The Perfect Murder Read Free

actually stage his unique dramas, have them carried out by his servants, and sit back as an audience of one. He attended several hundred such productions—some say eight hundred—before the bishop of Nantes could no longer abide his indulgences, even from an aristocrat who underwrote the Crusades, and had him and nearly twenty of his stagehands burned at the stake. This kind of killer is no longer an amateur. He has committed a crime both rare and interesting. One that excites the public’s wits. He has slipped the tethers that bind any journeyman: mercy, pity, ruth. He has transcended the mundane and arrived at that critical plane the fifth-century literary critic Longinus recognized as true art: that which transports us. Welcome to the world of the imagination.
    We grow giddy now, do we not? We are in the high ether of murder, breathing its thin but rare bouquet. We are now talking about gradations of genius, nuanced levels of novelty, visitations by the intoxicating afflatus. The headline writers know this and tell us not in words—because there are no words!—but in phrases suggesting that the mere reading of the account will effect in the reader an altered state. This is murder that chills one’s spine, stops one’s breath, curdles one’s blood, makes one’s flesh creep, stands one’s hair on end, makes one shudder, chills one’s bones, or makes one’s blood run cold. This is great art, inspiring ecstasy—literally ex stasis or “out of body.” Books will be written about this murderer—one must think of Jeffrey MacDonald—as surely as books have been written about Michelangelo or T. S. Eliot.
    Finally we come to the vocabulary of highest praise. These are the words reserved for that artist who comes along perhaps only once a generation or a century. And we damn him with the fiercest words possible. I can think of only a few who merit this kind of praise. Jack the Ripper continues to fascinate on so many levels. To reread the accounts of his work is similar to the sensation of returning to the hyper-populated canvases of Hieronymous Bosch—each visit to the work reveals so many beautiful things we didn’t see last time. I also think of Leopold and Loeb, the two young men who sought to use our art to reveal the triumph of pure reason in a time of rampant irrationality. They killed a man for no reason whatsoever, only to prove that they could do it. That they didn’t get away with it because one of them dropped his eyeglasses doesn’t detract from their thinking. The entire concept is thoroughly original. Their motive was nothing at all. Perhaps the scientists are right when they tell us that there is nothing as beautiful as a vacuum. Yet, can we praise these men? These Homers and Mozarts of our art? No, we must rage and invoke the language of Hades: satanic, diabolical, hellish, infernal, fiendish, demoniacal, and (my favorite) Mephistophelean. We curse Satan when we mean to praise God! We stutter, “How diabolical!” when we wish to lick our wanton lips and purr, “How divine!”
    Not only is the appraisal of murder cast in the language of euphemism, but the entire affair is appreciated at a safe remove. The mystery novel itself is nothing more than euphemism elevated to genre. The books are not about the murderer, but about the detective catching the murderer. The contemplation of murder is not unlike the viewing of an eclipse, I suppose. We must look upon it indirectly, we must see it through a series of mirrors or refractions. We are all Jasons peering into the face of the Gorgon by way of the looking glass. For the murder mystery, the mirror is the detective himself.
    Few people, actually, care about the detective. We care only about the murderer. But conscience still has a queer—albeit, these days, tenuous—grip on the average citizen. Tradition holds that we cannot call ourselves members of the society of proper men and women and openly enjoy the genius of a murderer. So we express our