The revenge plot, with its central action of exposing and scourging, requires a protagonist who strips off the 'civilised' part of himself and accepts a reduction to a primitive or existential state in which he is capable of the violence required to bring down or 'reduce' the transgressor. In Gordon Williams' The Siege of Trencher's Farm (1969) - the basis of the film Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1972), still banned on video - the protagonist sees himself poised between restraint and savagery, realising that he has so far witnessed the violent assault on his house with the eyes of 'the civilised man who stood on this side of the threshold...' (118). The process of crossing this metaphoric threshold, horrifyingly represented in the later chapters of Williams' book, is a central event in many thrillers. The impact of such a transition is summed up at the end of The Executioners, the John D. MacDonald novel on which the films of Cape Fear are based (J. Lee Thompson, 1961; Martin Scorsese, 1991). When Sam Bowden finally sees the dead body of Max Cady, who had even 'smelled like some kind of animal' (147), he finds only 'a sense of savage satisfaction' that he has 'turned this elemental and merciless force into clay'. In taking his revenge on a revenger, 'All the neat and careful layers of civilised instincts and behaviour were peeled back to reveal an intense exultation over the death of an enemy' (154).

Here, on the other hand, we are looking at killer-protagonist plots in which the protagonist is aiming not to reduce but to augment himself. He wants to take on the substance and, often even more importantly, the trappings of a higher social status, though this may be accomplished by primitive means that are wholly at odds with what he craves, that is, civilised luxury and heightened respectability. This upwardly mobile protagonist is himself the object of satire. In some of the more interesting narratives, he is exposed by his own first-person narration as the epitome of an aggressively materialistic society: whereas, for example, Harry Whittington's more heroic protagonists would rather die fighting than 'surrender to greed, corruption and mean-heartedness' (Whittington, ‘I Remember It Well’), a Whittington protagonist killer like Charley Brower (Web of Murder) reveals himself as the very embodiment of these qualities.

The ways in which these contrasting types of narrative work can be seen clearly in a novel that combines the two plot movements, The Killer, published in 1951 under the Wade Miller by-line. A narrative that seems throughout to be about a killing motivated by revenge for a dead son turns out to be as much or more motivated by the need to conceal a dodgy business deal. The protagonist is an 'uncomplicated' professional hunter hired to carry out the revenge, and his hunter's ethic has an integrity that's lacking in the life of Stennis, the man who hires him. The prosperity of Stennis is sustained, appropriately enough, by the manufacture of Stennisfab, which offers 'Standardization down to the last nail and a new kind of prefabrication' (14). The tendency for the hunter to be reduced to the level of his own prey becomes, in The Killer, a bond between 'throwbacks' (18) who are essentially separate from a hypocritical society upheld by those for whom 'standardised' success is the only goal. The morally debilitating effects of upper-middle-class affluence also produce the main plot turn in Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), in which there is a very similar counterpointing of the romantic primitive and the display-oriented social climber. Although Asphalt Jungle is less bound up with the sheer neediness of characters than are Burnett's earlier novels, it contains a man closely related to his thirties cast, Dix Handley. Dix's rough integrity is set against the duplicitous smoothness of Emmerich, the man who betrays the others because of his need to preserve his bourgeois respectability. The gang is destroyed by the treachery of a man who has lived 'by a system of masterly evasions, bewildering about-faces and changes of front', and, even though Dix's sentimental return home dominates John Huston's 1950 film more than it does the novel, we are equally moved by Dix as an opposing emblem of the humanity left behind in a society that values 'class' and show. Although characters like Stennis and Emmerich remain in the background of the revenge and caper plots of The Killer and The Asphalt Jungle, their catalytic roles are evident. It is ironically their aspirations to climb out of the jungle that bring them into association with a romantic primitive, a straightforward killer who seems less reprehensible in comparison to their civilised savagery.

