationed in France in 1917, René Griffon, the novel's detective, is led to investigate an anarchist gang operating in post-war Paris. Employing the clichéd excesses of anarchist illegalism and propaganda by deed, the gang is motivated by a desire to avenge one of its members murdered by the officer in charge of the same massacre. When their evidence falls into Griffon's hands, the gang blow him and his girlfriend up in a meaningless act of violence that destroys all their evidence. There is in this, as in much of Daeninckx's critique of the revolutionary left, a dislike of the assuredness and lack of humanity that accompany a dogmatic form of political commitment or embrigadement: the unquestioning surrender of one's own moral compass to the diktats of ideology and the sometimes ruthless pursuit of ends over means [ . . . ]. Indeed, the broad spectrum of the French revolutionary left frequently serves as the colourful toile de fond to the action of Daeninckx's novels as they unfold in the narrative present. If Le Der des ders sensationalises anarchism through its focus on the violence of illegalism, it nevertheless reflects nostalgia for the anarcho-syndicalist and pacifist tradition of the early twentieth century in which Daeninckx shares through the memory of his paternal grandfather, an anarchist who deserted during the First World War [ . . . ].

 

Éthicque en Toc and La Route du Rom have not been translated into English, and I haven't read either of them.

 

Nazis in the Metro features a private eye's investigation into an assault upon an author, an anarcho-pacifist who had fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and subsequently in the Resistance. It transpires that the victim had been investigating a convergence of extremists of the far left and far right, following the conversion of former Russian and Serbian communists to radical nationalism. The novel is critiqued in Hurcombe, as above.

 

According to Le Maitron Daeninckx has since 1990 described himself as a libertarian communist.

 

Rick Dakan: Geek Mafia (2008)

Dakan is described by Margaret Killjoy, in Mythmakers and Lawbreakers, in one of her featured interviews, as an 'anarchist geek'. Killjoy says the book is "a crazy revenge-fantasy crime novel with hacker con-artists as the heroes who scam money from the right-wing. Very enjoyable reading, let me tell you."

 

Pedro de Paz: The Man Who Killed Durruti (2005; first published in Spanish in 2004 as El hombre que mató A Durruti)

The 1936 killing of Buenaventura Durruti investigated as a short crime fiction novella. The English edition, published by Christie Books, includes a long historical postscript by Stuart Christie, setting the killing in context.

 

Kyle Decker: This Rancid Mill (2023)

Hardboiled novel with a punk anarchist PI.

 

Subject of an extended review by Peter Werbe in Fifth Estate in 2023, who finds the protagonist "probably the most unique character in detective fiction", and the novel "a good addition to the pantheon of mystery writers whose story not only confronts evil, but also exposes the corruption of power."

 

Cory Doctorow: Red Team Blues (2023)

Described by the author as "a post-cyberpunk, anti-finance finance thriller", the themes include crypto-currency, cyber-security, and forensic accountancy.

 

A long review by Blair Fix is copied at the Anarchist Federation website.

 

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment (1866)

This celebrated novel focuses on the torment of an impoverished student, Raskolnikov, who decides to kill an unscrupulous money-lender, thinking that with her money he could escape from poverty and help to support his family. After the crime he finds himself racked with confusion, remorse, and shame, and is forced to confront the real-world consequences of his actions.

 

The work was discussed by Kropotkin in his 1905 work on Russian Literature. Kropotkin found it "full of the most thrilling scenes of poverty on the one hand and of moral degradation on the other", but was not convinced by the intellectualised materialist motives for the murder: "Behind Raskolnlkoff I feel Dostoyevskiy trying to decide whether he himself, or a man like him, might have been brought to act as Raskolnikoff did, and what would be the psychological explanation if he had been driven to do so. But such men do not murder." He continues:

 

However, with all its faults, the novel produces a most powerful effect by its real pictures of slum-life, and inspires every honest reader with the deepest commiseration towards even the lowest sunken inhabitants of the slums. When Dostoyevskiy comes to them, he becomes a realist in the very best sense of the word, like Turgueneff or Tolstoy. [Some of his characters depict] living beings and real incidents of the life of the poorest ones, and the pages that Dostoyevskiy gave to them belong to the most impressive and the most moving pages in any literature. They have the touch of genius.

Frédéric H. Fajardie: Tueurs de Flics (1979);  Reines dans la Ville (1998); Billets Brulés (2002)

All referenced in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary. None have been translated into English, and I haven't read any of them.

