‘But suppose she hadn’t?’ the Home Secretary could not help asking.
‘Then the murder wouldn’t have happened, that’s all. In due course Arthur Constant would have awoke, or somebody else breaking open the door would have found him sleeping; no harm done, nobody any the wiser. I could hardly sleep myself that night. The thought of the extraordinary crime I was about to commit—a burning curiosity to know whether Wimp would detect the modus operandi—the prospect of sharing the feelings of murderers with whom I had been in contact all my life without being in touch with the terrible joys of their inner life—the fear lest I should be too fast asleep to hear Mrs Drabdump’s knock—these things agitated me and disturbed my rest. I lay tossing on my bed, planning every detail of poor Constant’s end. The hours dragged slowly and wretchedly on toward the misty dawn. I was racked with suspense. Was I to be disappointed after all? At last the welcome sound came—the rat-tat-tat of murder. The echoes of that knock are yet in my ear. ‘Come over and kill him!’ I put my night-capped head out of the window and told her to wait for me. I dressed hurriedly, took my razor, and went across to 11 Glover Street. As I broke open the door of the bedroom in which Arthur Constant lay sleeping, his head resting on his hands, I cried, ‘My God!’ as if I saw some awful vision. A mist as of blood swam before Mrs Drabdump’s eyes. She cowered back, for an instant (I divined rather than saw the action) she shut off the dreaded sight with her hands. In that instant I had made my cut—precisely, scientifically—made so deep a cut and drew out the weapon so sharply that there was scarce a drop of blood on it; then there came from the throat a jet of blood which Mrs Drabdump, conscious only of the horrid gash, saw but vaguely. I covered up the face quickly with a handkerchief to hide any convulsive distortion. But as the medical evidence (in this detail accurate) testified, death was instantaneous. I pocketed the razor and the empty sulphonal phial. With a woman like Mrs Drabdump to watch me, I could do anything I pleased. I got her to draw my attention to the fact that both the windows were fastened. Some fool, by the by, thought there was a discrepancy in the evidence because the police found only one window fastened, forgetting that, in my innocence, I took care not to fasten the window I had opened to call for aid. Naturally I did not call for aid before a considerable time had elapsed. There was Mrs Drabdump to quiet, and the excuse of making notes—as an old hand. My object was to gain time. I wanted the body to be fairly cold and stiff before being discovered, though there was not much danger here; for, as you saw by the medical evidence, there is no telling the time of death to an hour or two. The frank way in which I said the death was very recent disarmed all suspicion, and even Dr Robinson was unconsciously worked upon, in adjudging the time of death, by the knowledge (query here, Mr Templeton) that it had preceded my advent on the scene.
‘Before leaving Mrs Drabdump there is just one point I should like to say a word about. You have listened so patiently, sir, to my lectures on the science of sciences that you will not refuse to hear the last. A good deal of importance has been attached to Mrs Drabdump’s oversleeping herself by half an hour. It happens that this (like the innocent fog which has also been made responsible for much) is a purely accidental and irrelevant circumstance. In all works on inductive logic it is thoroughly recognized that only some of the circumstances of a phenomenon are of its essence and causally interconnected; there is always a certain proportion of heterogeneous accompaniments which have no intimate relation whatever with the phenomenon. Yet so crude is as yet the comprehension of the science of evidence, that every feature of the phenomenon under investigation is made equally important, and sought to be linked with the chain of evidence. To attempt to explain everything is always the mark of the tiro. The fog and Mrs Drabdump’s oversleeping herself were mere accidents. There are always these irrelevant accompaniments, and the true scientist allows for this element of (so to speak) chemically unrelated detail. Even I never counted on the unfortunate series of accidental phenomena which have led to Mortlake’s implication in a network of suspicion. On the other hand, the fact that my servant Jane, who usually goes about ten, left a few minutes earlier on the night of December 3rd, so that she didn’t know of Constant’s visit, was a relevant accident. In fact, just as the art of the artist or the editor consists largely in knowing what to leave out, so does the art of the scientific detector of crime consist in knowing what details to ignore. In short, to explain everything is to explain too much. And too much is worse than too little.
