The Perfect Crime

ONE of the popular bards of my youth once waxed merry over ‘the man whom the architect draws ’ — the person with angular shoulders and geometrical trousers who is ‘rendered’ along with the façade to indicate how small the average customer is going to feel when he enters the new building of the Bank of the Universe.

Yet the architect’s man — and I think he is better drawn in these days — is after all in correct scale, and serves his purpose. He may amuse, but he does n’t annoy. In that he differs from the architecture of the modern detective story. I refer, of course, to the drawing showing the scene of the crime, which appears in the front of the book, sometimes as an end paper, sometimes after the introduction, and sometimes in Chapter Two, but always where you can’t find it when you are anxious to know just why the butler could n’t see the murderer when the fatal blunt instrument was in action.

One of the constant mysteries of the mystery stories is the identity of the craftsman who designs these masterpieces. It may be an office boy in the publishing house, one of the duller office boys, who will never be president of the concern, but who can be trusted with a pencil and ruler. Or perhaps the president himself. Now, there’s a thought! A president often does drawings on the memorandum pads and blotters at board meetings and conferences while other people are feeling their way to the answer the president already knows.

But to every disillusioned reader of detective stories it is clear that these diagrams are never by any chance drawn by an architect. Of course, now and then the office boy — no, it must be the president in these cases — breaks the wall with a very professionallooking double line to indicate a window, or draws cute little arcs to show which way the doors swing, and you allow yourself to hope that this time . . . And then you see that the entire first floor, as usual, consists of a magnificent entrance hall, the library (Randolph’s body by the fireplace), Prout’s bedroom, and the butler’s pantry, with no windows except the one the murderer is suspected of using, and only a conjecture as to how the family eats its meals or gets upstairs.

There was a time when I allowed this mystery to worry me. It did seem incredible that no publisher should have thought about it — that no meticulous author should have insisted on consulting an architect as to the plan of his house. In these days when so many architects and draftsmen are looking for a job — any job — it ought to be a simple matter to pick up a telephone and have a fool-proof design by the next morning. But I have solved that part of the mystery without breaking the seal of the final pages.

No architect could possibly draw one of these diagrams. He would n’t know how to begin. For his trade is designing houses to live in, and these, after all, are only houses to be murdered in. Anybody who tried to live in one would simply go crazy, and that would spoil the story. If you are taking a house just to be mysteriously done in, you need n’t be fussy about the total absence of closets or even a front door. You are only going to be there until after the inquest, anyway.

And then the furniture. Of course, if you were expecting to work in a library twenty by forty feet in size, you would insist on its having more than one small window in the northeast corner, especially if the desk must be diagonally across the southwest corner of the room. But for the purpose of mysterious dispatch, what could be better? Your murderer, having crowded his way with difficulty past the desk, stands in the corner behind you to deliver the fatal blow, and it is dollars to doughnuts not a soul will see him.

So the fact that none of these diagrams ever looks like a place to live in no longer excites me. If the bathroom door opens into the breakfast room I know that it is only so arranged that Reginald can hide in the tub while waiting to take a pot shot at his millionaire uncle over the ham and eggs. If there are twin beds in the art gallery, I know that some sweet reasonableness has directed the arrangement, and wait patiently until page 235. After all, I don’t have to live in the darned place.

But I confess it does perturb me to find that the diagram indicates no way by which Thurston could possibly pass unseen from Room A through Room B, in which the Bible class is playing charades, and into Room C, which has no door. Even a murderer ought not to have the cards stacked against him like that.

Some day I hope it may be discovered who does make these diagrams. There are many of us who would like to call on him, carrying blunt instruments. But thus far the secret has been carefully kept. Perhaps here, at last, we have that long-sought paradox of the Gaboriaus and the Van Dines — the Perfect Crime!

EDWARD W. MUMFORD