 

Patrick Feast: Karl Marx Private Eye (2023)

Described in Jess Flarity's 2023 review for Fifth Estate as "a fascinating chimera: it is simultaneously a cozy mystery, a Conan Doyle parody, and a philosophical meditation on Karl Marx's reaction to the failed 1871 Paris Commune". It's also "primarily a comedy," if a weak one. Feast himself has been a contributor to Fifth Estate, and acknowledges the encouragement of Peter Werbe, of the Fifth Estate collective.

 

Dario Fo: Accidental Death of an Anarchist (first published 1970 as Morte accidentale di un anarchio; various English translations)

Satirical drama, presented as farce, based on the real-life defenestration of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli in 1969 while in police detention. Fiercely anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist.

 

William Godwin: Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)

Following completion of his ground-breaking proto-anarchist Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin opted to promote his ideas through the medium of a novel. Caleb Williams was written as a call to end the tyranny of governmental power, showing how legal and other institutions can break even the innocent when caught up in the criminal justice system.

 

For Jack Robinson, in Freedom's Anarchist Review in 1977, "This seminal work could truly be said to be a precursor of the novel of crime and suspense bearing, as all literature must, depths beyond the mere surface in appearance of a mere tale of adventure."

 

The book is the subject of David Weir's 2011 'Anarchist Fiction, Anarchist Sensibility. An Enquiry into the Strange Case of Caleb Williams,' in Stuart Christie, ed. Arena Two. Anarchists in Fiction. Weir describes the novel as "anarchist fiction of a high order", and notes that its sentimental elements also fed into the second and third editions of Political Justice. By contrast to some of the well-known anti-anarchist novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (including those of Conrad and Chesterton), Godwin "used the novel of sensibility to show that anarchism was something worthy of sentiment, and, as such, was a political philosophy much more worthwhile than anything the capitalist adventure could offer."

 

Ruth Kinna, in a 2020 article for Dope magazine, said of the novel that it "brilliantly described the injustice and terrors of arbitrary rule."

 

Graham Greene: Brighton Rock (1938)

Murder thriller, set in Brighton; possibly now better known in the 1948 film version. The novel is among Greene's works discussed in George Woodcock's 1948 The Writer and Politics; Woodcock describes it as "that formidable picture of the jungle of Christian evil." (p140)

 

Kerry Greenwood: Death at Victoria Dock (1992)

Anarchist activity in Melbourne in the 1920s, involving Peter the Painter, who had gone there after eluding the Siege of Sidney Street. Lightweight but fun.

 

Included in Anarchy Crime Fiction.

 

E.W. Hornung: Raffles. The Amateur Cracksman (1899)

Tales of a gentleman thief. Referenced in Jack Robinson's 1977 article 'Do anarchists like detective stories?' in Freedom's Anarchist Review. Robinson's view of "the genteel violence of Raffles" is that it is among the "symptoms of the ill-health, not a diagnosis towards a cure", as crime novels should "chronicle the corruption and sickness of society and the state without enjoying or partaking."

 

James Kilgore: Prudence Couldn't Swim (2011)

Darkly humorous hard-boiled fiction, set in a present-day Oakland, California, with alternating prequel chapters set in Zimbabwe. Though not especially anarchist, it's well worth a read in its own right, and also for the extraordinary life of the author. Kilgore was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and spent 27 years on the run, wanted on explosives charges, before being extradited from Zimbabwe and serving 6½ years in prison. He had meanwhile established himself under another identity as a respected academic, which occupation he resumed on his release. The novel was written in prison.

 

Robert Knox: Suosso's Lane (2015)

Unusual novel centring on the famous judicial murder case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, with a fictional continuation of the story into the 21st century. The author stresses that it is "not a documentary or work of scholarship," but in its historical coverage it's surely pretty close to realism.

 

The novel was warmly reviewed by S. Laplage in Fifth Estate #409, Summer 2021.

 

Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008; first published in Swedish as Män som hatar kvinnor, in 2005)

Hacker Lisbeth Salander, central to this bestselling novel, is never explicitly described as an anarchist, but her character may well strike a chord with anarchist readers.

 

Rather dismissively describing the novel as "a mainstream murder mystery [ . . . ] enjoyed by women in their 60s", Alex Donovan Cole, at Discourses on Liberty, gives an anarchist critique of the 2011 film of the book.

