108). Williams inflicts his atrocities while we accompany an anxious innocent. And when Mary returns to the Marr front door and begins her slide into panic, De Quincey remains with her, positioning her just beyond Williams’s reach, not directly exposed to his savagery, but hovering on the periphery, a witness to the events rather than a victim of them. ‘The unknown murderer and she have both their lips upon the door, listening, breathing hard’, whispers De Quincey; ‘but luckily they are on different sides of the door; and upon the least indication of unlocking or unlatching, she would have recoiled into the asylum of general darkness’ (p. 111). What is more, in his account of the Williamson murders, De Quincey follows the same pattern. He is with neither Williams nor Williamson, but accompanies the journeyman John Turner, ‘the secret witness, from his secret stand’ who waits breathlessly on the staircase while Williams hangs over the dead body of Mrs Williamson and then searches for keys (p. 124). The murderer’s coat is lined with silk and his shoes creak, for ‘the young artisan, paralysed as he had been by fear, and evidently fascinated for a time so as to walk right towards the lion’s mouth, yet found himself able to notice everything important’. Eventually the murderer walks off ‘to the hidden section of the parlour’ and Turner, seeing ‘at last … the sudden opening for an escape’, makes his way upstairs and then out of his bedroom window and down into the street, ‘the solitary spectator’ who watched spellbound in horror but evaded Williams’s brutality (pp. 123, 125, 102). In Macbeth, we as audience witness the two murderers shortly after their killing of Duncan. In his representation of both the Marr and Williamson atrocities, De Quincey places us in the same position. Bound to the viewpoint of the witness, we listen to or watch Williams just moments after his carnage is complete. In the ‘Postscript’, De Quincey builds his aesthetic of violence from this perspective, for we look on—rather than within—Williams. The terrified bystander is endangered but ultimately released, and reader, witness, and murderer fixed together in a closed and rapt space that descends towards the brink of terror before allowing an escape for help and the reassertion of the ethical world of human action. The three scenes are closely related in terms of structure and emotion, but in Macbeth we are with the murderer while in the ‘Postscript’ we are with the witness.

De Quincey’s sympathies, however, were divided even beyond murderer, victim, and witness, for he also paved the way for the appearance of the detective, not with the introduction of the actual figure, but by putting in place key features that helped to initiate the enormous and enduring popularity of murder mysteries and detective fiction. De Quincey aestheticized violence, transforming it into liberating and intellectual entertainment and then marketing it in a variety of fictive, impassioned, and satiric guises, where it was rapidly consumed by a reading public insatiably interested in palatable versions of murder that disturbed in order to excite and seduce. ‘From the adventure story to de Quincey, or from the Castle of Otranto to Baudelaire’, asserts Foucault, ‘there is a whole aesthetic rewriting of crime, which is also the appropriation of criminality in acceptable forms.’39 De Quincey stressed the intellectualism and design of brilliant crime. He was not interested in the murder of ‘some huge farmer returning drunk from a fair’, for while ‘there would be plenty of blood’, that can hardly be taken ‘in lieu of taste, finish, scenical grouping’ (p. 83). He delighted to piece together clues: ‘It is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps of this monster [Williams], and to notice the absolute certainty with which the silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and movements of the bloody drama’ (p. 107). His mind demanded mystery. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) is often taken as one of the first novels of detection, but De Quincey roundly condemned it because the plot was not ‘managed with art, and covered with mystery’.40 Most strikingly, in ‘The Avenger’ De Quincey adopts the whole rhetoric of detective fiction. Footsteps in the chapel promise to ‘furnish a clue to the discovery of one at least amongst the murderous band’, while the terrified townsfolk grapple with ‘the mystery of the how, and the profounder mystery of the why’ (pp. 47, 52). Maximilian’s confessional letter explains the inspired ways in which he committed his acts of murderous vengeance and marks ‘the solution of that mystery which caused such perplexity’ (pp. 77–8). In his aestheticization and commodification of crime, as well as in the rhetoric, suspense, violence, reversals, and ingenuity of ‘The Avenger’, De Quincey maps in key features of detective fiction.

De Quincey’s writings on murder were received with a great deal of contemporary enthusiasm.