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"Eight Perfect Murders" was the first piece I wrote for the Old Devils blog. John Haley, my new boss, had asked me to write a list of my favorite mystery novels, but instead I pitched the idea of writing a list of perfect murders in crime fiction. I don't exactly know why I was reluctant to share my favorite books yet, but I remember thinking that writing about perfect murders might generate more traffic. This was right around the time that several blogs were taking off, making their authors rich and famous. I remember someone doing a blog about making one of Julia Child's recipes every day that was turned into a book, and maybe even a movie. I think I must have had some delusions of grandeur that my blog platform might turn me into a public and trusted aficionado of crime fiction. Claire added fuel to the fire by telling me repeatedly that she thought this blog could really blow up, that I'd find my calling—a literary critic of crime fiction. The truth was that I'd already found my calling, at least I thought I had, and I was a bookseller, content with the hundreds of minute interactions that make up a bookseller's daily life. And what I loved most of all was to read—that was my true calling.
Despite this, I somehow began to see my "Perfect Murders" piece—not yet written—as more important than it really was. I'd be setting the tone for the blog, announcing myself to the world. I wanted it to be flawless, not just the writing, but the list itself. The books should be a mix of the well known and the obscure. The golden age should be represented, but there should also be a contemporary novel. For days on end, I sweated it out, tinkering with the list, adding titles, subtracting titles, researching books I hadn't yet read. I think the only reason I ever actually finished was because John started to grumble that I hadn't published anything on the blog yet. "It's a blog," he'd said. "Just write a list of goddamn books and post it. You're not getting graded."
The post went up, appropriately enough, on Halloween. Reading it now makes me cringe a little. It's overwritten, even pretentious at times. I can practically taste the need for approval. This is what was eventually posted:
In the immortal words of Teddy Lewis in Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan's underrated neo-noir from 1981: "Any time you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you're gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you're a genius ... and you ain't no genius." True words, yet the history of crime fiction is littered with criminals, mostly dead or incarcerated, who all attempted the near impossible: the perfect crime. And many of them attempted the ultimate perfect crime, that being murder
The following are my choices for the cleverest, the most ingenious, the most foolproof (if there is such a thing) murders in crime fiction history. These are not my favorite books in the genre, nor do I claim these are the best. They are simply the ones in which the murderer comes closest to realizing that platonic ideal of a perfect murder.
So here it is, a personal list of "perfect murders." I'll warn you in advance that while I try to avoid major spoilers, I wasn't one hundred percent successful. If you haven't read one of these books, and want to go in cold, I suggest reading the book first, and my list second.
Long before Alan Alexander Milne created his lasting legacy—Winnie-the-Pooh, in case you hadn't heard—he wrote one perfect crime novel. It's a country house mystery; a long-lost brother suddenly appears to ask Mark Ablett for money. A gun goes off in a locked room, and the brother is killed. Mark Ablett disappears. There is some preposterous trickery in this book—including characters in disguise, and a secret passage—but the basic fundamentals behind the murderer's plan are extremely shrewd.
Famous for being the first "inverted" crime novel (we know who the murderer and victim are on the very first page), this is essentially a case study in how to poison your wife and get away with it. It helps, of course, that the murderer is a country physician with access to lethal drugs. His insufferable wife is merely his first victim, because once you commit a perfect murder, the temptation is to try another one.
Poirot is investigating a "madman" who, it appears, is alphabetically obsessed, killing off Alice Ascher in Andover followed by Betty Barnard in Bexhill. Etcetera. This is the textbook example of hiding one specific premeditated murder among a host of others, hoping that the detectives will suspect the work of a lunatic.
This is my favorite Cain, mostly because of the grim fatalistic ending. But the murder at the center of the book—an insurance agent plots with femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger to off her husband—is brilliantly executed. It's a classic staged murder; the husband is killed in a car then placed on the train tracks to make it look as though he fell off the smoking car at the rear of the train. Walter Huff, her insurance agent lover, impersonates the husband on the train, ensuring that witnesses will attest to the murdered man's presence.
My pick for the most ingenious of them all. Two men, each with someone they want dead, plan to swap murders, ensuring that the other has an alibi at the time of the murder. Because there is zero connection between the two men—they briefly talk on a train—the murders become unsolvable. In theory, of course. And Highsmith, despite the brilliance of the plot, was more interested in the ideas of coercion and guilt, of one man exerting his will on the other. The finished novel is both fascinating and rotten to the core, like most of Highsmith's oeuvre.
MacDonald, my choice for underrated master of midcentury crime fiction, rarely dabbled in whodunits. He was far too interested in the criminal mind to keep his villains hidden until the end. The Drowner is an outlier, then, and a good one. The killer devises a way to drown his or her victims so that it looks exactly like an accident.
Not a novel, of course, but a play, although I highly recommend reading it, along with seeking out the excellent 1982 film. You'll never look at Christopher Reeve in the same way again. It's a brilliant, funny stage thriller that manages to be both the genuine article, and a satirical one, at the same time. The first murder—a wife with a weak heart—is clever in its construction, but also foolproof. Heart attacks are a natural death, even when they aren't.
Like Malice Aforethought, another "inverted" murder mystery, in which a small cadre of classics students at a New England university kill one of their own. We know the who long before we know the why. The murder itself is simple in its execution; Bunny Corcoran is pushed into a ravine during his traditional Sunday hike. What makes it stand out is ringleader Henry Winter's explanation of the crime—that they are "allowing Bunny to choose the circumstances of his own death." They are not even sure of his planned route for that day but wait at a likely spot, wanting to make the death seem random instead of designed. What follows is a chilling exploration of remorse and guilt.
Truth is, it was a hard list to put together. I thought it would be easier to come up with examples of perfect murders in fiction, but it just wasn't. That's why I included Deathtrap, even though it's a play and not a book. I'd actually never even read Ira Levin's original script or even seen it onstage. I was just a fan of the film. Also, looking back on the list now, it's clear that The Drowner, a book I really do love, doesn't quite belong here. The murderer lurks at the bottom of a pond with an oxygen tank, then pulls her victim down into the depths. It's a fun concept, but highly unlikely, and hardly foolproof. How does she know where to wait? What if someone else is at the pond? I suppose that, once pulled off, it is a crime that truly looks like an accident, but I think I just put the book on the list because of how much I love John D. MacDonald. I suppose I also wanted something slightly obscure, something that hadn't been turned into a movie.
After I posted it, Claire told me she loved the writing, and John, my boss, was just relieved that the blog had been started. I waited for comments to appear, allowing myself brief fantasies in which the piece would start an online frenzy, blog readers chiming in to argue about their own favorite murders. NPR would call and ask me to come on-air to discuss the very topic. In the end, the blog piece got two comments. The first came from a SueSnowden who wrote, Wow!! Now I have so many new books to add to my pile!! and the second came from ffolliot123 who wrote, Anyone who writes a list of perfect murders that doesn't have at least one John Dickson Carr on it obviously knows nothing about anything.
Excerpted from Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson. Copyright © 2020 by Peter Swanson. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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