A more common setting for the 'social climber' novel is not the city as jungle (the urban wilderness within which the main actors suffer a reduction to the primitive) but a small town or (as in MacDonald's Soft Touch) a 'medium-sized city'. In such a milieu we see the workings of a complex socio-economic mechanism, within which the protagonist who has violated the social codes in over-reaching himself provokes an appropriate nemesis. Even gangster narratives (usually urban) can be set in small communities, for example, in Peter Rabe's Kill the Boss Good-by (1956). Drawing on his experience as a professor of psychology, Rabe uses a power struggle within the rackets in the back-water of San Pietro as a fable in which the success drive is presented as a national manic psychosis. The self-destruction of Fell, a gangland boss who is 'resting' after a nervous breakdown, has something in common with the gangster tragedies of the thirties (for example, Little Caesar). What distinguishes it from its thirties counterparts is the way in which an identified mental condition is used to create an image of the sort of world Fell inhabits - in particular, of the excesses of the drive towards success in capitalistic enterprises. With San Pietro 'in the palm of his hand' (31), Fell has 'pressure left and nowhere to put it' and seems unable to stop his frenetic activity. The problem for others involved with him is to distinguish between effective entrepreneurial behaviour and incipient psychosis: Fell '"never stops"', and his behaviour is the capitalist dream gone mad (94-7).

In Rabe's third-person narrative are able to see Fell through the eyes of those affected by his unbalanced state of mind. In several other noir thrillers of this period, first-person narratives take us inside the mind of the scheming money-grubber or social-climber, using the intimacy of this approach to satirise the self-deception, greed and underlying brutality of the American success ethic. Nothing More Than Murder (1949), the earliest of Jim Thompson's first-person killer novels, stays with the point of view of Joe Wilmot, a small-town schemer who believes there is nothing wrong in killing for profit: it's 'just murder, nothing more than murder' (80). Thompson was a writer so disturbing and original that one wonders, with Geoffrey O'Brien, what contemporary readers made of the Lion paperback originals they picked up at newsstands, with their cover promises of 'a cheap and painless thrill' (O’Brien, 145-50). In Nothing More Than Murder Thompson issues the satirist's challenge to his readers to see their own faces in the mirror, inserting himself in the novel as a visiting speaker, talking to an audience that applauds because 'they didn't seem to realize that they were the kind of people this author was talking about. Well...' (67). When the criminally avaricious Joe protests that '"I don't want anything I'm not entitled to..."', an insurance investigator replies, '"Oh, sure you do. We all do."' This is at the core of the novel. Joe is a 'small fry' capitalist with his own 'ideas on making money', trying to profit by underhanded means and not reckoning with the 'big boys' (117-19). There is considerable ironic justice in Joe being 'mopped up' himself by a big-league rival, a more skilful and cunning fraudster who says to Joe as he in effect puts him out of business, '"I'm sorry, Joe...It's nothing personal."' (153-4). Joe, whose mind is too slow to enable him to conceal his true character, becomes the caricatured embodiment of a culture so grasping that the 'personal' atrophies. '"It's a disappearance case,"' the insurance inspector says, and what has disappeared is not just 'some dame' sacrificed to Joe's scheme but the traits of character that enable a man to 'identify himself with the human race' (142).

The dehumanised narrator handled with satiric detachment makes frequent appearances in other novels being written during this period for some of the major publishers of paperback originals: for example, in 1958-60, Harry Whittington's Web of Murder (Gold Medal), John D. MacDonald's Soft Touch (Dell), and Gil Brewer's Nude on Thin Ice (Avon). Whittington, who places Web of Murder in the tradition of James M. Cain, says of the novel's structure: 'We start the protagonist almost casually down the road to Hades and then follow him on every cruel twist and turn through increasing terror to the pit beyond hell' (Whittington, ‘I Remember It Well’). The description could apply to all three of these narratives, sharing as they do the characteristic noir irony of the bid for freedom that ends with worse entrapment. In each case what is involved is the entry of the protagonist into a world in which money and social position become snares that entangle him in a nightmarish parody of the success he aimed for. The status and objects pursued are transformed in sinister, surreal ways to become (as in Cain's novels) a curse and a torment. In Web of Murder, for example, a narrator who habitually subordinates everything to his material and professional ambitions richly deserves his fate - to be paralysed, sexually exploited and unable to extricate himself from the clutches of the woman who has all along best known how to manipulate his crass ambitions, a grotesque parody of the situation he began by trying to escape.

