Men of Blood: Murder in Everyday Life

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

In England, the annual murder rate per 100,000 population is about 1.1;
the comparative rates for Canada and the United States are 2.5 and 10,
respectively. While Men of Blood “exclusively uses English case
material,” Leyton’s ultimate aim is “to deepen the scientific
understanding of the social and cultural mechanisms by which any country
can lower its [homicide] rates.” The author, a social anthropologist,
attributes the relatively low English murder rate to a “civilizing
process of socialized repression [that] inhibits the display of
violence”—a process dating back to the emergence of English common
law, with its increasing intolerance of “blood feud and personal
violence.”

To explain the U.S. tolerance of just these values—embodied in pop
culture by Hollywood’s killing machine par excellence, John
Rambo—Leyton evokes Christopher Lasch’s attack on the U.S.
“culture of competitive individualism”—a culture in which homicide
laws, unlike their English counterparts, fail to serve as an effective
constraining force. Throughout the book are emphatic reminders that
homicide, wherever it occurs, is “overwhelmingly the preserve of the
bottom of the working class.”

Although Leyton’s homicide profiles and the generally more
enlightening theoretical discussions that surround them are not always
satisfactorily integrated, his book as a whole is well written and full
of intriguing insight.