‘To return to my experiment. My success exceeded my wildest dreams. None had an inkling of the truth. The insolubility of the Big Bow Mystery teased the acutest minds in Europe and the civilized world. That a man could have been murdered in a thoroughly inaccessible room savoured of the ages of magic. The redoubtable Wimp, who had been blazoned as my successor, fell back on the theory of suicide. The mystery would have slept till my death, but—I fear—for my own ingenuity. I tried to stand outside myself, and to look at the crime with the eyes of another, or of my old self. I found the work of art so perfect as to leave only one sublimely simple solution. The very terms of the problem were so inconceivable that, had I not been the murderer, I should have suspected myself, in conjunction of course with Mrs Drabdump. The first persons to enter the room would have seemed to me guilty. I wrote at once (in a disguised hand and over the signature of “One Who Looks Through His Own Spectacles”) to the Pell Mell Press to suggest this. By associating myself thus with Mrs Drabdump I made it difficult for people to dissociate the two who entered the room together. To dash a half-truth in the world’s eyes is the surest way of blinding it altogether. This pseudonymous letter of mine I contradicted in my own name the next day, and in the course of the long letter which I was tempted to write I adduced fresh evidence against the theory of suicide. I was disgusted with the open verdict, and wanted men to be up and doing and trying to find me out. I enjoyed the hunt more.
‘Unfortunately, Wimp, set on the chase again by my own letter, by dint of persistent blundering, blundered into a track which—by a devilish tissue of coincidences I had neither foreseen nor dreamt of—seemed to the world the true. Mortlake was arrested and condemned. Wimp had apparently crowned his reputation. This was too much. I had taken all this trouble merely to put a feather in Wimp’s cap, whereas I had expected to shake his reputation by it. It was bad enough that an innocent man should suffer; but that Wimp should achieve a reputation he did not deserve, and overshadow all his predecessors by dint of a colossal mistake, this seemed to me intolerable. I have moved heaven and earth to get the verdict set aside and to save the prisoner; I have exposed the weakness of the evidence; I have had the world searched for the missing girl; I have petitioned and agitated. In vain. I have failed. Now I play my last card. As the overweening Wimp could not be allowed to go down to posterity as the solver of this terrible mystery, I decided that the condemned man might just as well profit by his exposure. That is the reason I make the exposure tonight, before it is too late to save Mortlake.’
‘So that is the reason?’ said the Home Secretary with a suspicion of mockery in his tones.
‘The sole reason.’
Even as he spoke a deeper roar than ever penetrated the study. ‘A Reprieve! Hooray! Hooray!’ The whole street seemed to rock with earthquake, and the names of Grodman and Mortlake to be thrown up in a fiery jet. ‘A Reprieve! A Reprieve!’ The very windows rattled. And even above the roar rose the shrill voices of the news-boys: ‘Reprieve of Mortlake! Mortlake reprieved!’
Grodman looked wonderingly towards the street. ‘How do they know?’ he murmured.
Those evening papers are amazing.’ Said the minister dryly. ‘But I suppose they had everything ready in type for the contingency.’ He turned to his secretary. ‘Templeton, have you got down every word of Mr Grodman’s confession?’
‘Every word, sir.’
‘Then bring in the cable you received just as Mr Grodman entered the house.’
Templeton went back into the outer room a
nd brought back the cablegram that had been lying on the Minister’s writing-table when Grodman came in. The Home Secretary silently handed it to his visitor. It was from the Chief of Police of Melbourne, announcing that Jessie Dymond had just arrived in that city in a sailing vessel, ignorant of all that had occurred, and had been immediately despatched back to England, having made a statement entirely corroborating the theory of the defence.
