The Perfect Murder

The perfect murder is a quest as old as man. Cain attempted it first and failed first. His alibi—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”—was a legendary attempt to point suspicion in another direction. But because suspects in Eden at the time were few (four, counting the snake), the process of elimination was fairly efficient. Since then, Cain and his intellectual progeny have been prolific. Every generation has seen more than one mad genius bring his or her wit to bear on the technology and circumstances of the day to carry out the perfect murder. And there has always been some detective just as eager to put the same caliber of wit to the task of catching the killer. From this competition came the literary genre known as the murder mystery.

With few exceptions, the murder mystery is always told from the detective’s point of view. The narrative of catching the killer is not only the most sensible structure for a good plot, but also the most morally safe. The author gets to peer into the darkest folds of the human psyche from the high moral ground of successful law enforcement. Not long ago in the pages of
Harper’s Magazine,
I set out to shuffle the players, the plot, and the outcome of this literary tradition. As a conversational device, I created the character of “Tim,” a man with a nineties sensibility and eighties wealth. For reasons of both art and convenience, Tim decides that he must murder his wife, but doesn’t know how to go about it. So he hires five mystery writers to serve as his consultants. As a man of the nineties, Tim dares not take a step without soliciting the opinion of his advisors. Tim believes that if politicians must do it, then it only makes sense that murderers should as well. The original
Harper’s
article was published as the minutes of a meeting between Tim and his novel employees. Afterwards, it struck Tim that as helpful as it might be to get everyone’s opinion over lunch, it would better suit his ends if he allowed hs consultants to ponder their individual solutions to his problem over time and on paper. Thus, beginning again, Tim wrote a letter to his five advisors and began an exchange. What follows is a year’s worth of correspondence, all in pursuit of the murder most appropriate to the time we live in and the people we are.

DEAR FRIENDS,

I write you because I have so many complaints about the fine art of murder and how it has been debauched in our time. One can hardly pick up a newspaper without reading of someone being stabbed or shot or shoved in front of a passing train or car. How sad. Like so many fans, I yearn for the old days when the cocktail chatter among society swells flourished with news of methods, motives, designs, and craftsmanship. Think of Robert Walker in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train
when he asked those two beaming grande dames how they might kill their husbands. The conversation came alive! Pros and cons were batted back and forth. And with a candor too uncommon today, the dowagers weighed the competing virtues of the noose and the dirk.

I think murder, like so many of its sister arts, has been destroyed by the hideously leveling force of capitalism. The finest practitioners have sold out, and all the arts have been cheapened. Alas, it is everywhere. Who doesn’t wince upon hearing our operatic divas squawk Christmas ballads each year to make a few extra dollars? Who can stand to see our finest thespians on television pimping the newest denture adhesive or hemorrhoid ointment? Our novelists are reduced to doing the work of press agents, and our poets churn out doggerel for third-rate political candidates. Yet, from time to time, some great artist emerges from the common herd to restore some tired genre with a fresh approach, to shake the old forms free of received gimmicks and cliches. Murder, too, is in need of an artist.

As I write you, I have just completed breakfast, all the members of my household have left, and I am alone to contemplate this morning’s headline. It reads,
MAN SHREDS NEIGHBOR IN WOODCHIPPER
. I am not certain I need tell you the details of the killing, because what seizes anyone’s imagination in this story seized the headline writer’s as well. It’s that woodchipper. The rest is tiresomely familiar. Two men, a robbery involving a huge sum—you know the rest.

Perhaps the most subtle sentence in the entire story is this one: “A woodchipper is a common appliance in contemporary American suburbs meant to handle wood items up to 18 inches in length and 10 inches in diameter.” Pity the poor hack who wanted so desperately to take flight from the facts and describe the Grand Guignol that is—despite ourselves—taking shape in our minds. Instead he must bait the reader’s imagination with a sentence that sounds as if it were taken from the machine’s instruction manual. Fortunately, it is enough. Every reader who reads this scene conjures up the proper assortment of images: a saw hastily retrieved from the workbench, a bloody bathtub, and a crude lesson in Gray’s anatomy. And maybe we contemplate the whirr of the latest catalog appliance being pressed into macabre service.

