The roots of the crime film go back far beyond the invention of the movies. Criminals have exercised a particular fascination for the literary imagination whenever social orders have been in flux. Shakespeare's great villains — Aaron the Moor, Richard III, King John, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth — are self-made men who seize opportunities for advancement that would never have arisen in a medieval world whose divinely ordained sense of social order seems to reign, for example, at the beginning of Richard II. Criminals, even if they end up as kings, are precisely those people who overstep the bounds appointed by their status at birth, striving each “to rise above the station to which he was born.” With the waning of the notion that the social and economic status of kings and peasants alike reflect an eternal, God-given order comes the suspicion that some people may be occupying social places they have no right to — a suspicion that produces the rise of the criminal in literature.

Criminals in American literature are as old as American literature itself. The first important novel to appear in the United States, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), is a supernaturally tinged tale of crime that goes far to anticipate the anxieties of film noir in its sense of gathering doom.