‘Pending further inquiries into this,’ said the Home Secretary, not without appreciation of the grim humour of the situation as he glanced at Grodman’s ashen cheeks, ‘I had already reprieved the prisoner. Mr Templeton went out to dispatch the messenger to the governor of Newgate as you entered this room. Mr Wimp’s card-castle would have tumbled to pieces without your assistance. Your still undiscoverable crime would have shaken his reputation as you intended.’
A sudden explosion shook the room and blent with the cheers of the populace. Grodman had shot himself—very scientifically—in the heart. He fell at the Home Secretary’s feet, stone dead.
Some of the working men who had been standing waiting by the shafts of the hansom helped to bear the stretcher.
THE END
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
INTRODUCTION
THE historical significance of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, first published in 1841, and its recognition as the first detective story, can be judged from the presence of so many elements that would come to define the genre of detective fiction. A mother and daughter are found brutally murdered in a room locked from the inside; and an arrest is made. But the reclusive Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, accompanied by the unnamed narrator, identifies the completely unexpected perpetrator by a process of logical reasoning—called ‘ratiocination’ by Poe—based on the observation of significant, but seemingly irrelevant, facts. So, we find the brilliant detective, the less-than-brilliant narrator friend, the crime that baffles the police, the wrongly arrested suspect, the locked room, and the unexpected but logical solution, deduced from clues presented throughout the story. Writing in 1934, G. K. Chesterton, the creator of priest-detective Father Brown, was unequivocal in his estimation of the story’s importance:
‘I do not think that the standard set by a certain Mr Edgar A[llan] Poe in a story called “The Murders of [sic] the Rue Morgue”, has ever been definitely and indisputably surpassed. The two essentials of such a story are that the logic should be clear and yet the climax should be unexpected.’
Dupin exemplifies many features that would come to distinguish the detective figure in the work of subsequent writers. He is observant, intelligent, arrogant and contemptuous of the police; during the course of this investigation he remarks: ‘In fact, the facility with which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution of this mystery, is in direct ratio of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the police.’ His motivation for investigating ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ foreshadows that of many later amateur sleuths: he does it for amusement. Although there is little in the way of physical description or personal detail, we learn that he comes from an illustrious but impoverished family and lives in ‘a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstition’, paid for by his nameless companion. Because they are both ‘enamoured of the Night for her own sake’, they close the ‘massy shutters’ as soon as dawn breaks and light ‘a couple of tapers which…give out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays’ and they venture out only at night, ‘amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city’. This gothic atmosphere is further heightened by the description of the gruesome Rue Morgue murder scene.
Also destined to become a recurrent feature of much subsequent detective fiction, the detective’s companion acts as a nameless narrator, but also fulfils an important practical function. As the detective explains his observations and deductions to him—and this figure is almost always male—so the writer explains to the reader. The most famous example of the companion/narrator is undoubtedly Dr Watson, the chronicler of the investigations of Sherlock Holmes. In fact, so inextricably linked with this literary device did Dr Watson become, that his name is accepted shorthand for this type of character: ‘the Watson’.
The room in which the Rue Morgue victims are found is locked from the inside, thereby making the killer’s escape seemingly impossible. Although an important consideration in the elucidation of the crime, the plot device here does not merit the prominence it was later to receive when it eventually produced an entire sub-section of the genre, in which the explanation of the sealed room was as central as, and frequently more baffling than, the identity of the killer. Further, the presence of both a wrongly arrested suspect and an unexpected solution also became regular features in subsequent detective fiction, although neither is a prerequisite. The former adds urgency, and, frequently, an emotional dimension, while the latter confounds reader expectation, a ploy which, as the genre developed, became almost its raison d’être.
Dupin appeared in only two further investigations: a murder, based on a true story, in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and a burglary in the shortest of the three stories, ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844).
J.C.
What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
—SIR THOMAS BROWNE
The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.
The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract—Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not
unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.
Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by ‘the book’, are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honour by honour, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognises what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation—all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own.
The Perfect Crime: The Big Bow Mystery Page 14