Moving on, the reader encounters the obligatory quotation from the local constable. He tells us in the charmingly flat prose of the precinct house that “the evidence consists exclusively of fingernail bits and skin flakes found adhered to the leaves of an oak tree by the river behind the house.” You have to love this man. “Adhered,” he says! As if the word were a term of art in his line of work. And listen to the lyrical flow of those prepositional phrases. “…to the leaves of an oak tree by the river behind the house.” This is the poetry of the common man.

The quotation is especially important because a successful crime reporter knows that when he writes he must tell two stories. The first is a crude outline of a narrative, the cold objective facts of the case that construct the bare framework of the story. This is a story restricted in form by the public’s allegedly prim taste and a city editor’s cowardice. The other story is actually not written by the reporter at all. It is merely alluded to, a silhouette of a story lurking behind the first. But it is the richer of the two, full of detail, action, and meaning. The author of this story is none other than the reader himself, who shades in the outline supplied by the newspaper with his obscene imagination.

In the course of contemplating this phantom story, our eyes are pulled back to one word by the policeman. We consider it again: “exclusively.” And we realize that the evidence is very, very slight. A mild qualm troubles the morning’s reverie. Somewhere in the back of our mind, one lone synapse—confined to a corner of the subconscious so far away from our surface reading of the story that we are scarcely aware—flicks off a single, lambent thought: if only the killer had wheeled the woodchipper a little closer to the water he wouldn’t have been caught.

Can it be true? That we wish him to
get away
with this crime? Of course, it’s true! Because what really attracts us to this story—whether we are sitting in our housecoats after breakfast, or catching a paragraph or two at a red light on the way to work, or absorbing the details as we roar along in the common carrier—is the novelty of that damned woodchipper. In some strange way, we wish to reward this man, privately, each to ourselves, with our regret over his loss of liberty for taking an act so wretchedly common these days and endowing it with a certain freshness. I believe there is an entire school of thought that considers such cleverness to be the very soul of genius.

Murder needs a great artist, my friends, and I am that man. I am a journeyman now, like so many of your readers. I have perused the great books, your books, which I count as
theoretical
musing on the art. I have read the newspapers and nonfictional accounts—which, like a remainder stall in a bookstore, alert us to the most notorious failures. I am like so many of your readers, only I am bold enough to graduate from my apprenticeship. I wish to take my diploma. Remove my aprons. Join the guild. Do you know what I mean? I am ready to take theory into practice. And like any good student, I turn to my mentors for advice. Let’s face it. These are the nineties, the
fin de siècle,
and no great artist in any modern discipline—whether fiction, politics, business, music, or what have you—can dare take that step without the proper coaches, experts, and technicians. In short, like any modern man, I need my consultants.

Certainly you will agree that murder—and I shall call it what it is; what good is euphemism among intimates!—is an art. I have built my theory upon the ground broken by Thomas De Quincey in his excellent essay, “On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” (I may be an apprentice, but I have done my homework.) De Quincey coyly addresses what I freely admit to you in this letter: that murder has its charms and attractions when committed with a sense of aesthetics. How much all of us are driven, in De Quincey’s words, “to graze the brink of horror.”

De Quincey seeks to strip the veneer of etiquette from murder and thereby contemplate its hidden beauty. He does this by considering one of its sister arts, the common house fire: “And in any case, after we have paid our tribute of regret to the affair considered as a calamity, inevitably, and without restraint, we go on to consider it as a stage spectacle. Exclamations of ‘How grand!’ ‘How magnificent!’ arise in a sort of rapture from the crowd.”

