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The thing that's so distracting about the subclass of classic murder mysteries where the victim obviously deserves it is that it's potentially a bit stressful wishing the murderer would get away with it. Hanging a lampshade by having one or more characters say as much doesn't usually do that much to disperse the hanging question.
The only types of answer to this that really feel valid to me are exemplified by the Agatha Christie's Poirot episodes Problem at Sea and Murder on the Orient Express:
(a) in Problem at Sea, Poirot answers the complaint coldly with "I do not approve of murder!" and
(b) in Murder on the Orient Express he weighs all the circumstances and decides that justice was done with an appropriate substitute for a jury, that the murderers would not have acted outside the law if it had not failed its sacred responsibility to them, and hence he lets them get away with it.
There's no question that the latter story is a more mature and nuanced Poirot, in that he weighs the issues so carefully apart from anything else, but the former is also a short story and its structure wouldn't have contained space for that sort of internal debate in any case. But it's also worth pointing out that the murderer in Problem at Sea wouldn't have passed the tests from Orient Express anyway, though they don't discuss it. The character who taxes Poirot with injustice is pathetically biased.
The victim in Problem at Sea isn't a murderer, just a thoroughly unpleasant and abusive wealthy woman, and her husband snaps after decades of abuse. There are a lot of divorce law murders in this era of detective fiction, murders which wouldn't have happened if divorce was as easy to get as it is now, and they certainly are worth an ethical debate, but this murderer isn't trapped in an abusive situation: he could've left at any time (though not without difficulty perhaps), but he chooses murder for the money. Allowances for the mental state of victims of chronic abuse must be made, and sometimes they are justified in killing to escape perhaps, but he certainly had alternatives to murder.
It's also hard to have much sympathy for victims who are extremely wealthy, and there are a lot of these in classic mysteries. It probably makes them more readable overall. But a stockbroker fraudster victim, and there are plenty of these, is an extreme example (I refer now to my present reading, Tenant for Death by Cyril Hare, not to the above Poirot stories). It can get actually distressing to see their guilt not seriously engaged with, as a philosophical issue, on the page. Problem at Sea doesn't give the answer some in the audience want, but it at least has obviously considered the issue.
The only types of answer to this that really feel valid to me are exemplified by the Agatha Christie's Poirot episodes Problem at Sea and Murder on the Orient Express:
(a) in Problem at Sea, Poirot answers the complaint coldly with "I do not approve of murder!" and
(b) in Murder on the Orient Express he weighs all the circumstances and decides that justice was done with an appropriate substitute for a jury, that the murderers would not have acted outside the law if it had not failed its sacred responsibility to them, and hence he lets them get away with it.
There's no question that the latter story is a more mature and nuanced Poirot, in that he weighs the issues so carefully apart from anything else, but the former is also a short story and its structure wouldn't have contained space for that sort of internal debate in any case. But it's also worth pointing out that the murderer in Problem at Sea wouldn't have passed the tests from Orient Express anyway, though they don't discuss it. The character who taxes Poirot with injustice is pathetically biased.
The victim in Problem at Sea isn't a murderer, just a thoroughly unpleasant and abusive wealthy woman, and her husband snaps after decades of abuse. There are a lot of divorce law murders in this era of detective fiction, murders which wouldn't have happened if divorce was as easy to get as it is now, and they certainly are worth an ethical debate, but this murderer isn't trapped in an abusive situation: he could've left at any time (though not without difficulty perhaps), but he chooses murder for the money. Allowances for the mental state of victims of chronic abuse must be made, and sometimes they are justified in killing to escape perhaps, but he certainly had alternatives to murder.
It's also hard to have much sympathy for victims who are extremely wealthy, and there are a lot of these in classic mysteries. It probably makes them more readable overall. But a stockbroker fraudster victim, and there are plenty of these, is an extreme example (I refer now to my present reading, Tenant for Death by Cyril Hare, not to the above Poirot stories). It can get actually distressing to see their guilt not seriously engaged with, as a philosophical issue, on the page. Problem at Sea doesn't give the answer some in the audience want, but it at least has obviously considered the issue.
