We get it. We know the feeling of being wronged. Whether with justification or entirely unprovoked, we understand the rage that a sense of injustice brings. From the stolen sweets in the school playground to the abandonment by a lover, we spend our lives dealing with betrayal, coming to terms with it, and moving on.
Until we don’t.
Because, eventually, we all break; there comes a point when enough is enough and, one way or another, we’re going to get our own back. Cue the emergence of revenge as a primary motivator behind crime and, more significantly (for us at any rate) crime fiction.
The desire for revenge lies behind much of recorded real-life crime. Revenge porn is a particularly nasty modern phenomenon, but studies have shown that some 20% of homicides and 60% of school shootings are driven by a desire for revenge. Revenge even seeps into our politics: both Starmer and Trump were elected to office, in part, by a desire on the part of the electorate to get their own back on previous administrations that they believed had harmed or ignored them.
Work carried out at the Virginia Commonwealth University linked the pain of being hurt or rejected with the desire to inflict pain in turn, an instinctive desire to meet harm with aggressive retaliation. It’s an ancient human response: we’re hurt or scared, we fight back. That same investigation went on to discover that the instinct to seek revenge is closely linked to the pleasure impulse in the brain. We seek retaliation because we know it will feel good. Revenge really is sweet.
And so we see the rise of one of the most enduring themes in culture – the need to seek justice, even if we have to take matters into our own hands and act outside the law, to right the universe when the universe itself has let us down.
Twas ever thus. One of the earliest surviving works of fiction, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, has revenge as its central theme: Clytemnestra seeks revenge on her husband, Agamemnon, for the sacrifice of their daughter; Orestes kills his mother in retaliation for the crime. Only in the third and final play does revenge (after some shenanigans on the part of the Furies) morph into justice with trial by courtroom becoming the accepted way forward.
The Oresteia was followed by Medea and Electra; revenge features in The Canterbury tales and is a major theme in both Hamlet and Titus Andronicus. On through the ages it runs, like a dark river, winding its way through our popular culture. In my own books, revenge has featured in Blood Harvest, Now You See Me, Little Black Lies, Daisy in Chains, The Pact, The Fake Wife and, most recently, in my latest story, The Token.
Why then, are so many writers, including me it seems, seemingly obsessed with revenge?
For a start, it enables the vicarious thrill so crucial to crime fiction. Whilst we might identify with the character driven by the need for revenge, because we’ve all felt something of the same, few of us dare take such extreme action in our own lives. Following a wronged character’s journey through the story, cheering on him or her from the sidelines, allows us the satisfaction of seeing dark justice take its course, in a way entirely denied to us in reality. We can’t help but cheer on betrayed and abandoned Megan in The Pact, even as her demands from her former friends become ever more outlandish.
There is a sense of the inevitable, when revenge becomes the driving force behind events. Alongside the perfectly human sense of guilt for past wrongs, real and imagined, that we might have committed comes that tiny, insidious voice at the back of our minds telling us we deserved this. We did something bad. Maybe we should just accept our fate?
A thirst for revenge, of course, can have disastrous consequences, making it perfect for a genre in which if a thing can go wrong, it does. In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab’s obsessive and compulsive desire to pursue the great white whale leads ultimately leads to the destruction of himself and his crew. Hamlet’s need to avenge his father’s murder leads to the loss of several innocent lives, including his own. This sense of events spiralling out of control, of a force unleashed beyond all initial expectations, keeps readers turning the pages long into the night.
Revenge is the perfect driver of suspense because we never know when the hammer is going to fall. Famously ‘best served cold’, revenge can be brewing for years; it can emerge decades after the catalytic event, thereby giving the potential victim a lifetime of fear.
Using revenge as a trope allows the everyman or everywoman to become the baddie. If something dreadful happens to our protagonist, we get it. We understand and can forgive her stepping, ideally temporarily, into the bad guy’s shoes.
And of course it is wonderfully flexible. Our protagonist can be the potential victim of revenge, such as Carly Chase in Peter James, Dead Man’s Grip or, like Catrin in Little Black Lies, the driver of it.
Here, in my opinion, are some of the best, and best known, crime novels with revenge at their hearts.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
A young French sailor, after being unjustly imprisoned for years in an island fortress, uses an unexpected fortune to seek revenge on the Parisian high society that framed him.
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
A wealthy American is found dead inside a locked compartment of a luxury train, stabbed a dozen times. Stranded by snow, and cut off from the world, tension mounts among the remaining passengers. Hercule Poirot must find and identify the killer before he or she can strike again.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
In one of the darkest and most commercially successful thrillers of modern times, a young wife, Amy Dunne, frames her husband, Nick, for her own murder after discovering his infidelity.
The Mistress’s Revenge by Tamar Cohen
When a mistress of five years is dumped, she starts a journal to deal with her heartbreak. But it soon becomes clear her grief is becoming obsession.
Find Her by Lisa Gardner
Flora Dane spent nearly 500 days in captivity and returns to the world a very different woman. Is she victim or vigilante?
Dead Man’s Grip by Peter James
A young American student is knocked off his bicycle one morning and killed. No one is to blame, but the victim’s mother, head of a notorious American crime gang, wants someone to pay. When two of the drivers involved are found tortured and murdered, single mother Carly Chase fears she’ll be next.
And finally, if I may be so bold, The Token by Sharon Bolton
Seven ordinary people, strangers to each other, receive a mysterious token one morning in the post. It promises them a share of untold wealth in the near future. Excited, incredulous, nervous, they set out to learn why they’ve been singled out in this unusual manner. The answer, regrettably, is worse than any of them could have dreamed.
Sharon Bolton’s new novel, The Token, is published by Orion