 

Margo Laurie: The Anarchist's Wife (2022)

The story of Sacco and Vanzetti, told from the view point of Sacco's wife Rosa. Though there are fictional elements, the novella has been impeccably researched, and the author has taken pains, in an appendix, to specify what is and is not historically accurate, citing her sources meticulously. It's also very effective, not least from assuming that Rosa herself didn't know the truth of the extent of her husband's involvement (if any), so the reader can empathise with her, and appreciate the extent of the judicial travesty, without any presumption of guilt or innocence. The author views this work as historical fiction, rather than crime fiction, but I think it's both.

 

Maurice Leblanc: Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (1907; first published in French as Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Cambrioleur)

Lupin was created as the French alternative to Sherlock Holmes, and this collection of short stories was the first in which he was featured. Leblanc continued to feature him through the rest of his life, for no less than 24 books.

 

There has been speculation that Lupin was based (at least in part) on a real anarchist illegalist, Alexandre Jacob (known as Marius Jacob), who was charged with 106 robberies, and sentenced to forced labour for life. However, as noted by David Drake, "the extent to which Lupin was modelled on Jacob is a subject of debate".

 

Emmanuel Litvinoff: A Death Out of Season (1973)

A novelisation of the 1911 Siege of Sydney Street, convincingly depicting the East London anarchist scene of the time. Litvinoff was born and bred in the East End, and an activist himself, steeped in anarchism and leftism. A Death Out of Season is the first novel of a trilogy, and discussed in Valentine Cunningham's 'Litvinoff's Room: East End Anarchism,' a chapter in H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, eds (2005) 'To Hell with Culture' Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature. Cunningham describes the novel as "an evident replay of the anarchistic motifs of Conrad (and of the Dostoevsky who lies behind Conrad) filtered, as it were, through Graham Greene." It is, he says, "a compelling re-creation of the politics of the East End and its visionary immigrants (especially Jews), the ferments at the Club in Jubilee Street and among the readers of Arbeter Fraint [ . . . ]".

 

Léo Malet: 120, rue de la Gare (1991; first published in French in 1943); A Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge (1956; first published in French as Brouillard au pont de Tolbiac)

120, rue de la Gare was Malet's first novel, centred on what became his series character Nestor Burma, a former anarchist turned private eye, though anarchism doesn't feature in this first book.

 

In A Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge Burma investigates a case linked to French anarchist activities in the 30s.

 

Malet himself had begun life as an active anarchist, had also performed as a cabaret singer, and participated in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s.

 

Malet and his fiction are discussed in Stephen Schwartz's 'Léo Malet. From Anarchism to Arabophobia', in Stuart Christie, ed. (2011) Arena 2. Other novels referred to there include The New Mysteries of Paris and The Tell-Tale Body on the Plaine Monceau, neither of which I've yet read.

 

Jean-Patrick Manchette: Nada (2019; first published in French in 1972)

An ultra-left groupuscule kidnaps the American ambassador to France. One of the group is an anarchist whose father died in 1937 defence of the Barcelona Commune.

 

The novel is the subject of a useful article by Jose Rosales and Andreas Petrossiants, reprinted from blindfieldjournal.com at The Anarchist Library. They describe Manchette's position as "a decidedly anarchist-inspired situationism", which infuses this novel and other works of his.

 

Ngaio Marsh: The Nursing Home Murder (1935)

Old-style whodunnit, in which anarchists are introduced early on as a red herring, but Marsh subsequently completely confuses anarchism and Bolshevism, and there's no further real anarchist interest.

 

Douglas A. Martin: Wolf (2020)

Described by the author as 'anti-true crime', this unusual novel is far removed from conventional crime fiction, with no named characters, plotting barely more than suggested, yet a successful conjuring of bad things and the bewilderment of the perpetrators. It was warmly reviewed by Carrie Laben in the second Anarchist Review of Books, for whom "Wolf though never explicitly abolitionist, is anti-true crime because it presents a world where externally-imposed justice was never an option."

 

Isabel Meredith: A Girl Among the Anarchists (1903; pen name of Olivia and Helen Rossetti)

Described by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, in her 2008 Framed. The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle, as a "semiautobiographical dynamite narrative", the novel draws on the real-life experiences of the teenage Rossetti sisters in the anarchist movement in the London of the late 19th century. Miller credibly suggests that this work was a key source (albeit unacknowledged) for Conrad's The Secret Agent. I would further suggest that is also a key source, either directly or indirectly, for a good many historical crime narratives of the later 20th century.