Murder too is greeted with such a rapture. Only, murder being what it is, we must express ourselves in the key of moral revulsion and make our aesthetic judgments in the language of disgust. All murder is denounced as villainous or horrible or ghastly. But it is not difficult to translate these flaccid euphemisms. In these words, the good critic can hear the subtle shadings of the aesthete, grappling with questions of taste both good and bad, and of craft both pedestrian and sublime. Unlike when one reads the vocabulary of literary criticism, one needn’t leaf through the pages of an appendix in order to translate the specialty’s jargon. In this fine art, our vocabulary shouts at us every day from the front pages. And on those pages, one can find the elements of an art as ancient as Cain himself, our founding father.

Consider the most unoriginal murders, the simple braining with a rock or stabbing with a knife. Our headline writers feebly call such killings: troubling, disturbing, perplexing, harrowing, vexing, galling, or agonizing. But then what murder isn’t any of these? Such adjectives combine the severest criticism with the faintest praise. What we mean with such words is that the murder is simply bad, both in motive and in means. It is “troubling” because it is uninteresting in every way, and it is “vexing” because we are at a loss to guess why anyone would risk prison for something so uninspiring. Any schoolmarm would give this work an F.

Then we have the catalog of nouns used to condemn as merely average the murderer who has employed a common method, only to excess. We call the man: brute, savage, ruffian, barbarian, desperado, ghoul, ogre, beast, fiend, cutthroat, villain, miscreant, wretch, reptile, monster, hellhound, cur, dog, mongrel, or animal. This murderer is a distinct amateur who instead of stabbing his victim once, perhaps stabbed his victim fifteen times. Repetition does not art make. Our killer gets a D.

But he is getting better, is he not? So let’s move on. One more step up the ladder of praise and he or his crime is condemned as: indifferent, cold, senseless, callous, thoughtless, and pointless. At this level of criticism, the act of killing is still of little interest but we hear in such language a condemnation of the amateur’s foolishness. An opening, as it were, had been made. The stage had been set, the curtains had parted, but our protagonist came to the proscenium in a pratfall. I think of a man who recently drove his entire family to an isolated bridge and hurled them off one at a time only to discover later that not only had they all swum to shore safely but that a den of Cub Scouts had witnessed the entire fiasco from a nearby scenic viewpoint. At this level, our man has let us down, and so we describe his killing as “indifferent” not so much because
he
is but because
we
are. It is “senseless” because
we
can make no sense of it, and “thoughtless” because so little thought went into the act. It is “pointless” because it can be neither praised nor derided. Still, a C.

Just above this echelon we find the vast majority of murders. We are now solidly in the realm of aesthetic criticism. We can sense the hand of the artist but we think the execution still lacks a certain polish. I am thinking of the fellow who opened up the possibility of marriage for himself and his lover by locking her husband (a zoologist at the local zoo) in the cage of a panther after everyone else had left work. I admire the effort involved here—the beginnings of a theme, perhaps even an extended conceit, an attempt at unity. Unfortunately, his genius was captured on the videotape of a security camera. Behold the perils of the modern age, ladies and gentlemen.

In murders at this level there is a sense of disappointment but praise for a job well done, however much it may have failed. And there are so many of these killings that we have a great multitude of words: heinous, wicked, infamous, depraved, brutal, atrocious, vicious, unconscionable, unjustifiable, indefensible, inexcusable, unpardonable, irremissible, disgraceful, despicable, scandalous, outrageous, immoral, unwarranted, undeserved, unmerited, scurrilous, perfidious, treacherous, contemptible, cowardly, craven, dastardly, detestable, deplorable. Just reading the list, one can hear the critic’s connotation, the frustration of promise undelivered. “Unmerited,” we say, suggesting so subtly that it might have been “merited.” “Disgraceful,” we say, knowing that what we mean is that it might have been “graceful.” There is a deep sadness in these killings, but unfortunately the killer must leave with nothing more than a white ribbon and our thanks for participating. A C+ .