Crime In Progress

One of the reasons I wanted to have this private email-list was to share work in progress, the kind of work that most people never see but which forms the everyday of the writing life. So, I've been asked to write a book for Bloomsbury (and yes, I'm totally chuffed about this!) which would discuss crime and what management lessons might be drawn from this. The commissioning editor was pleased with the proposal, the reviews were mixed but fair (the proposal was very short, so couldn't really fit in all shades of gray), and I'm now waiting for the contract. Both the series editors (for the book is supposed to be one of the first releases in a series) seem happy, at least! So I started writing, for often I need to write to know what I actually think – thinking as something that emerges on the page! Here is the start of the book, as it stands right now, with a historical intro and some philosophical argumentation. More to come, natch! Stay classy now!

Introduction: Mack the Knife

"Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne,
Und die trägt er im Gesicht.
Und Macheath, der hat ein Messer,
Doch das Messer sieht man nicht."
Bertol Brecht

In 1723, a young man by the name of Jack Sheppard takes to crime. He comes from a poor family, but has managed to get an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and is good at it. Jack has less than two years to go to become a journeyman carpenter, a member of the carpenter's guild, and a free, professional man. People think he has a great future, so to translate this to contemporary times, our man Jack has almost finished his education and has a great network on LinkedIn. However, like so many students before him, he quite enjoys a night out. Together with quite a few other apprentices, he starts to go to a tavern by the name of The Black Lion (close to where Drury Lane meets Aldwych, although the tavern is long gone). This was a rather dissolute place, good for strong drink, frequented by thieves and whores, and Jack took to it with a gusto. Soon he started to do more drinking and whoring than carpentry; he took up with a lady of the night called Edgeworth Bess (real name Elizabeth Lyon), and started stealing to supplement his salary as an apprentice. First it was mere petty theft, but he had a knack of not getting caught, and quickly advances to stealing from houses he was working on, and later on to burglary. By this time, he has left his master, does some off-the-books work as a carpenter, but over all lives a life of crime.

In early 1724, so at most a year after he turned to crime, he gets arrested for burglary, and starts what some might call a second or third career. As it happens, Jack turns out to be an escape artist of no little skill. He flees from his first arrest, gets picked up for pickpocketing, Bess gets locked up with him, and he promptly flees again – this time using the now classic 'bedclothes tied together as an impromptu rope'-routine, bringing Bess along (as befits a gentleman). Less than two months later, Jack gets arrested again, locked up in Newgate, and sentenced to death. He escapes the very day the death warrant arrives, August 31st, having loosened a bar in a window, but is re-arrested nine days later. His fourth escape, for of course there was one, puts Mission: Impossible to shame. After picking his handcuffs, but still in leg irons, he starts climbing up a chimney, but finds this blocked. He retreats and breaks through the ceiling instead, climbs in leg irons, and then breaks through six barred doors to get to the roof of the prison, from where he manages to get over to an adjacent roof. Jack manages to sweet-talk the people he comes across after this not to report him, and pays a blacksmith a considerable sum to finally relieve him of the irons. Now free, he stays on the lam for two weeks, dressing up as a dandy and partying hard. On November 1st 1724 he is arrested for a final time, and he is executed by hanging on the 16th. He is 22 (and a half) years old.

"Honest Jack" had at this time become something of a folk hero; he was known for being witty and sociable, considered rather good-looking, and his escapades (particularly as these were exaggerated in the media) amused and entertained the public. His life and death ended up creating a cottage industry of pamphlets, novels, prints, songs, and the likes, the most well-known product of which was The Beggar's Opera by John Gay (1728). Here, the hero was one Captain Macheath, a chivalrous retelling of Jack Sheppard, a character that turned up again as a pirate in the sequel Polly (1777, long after Gay's death), in a penny dreadful in 1841, and even quoted by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit (1857). That would have been the end of it, had not Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill created a new version to celebrate the original's bicentennial. Their version, modernized and with all-new music, was called Die Dreigroschenoper, better known in English as The Threepenny Opera. In this rather socialist work, Macheath is known by his nickname "Mackie Messer" or "Mack the Knife", and the play starts with a prologue in which a street performer sings a murder ballad about, you guessed it, "Mack the Knife", a song which also closes the play. This song, a quickly written last-minute addition, later turned into a jazz standard. Louis Armstrong's version from 1955 is today well-known (and part of the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress) but didn't do that well in the charts. Bobby Darin's version from 1959, however, becomes a global hit and a platinum record. Later, it will be covered by artists as diverse as Frank Sinatra, The Doors, Ella Fitzgerald, Nick Cave, Eartha Kitt, and Robbie Williams, to only name a few.

It's quite a journey, this: From a promising young man experimenting a bit on the wild side to a well-known escape artist, then onto becoming a posthumous (anti-)hero, one of whom plays are made and songs sun. Then a kind of immortality, as Mack the Knife from the song almost everybody has heard, and opening a book on crime. Not bad for a boy from the East End, who started on the straight and narrow, but whose life was defined by his turning to crime.