 

The Rossetti sisters—daughters to William Michael Rossetti—merited coverage in George Woodcock's Anarchism, which recounts how they were inspired by their admiration for Kropotkin to publish from their home, in 1895, a journal called The Torch: A Revolutionary Journal of Anarchist Communism, which included contributions from Michel, Malatesta, and Faure, among others. He noted, though, that "in later years both the Rossetti girls wrote with amusing asperity on their anarchist childhood."

 

J.S. Monroe: The Riot Act (1997; pen name of Jon Stock)

Young amoral anarchist gets involved in anti-terrorist work with (rogue) secret service agents. All rather far-fetched. Stock was a Daily Telegraph journalist at the time of writing, and it very much depicts a right-wing journalist's idea of an anarchist personality.

 

Montalban: El Pianista

Not yet translated into English. Not yet read.

 

Walter Mosley: Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large (2005)

Pulp novella foregrounding a charismatic anarchist fixer, an admirer of Bakunin. Included in Killjoy's list of stories featuring sympathetic anarchist characters.

 

Robin Paige (i.e. Susan Wittig Albert and William J. Albert): Death in Hyde Park (2004)

Anarchist propaganda by the deed, set in the Edwardian era, where the police and secret services are happy enough to stitch suspects up, deliberately stereotyping suspects as 'anarchists'.

 

Although classified by Margaret Killjoy (2009) among 'Stories that Feature Anarchists as Villains', this lightweight novel is quite well researched, and the anarchist characters are not as negatively stereotyped as one might expect. Anarchism itself is treated rather naively, but the authors have taken the trouble to cite John Quail's history of British anarchism, The Slow Burning Fuse, in a page long bibliography.

 

Ann Perry: Long Spoon Lane (2005; pen name of Juliet Marion Hulme)

Police corruption in Victorian London, involving grossly caricatured anarchist activity.

 

 

Pouy: La Petite Ecuyère a Cafté

Not yet translated into English. Not yet read.

 

Quadruppani: Saigne-sur-mer

Not yet translated into English. Not yet read.

 

Ian Rankin: The Naming of the Dead (2006)

In The Naming of the Dead the context is almost as important as the storyline. The context is the G8 Summit held in Glasgow in 2005, and the accompanying protests, with the 7/7 bombings happening more or less concurrently. Anarchists present at the protests are depicted realistically (as far as I can tell, not having been there), and the added spice is that Rankin's lead character, Detective Inspector Rebus, is himself portrayed as someone with anarchistic leanings. Rankin himself has said:

 

I do think that the crime novel at its best is political. Crime fiction involves exploring society from top to bottom.

Rebus always struck me as a bit of an anarchist. If you' re rich, wealthy and well-connected, and you' re committing a crime because you' re greedy and you think you'll get away with it, he's much more likely to go after you than if you' re someone at the very bottom of society who is committing a crime because you' re desperate and have got nothing.

He's much more likely to give someone like that a break. I guess that makes the books slightly political.

[Edinburgh News]

There is a useful discussion of this aspect of the novel in Peter Messent's 2013 Crime Fiction Handbook.

 

Alex Reeve: The Anarchists' Club (2019)

Lightweight, with not much on anarchism, though there is some narrative about the Rose Street Club in Victorian London, and the first person detective is trans.

 

The Residents: The Brickeaters (2018)

Improbable hard-boiled fiction, readable as po-faced parody.

 

The novel was reviewed at length by Ben Olson in Fifth Estate #410, Fall 2021. He says "For anarchists, alienation from society is what is most relevant about Dada. The Brickeaters represents this alienation, playful and absurd but also unnerving and unpredictable, a cluster of rearranged political potential yet resolutely antipolitical in a way that matches the anti-art of the Dada movement. [ . . . ] The Brickeaters is a relevant read for anarchists today, as its Dadaist influences resonate not only with anti-art but with a non-traditional, anti-political stance, a spiritual anarchy."

 

George Simenon: The Suspect (1938)

A non-violent anarchist learns of the planned bombing of a factory by militant comrades, and makes it his mission to prevent this happening. The projected bombing seems a bit far-fetched, but the central character is presented sympathetically. One minor character is said to have once been part of the Bonnot gang.