In MacDonald's Soft Touch (filmed in 1961 as Man-Trap), the narrator, Jerry, begins as a man trapped by his own choices in a childless marriage to a drunken, unfaithful wife and in a 'meaningless job' (32). At the finish, after breaking free from being bound on a bed, he again traps himself as a result of his own greed and violence. The plot is set in motion when he succumbs to his old buddy, Vince, who shows up 'out of the past, a tiger in the night...offering the silky temptation of big violent money' (5). The suggestion here of boldly instinctive action is ironised by the phrase 'big violent money': the money itself is a strong physical presence and an agent of transformation, but it is also the antithesis of the animal energies of tigers in the night. These atavistic urges are a reduction entirely inappropriate to the socio-economic structure Jerry inhabits, and his sense of self disintegrates as he tries to reconcile primitive impulse with the establishment of his identity as a successful and civilised man. He catches glimpses of disorienting images of himself in the mirror and tries to shut off the deeds ('Murderer. Thief. It couldn't be me' [110-11]). MacDonald's final plot twist wipes out in Jerry's mind the whole of this experience of being 'somebody else'. Suffering from traumatic amnesia, he can only sense the events of the past two months flickering back in a bizarre and hallucinatory way, until he is drawn by an imperfect memory of the money to disinter the wife he cannot remember killing: 'And then they took me away' (152).

Gil Brewer's Nude on Thin Ice contains an even more surreal transformation of stolen wealth into a monstrous form of fatality. His narrator, Ken McCall, exposes himself from the outset as a man entirely suited to a life of minor dishonesties. The greed and general unscrupulousness that are his undoing are failings he is always ready to identify in those he is about to betray or abandon: 'This god-damned world was populated ass over teakettle to the hilt with sparkling parasites' (57). He readily seizes any opportunity for possible gain: 'The cross-eyed gods of the universal cash register had punched the No Sale key, and the drawer was wide open - waiting' (18-19). It is an image ironically echoed by an end in which the money he has stolen (and murdered for) is locked in a steel suitcase and Ken himself is trapped 'wide open - waiting' in the doorless adobe room he has been forced to build so that the woman to whom the crime has bound him can keep her eye on him: 'I want to always be able to see you' (141).

In their self-created entrapment these murderers are men who are compelled to 'fit in' if they are not to arouse suspicion. Other protagonist killers set a higher value on conformity for its own sake, particularly in two female-authored novels of the time, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and Vin Packer's The Damnation of Adam Blessing (1961), both of which move the crime novel closer to the novel of manners and in doing so bring the guilt of the community more sharply into satiric focus. In contrast to protagonists who need to conform in order not to arouse suspicion, Tom Ripley and Adam Blessing crave approval and integration. In dealing with the social world, Highsmith's Ripley is the more successful and the more sophisticated in his judgements. Adam Blessing, as his name suggests, is more innocent, more victimised and, because of his innocence, less successful. Both Highsmith and Packer explore the indeterminacy of guilt, invoking official standards of guilt and innocence only to subvert them. There is in their novels a much greater sense of complicity and sympathy than there is in the male-authored narratives - with Packer's Adam Blessing because of his gauchely unattractive innocence and even more so with Tom Ripley, whose actions have a disturbing appeal and, in the context of the novel, make an odd kind of sense.

