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In the same way it would be very satisfactory to show that she was a secret assassin as well as a secret drinker, and that she contrived somehow to murder the old Colonel even in his charitable refuge. Then there is Little Nell, which would be an example not so much of natural death as of natural murder. Here we should have too large and bewildering a choice in apportioning the guilt. Who killed Little Nell? Who would not have killed Little Nell? Little Paul in "Dombey and Son" is a much more genuinely pathetic figure; but there would be a certain thrill in discovering that he was really killed, let us say by Miss Tox, as possibly standing between her and her designs on Mr. Dombey. It would throw light, as it were, on another side of the character of Miss Tox, of which Dickens was evidently quite unaware. Pendennis's mother also died; and high time too. Some how I cannot quite bring myself to believe that Laura would have gone quite as far as this, even with the legitimate object of encouraging Arthur Pendennis to make a fresh start and stand on his own feet. But something rather picturesque might be done with the machinations of Blanche Amery, assisted by the technical talent of her admirer, M. Mirabolant, the Cook. Anyhow, it would be quite a pleasant parlour game to go through all the famous novels in which people die in an apparently normal manner, and turn them into detective stories of the most dark and lurid type.

I think my favourite murder in real life is the murder (if it was a murder, for even that is doubtful) of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, which produced the final frenzy about the Popish Plot. Not only were there intensely interesting political and religious problems involved, but the personal problem itself was picturesque in the same sense as a really good detective story. Two details especially have precisely the character that makes such a story: the presence of clues that are not clues, that can baffle and mislead more than they enlighten. The poor magistrate's body was found in a ditch transfixed with his own sword; but it was also evident that he had been strangled. Any properly constituted person will feel tempted to make a mystery story out of that. There is something of the true dance of death in the suggestion of somebody being hanged and then run through the body with a sword; or perhaps killed with a sword and then hanged for some reason on a tree. And as the romancer could easily introduce characters like Titus Oates and Shaftesbury and Charles the Second and Pepys, he could have a high old time. And certainly it may be considered a successful murder, for the only people who have been at all clearly shown to be innocent were the people who were hanged for it.

Of murders in fiction I am not so sure, for some of the very best mystery stories in the world, like "The Moonstone" and "Trent's Last Case," do not really revolve round a murder at all. Even Count Fosco, in "The Woman in White," very properly prided himself on his delicacy and humanity in not murdering a lady but only locking her up as a lunatic. I rather distrust those murders which are committed with some little-known Eastern poison that leaves no traces." It seems to me unfair like saying the man was hit with a peculiar sort of Patagonian club that does not make a bruise. A very good method occurred in a story by Mr. Edgar Jepson ("The Tea-Leaf," published in The Strand Magazine in October, 1925), in which a man was killed in a Turkish bath with a dagger of ice or some liquid chemically frozen very hard, which immediately melted; the only perfect way of getting rid of the weapon. There are a great many other excellent schemes which I cannot at the moment remember; and as I have no intention of applying them in a really practical and professional way, I will leave it to a more scientific age, freed from the trammels of dogmatic morality, to discover the difficulties and defects which are probably to be found in each.