 

Upton Sinclair: Boston (1928)

Long novel about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, written with passion, careful research, and direct knowledge of the case, the author having personally twice interviewed Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The author makes no direct claim of innocence or guilt, but there's no mistaking his outrage at the appalling injustice of the trial and execution.

 

April Smith: Judas Horse (2008)

FBI undercover agent infiltrates an anarchist animal liberation cell, but the story moves on to police and political corruption. Included in Killjoy's list of stories that feature anarchists as villains.

 

John Smolens: The Anarchist (2009)

Alternatively described as a historical novel, this recounts the story of the assassination of US president McKinley in 1901 by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, and his subsequent execution. The historical anarchist context seems fair, with references to Emma Goldman and Johann Most, as well as the prior anarchist assassination of King Umberto I of Italy by Gaetano Brescia, in 1900. The unhistorical element is that one character is a fictional representation of the unknown bomb-thrower at the 1886 Chicago Haymarket incident. Czolgosz himself is described relatively sympathetically.

 

Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcommandante Marcos:  The Uncomfortable Dead (2006)

The Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary's essay on 'The Anarchist Detective' has this to say: . . . "the historian, professor, union organiser and world-renowned writer Taibo was born into an exiled (this time in Mexico) working class Spanish anarchist family, and his detective has appeared in 6 novels including the most recent, The Uncomfortable Dead (2006), co-written with the Zapatista Subcommandante Marcos."

 

Activist Noir's 26 Radical Crime Novels writes: "Amongst his many forays into radical fiction, Paco Ignacio Taibo II co-wrote a noir novel with Subcommandante Marcos, whose advocacy for the Zapatista Movement easily translates into socially engaged crime fiction. Not to sound too Soviet, but fiction can be used as very effective propaganda, and if you' re looking to scrub your brain free of Ayn Rand forever, The Uncomfortable Dead is a good place to start."

 

The novel is fresh and original, and the format of alternate chapters by each author works well. Local colour is taken for granted, to the extent that some references are likely to be lost on non-Mexican readers such as myself.

 

Eleanor Updale: Montmorency's Revenge (2006); Montmorency and the Assassins (2007)

Montmorency's Revenge is a YA historical crime novel, in which anarchist activities are central to the story; the assassination of President McKinley takes place during the action.

 

Montmorency and the Assassins is another in the same series, with anarchist plotting and projected attentats again central to the story, including historical anarchists such as Gaetano Bresci, and the assassination of king Umberto I of Italy. A central character is a youthful aristocrat who infiltrates the anarchists, after initially showing a degree of sympathy, but who then proceeds as a police informer.

 

Both are among Killjoy's 'Stories that Feature Anarchists as Villains'.

 

Vallet: Sam Suffit

Not yet translated into English. Not yet read.

 

Jason Webster: The Anarchist Detective (2013)

Murder and a criminal trade in saffron, set in Spain. The title is somewhat misleading, as the principal anarchist character was the detective's great-grandfather, active during the mid-30s, but eventually executed by Franco in the early 40s. Close to the end there's a surprising cross-over reference to Ernst Jünger, who appears in the anarchySF reading list.

 

Brand Whitlock: The Turn of the Balance (1907)

Not exactly describable as crime fiction, but a fascinating account of how poverty and institutional injustice combine to drive people into crime. Details may have changed over the intervening century, but the theme continues to have relevance.

 

 

In Emma Goldman's 'Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure' (ch. 4 of her 1911 Anarchism and Other Essays) Goldman describes this novel as "the greatest American exposé of crime in the making", "demonstrating how the legal aspects of crime, and the methods of dealing with it, help to create the disease which is undermining our entire social life."

 

Wishnia: Blood Lake: A Filomena Buscarsela Mystery (2002)

Set in Ecuador, with a complex plot, the 2014 PM press paperback edition was reviewed for Fifth Estate #403 by Peter Werbe, who doesn't expect an anarchist perspective, but for whom "The story has enough room for left/liberal critiques which note the obvious wealth of the ruling class amidst massive poverty, endemic violence, official corruption, the murderous nature of the police and army, death squad training at the U.S. School of the Americas, and even a swipe at "civilization" itself, complete with scare quotes."

 

Zeimert: Viens Poupoulpes!

Not yet translated into English. Not yet read.

 

 


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