As Tom Ripley sets out on his mission, supposedly aimed at persuading Dickie Greenleaf to return from Europe, it is possible to read his journey as an inversion of the great American voyage of discovery. Released from the pressures of conformity and from the snare of poverty, Tom acquires on board ship a 'versatile', magical cap, capable of transforming his character and personality. Having killed 'good-natured, naive Dickie' and having assumed his identity, Tom's reflections echo the American myth of a new-found land - the 'clean state' and 'the real annihilation of his past' (98-9). Although he is travelling east rather than west, this is his rebirth as a 'true American', another parodic version of the American success ethic. Tom is determined, like the immigrants to America, to make good, moving 'Upward and onward!' (32). His extraordinary success dependant on exactly imitating the class (or at least one particular member of the class) to which he aspires. He is careful, in his impersonation, not to improve on Dickie too much (for example, not learning the subjunctive). A comic version of American adaptability, he develops a new sense of self. His other-directedness, oversensitivity and diffidence all make it easier for him to transform himself. Murder, too, serves this fantasy of upward mobility, disposing of the inconvenient facts of a subservient past. Ripley's ability to be another self brings into focus the falsity and superficiality of the social judgements that confer status and respectability, and our tendency as readers is to hope that the rest of society will fail to detect Ripley's deception. Asked by a German interviewer whether Ripley would ever lose out, Highsmith declared, 'Nein, nein! Nicht bevor ich sterbe.' The suspense of the novel is built on tension between the exposure he risks and his success in evading detection, with Tom vacillating between confidence in his luck and fear of nemesis. The open-endedness of his fate both overcomes the 'fatality' of noir and signifies the continuance of his subversive principle in the world.

Patricia Highsmith, who published her novels as hard-backs with firms such as Harper and Doubleday, tried to avoid generic categorisations, observing that a writer was better treated and more seriously reviewed if he or she was not, say, 'a suspense novelist' but 'just a novelist’ (Reilly, 446). Vin Packer (the pen-name of Marijane Meaker) was, on the other hand, a regular writer of Gold Medal paperback originals, an exception amongst the generally male contributors to the fifties paperback boom (Breen, 55). She wrote both crime novels and lesbian 'shockers' (like the hugely popular Spring Fire), though she, too, was eventually packaged as 'a mainstream writer whose books just happened to include crime' (Server, 52-5; Gorman, 186). The Damnation of Adam Blessing shares some of the characteristics of the Ripley novels. Adam is a less attractive and rather less complex character than Tom Ripley, but there is a similar use of close third-person narration to create sympathy for the protagonist and understanding of his feeling of sensual longing for the good things in life. Both characters can be seen to function as a means of social satire, and in both cases we forgive their crimes because of the crassness and cruelty of those who have wealth and power. Like Highsmith, Packer creates her protagonist as an orphan seeking a toehold in a treacherous society, using the tensions generated as a way of exploring the American class structure and the myth of self-transformation and upward mobility. The crimes of both protagonists consist in devising ways to alter their identities, adopting methods just enough beyond the normally acceptable to put them (if the truth were known) even further beyond the pale than accidents of birth have placed them. From the very beginning, when the orphaned Adam hero-worships the wealthy man who extends condescending kindnesses to him, he works at concealing his origins (or rather, lack of origins) and pretends to strangers that he is the son of 'that rich man'. What we see throughout is Adam's own impotence, actual and metaphoric, his failure, his 'immense loneliness' (96) and his increasing desperation. He is a Candide figure, an innocent adrift in an unfriendly world, equipped with none of the social graces, hypocritical charm or guile of those who are well-adapted to life. He repeatedly thinks far better of people than they deserve and wants only to confer 'blessings' on them so that they will repay him with kindness and fellow-feeling. Like Candide, he is on the receiving end of a series of misfortunes so great that a normal person would be driven to extreme misanthropy, but for the irretrievably innocent Adam there is nothing that can make him stop living in hope. The final irony is the murder he commits, killing the beastly wife of another of his father figures in the hope that this will demonstrate his gentlemanly commitment to settling his debts. As with his present-giving, he is attempting in his own way to become a benefactor. It is, of course, a misguided effort, but Adam nevertheless acts as a foil to the rich and powerful, whose actions and motives are far less generous.