A Many-Splendored Thing

So, Jack who became Mack was defined by crime, but what, when it comes down to it, even is crime? I know, I know, it's the kind of pseudo-intellectual opening books like this does so often that it starts to feel like a crime of its own, but be that as it may, it's not the easiest question to answer. On the most basic of levels, we all know the definition. A crime occurs when you break the law, i.e. when you do something that is considered illegal in the judicial system you're in. Jack was a criminal because he was a thief and a burglar, and an escapee to boot. That said, such an understanding of crime is quite expansive. It covers things that most people would agree aren't entirely legal but not really a big deal either: Things such as jaywalking, minor speeding, and being drunk in public, whilst also including things abhorrent to almost all people, such as rape, aggravated battery, and genocide. It is a strange thing, this, that can cover everything from crossing the street in the wrong way to attempting to eradicate an entire people. Stranger still, when you consider the kind of things that can be against the law. For instance, all the following have, somewhere and at some point, been against the law:

– Handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances (UK Salmon Act 1986, Section 32)

– Being drunk in charge of a cow (UK Licensing Act 1872)

– Mispronouncing 'Arkansas' (Ark. Code Ann. § 1-4-105 (1881 resolution))

– Being "unsightly or disgusting" in public view (the so-called US "ugly laws"^[1])

– Flying a kite in the street in an annoying manner (UK Town Police Clauses Act 1847, s 28(k))

– Selling cheddar that isn't pleasing in flavor (Wisconsin (USA) – Admin. Code ATCP 81.40)

– Eating a frog that died during a frog-jumping contest (California 1957 Fish & Game Code §6883)

and many more…

We might giggle at such things, but throughout history, there have been many, many things that in one way or another count as breaking the law. Yet in many of these cases, we would not necessarily think them deserving of the lofty epithet 'crime', for a variety of reasons. Whilst being drunk when in charge of a cow might have been against the law (and may still be, in fact, as drunkenness when handling livestock might constitute a breach of laws regarding proper animal husbandry etc.), we would not in normal discussions or in natural language call it a crime. Rather we'd call it an offense, a misdemeanor, or the very literal breaking of a law. Crime seems all too grand, too serious, to describe these things. There's also another dimension to this. Imagine you're asking an older person what their son does, and getting "Oh, he's a criminal!" as an answer. It might shock you a little, but being the kind of person you are, you decide not to judge, and ask what they mean. "He is a serial killer, you see. He started out as a serial rapist, but he's gotten into all sorts – cannibalism, necrophilia, and a lot of murdering." As shocking as this is, I would ask whether the original statement was meaningful. This person has committed crimes, no doubt. Horrible, horrible such. They are clearly an offender, even a monster, but it seems a bit wrong, too uplifting even, to call them "a criminal" and what they did as 'crimes'. Abominable acts, yes, but also so much more than crimes. So it would seem that at least in everyday language, for something to be a crime – a real one, deserving of the name – it both needs to be serious enough to count as a proper crime, yet not so serious that referring to it as a crime would be to diminish it. That is, of course, unless the crime in question gets a particular qualifier, such as being ”a crime against humanity”. Suddenly, it is as if certain crimes have gotten a new lease on life! Now a genocide can well fit the bill, as can a number of other atrocities. The serial killer might still fall outside of our folk taxonomy, but the dictator is now neatly fitted in.

To all this comes that we in everyday parlance might well ignore the finer points of whether something is a crime, a misdemeanor, or the breaking of a statute, and just call everything that's against the law a crime. However, in the same everyday context, we often refer to other things as crimes. For example, "It's a crime the way they're acting these days," "That's a complete crime against fashion," or "The fact that Liverpool lost was nothing short of a crime." In these instances, crime refers not just to breaking the law but, more fundamentally, to breaking an order. We assume there is an order to sport, fashion, or the world, and anything that disrupts this order is, in everyday terms, a crime. So we might look at our uncle's unfortunate choice of flamboyant shirts, tut, and tell our aunt we're going to report him to the 'fashion police'. We know that there is no such thing as an actual crime against fashion (even though I believe we are all waiting for the kind of politician who will criminalize wearing socks with sandals), nor a fashion police (even if this could immediately make youth unemployment a thing of the past), but we still operate with such terms.

Lest I get accused of being overly glib – and I acknowledge we went from necrophilia to 'socks with sandals' at an unusual pace – my point here is not to make fun of how the term crime is used. On the contrary, I want to highlight that whilst the concept of crime is simple in theory, it becomes quite complex in practice. In contains multitudes, it mutates and changes, and it ranges far and wide. Honest Jack was an easy enough case, if a flamboyant one with a surprising reach, but his fellow criminals have over the ages formed a very motley crew indeed. With stories, and lessons, to match.