Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s

by Leslie S. Klinger

  “Again misleading,” Vance declared. “An innocent person’s presence is too often used as a shield by the real murderer who is actu’lly absent. A clever criminal can commit a crime from a distance through an agency that is present. Also, a clever criminal can arrange an alibi and then go to the scene of the crime disguised and unrecognized.82 There are far too many convincing ways of being present when one is believed to be absent—and vice versa. . . . But we can never part from our individualities and our natures. And that is why all crime inev’tably comes back to human psychology—the one fixed, undisguisable basis of deduction.”

  “It’s a wonder to me,” said Markham, “in view of your theories, that you don’t advocate dismissing nine-tenths of the police force and installing a gross or two of those psychological machines so popular with the Sunday Supplement editor.”83

  Vance smoked a minute meditatively.

  “I’ve read about ’em. Int’restin’ toys. They can no doubt indicate a certain augmented emotional stress when the patient transfers his attention from the pious platitudes of Dr. Frank Crane84 to a problem in spherical trigonometry. But if an innocent person were harnessed up to the various tubes, galvanometers, electro-magnets, glass plates, and brass knobs of one of these apparatuses, and then quizzed about some recent crime, your indicat’ry needle would cavort about like a Russian dancer as a result of sheer nervous panic on the patient’s part.”

  Markham smiled patronizingly.

  “And I suppose the needle would remain static with a guilty person in contact?”

  “Oh, on the contr’ry.” Vance’s tone was unruffled. “The needle would bob up and down just the same—but not because he was guilty. If he was stupid, for instance, the needle would jump as a result of his resentment at a seemingly newfangled third-degree torture. And if he was intelligent, the needle would jump because of his suppressed mirth at the puerility of the legal mind for indulging in such nonsense.”

  “You move me deeply,” said Markham. “My head is spinning like a turbine. But there are those of us poor worldlings who believe that criminality is a defect of the brain.”

  “So it is,” Vance readily agreed. “But unfortunately the entire human race possesses the defect. The virtuous ones haven’t, so to speak, the courage of their defects. . . . However, if you were referring to a criminal type, then, alas! we must part company. It was Lombroso, that darling of the yellow journals, who invented the idea of the congenital criminal. Real scientists like DuBois, Karl Pearson and Goring have shot his idiotic theories full of holes.”*

  “I am floored by your erudition,” declared Markham, as he signalled to a passing attendant and ordered another cigar. “I console myself, however, with the fact that, as a rule, murder will leak out.”

  Vance smoked his cigarette in silence, looking thoughtfully out through the window up at the hazy June sky.

  “Markham,” he said at length, “the number of fantastic ideas extant about criminals is pos’tively amazing. How a sane person can subscribe to that ancient hallucination that ‘murder will out’ is beyond me. It rarely ‘outs’, old dear. And, if it did ‘out’, why a Homicide Bureau? Why all this whirlin’-dervish activity by the police whenever a body is found? . . . The poets are to blame for this bit of lunacy. Chaucer probably started it with his ‘Mordre wol out’, and Shakespeare helped it along by attributing to murder a miraculous organ that speaks in lieu of a tongue. It was some poet, too, no doubt, who conceived the fancy that carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer. . . . Would you, as the great Protector of the Faithful, dare tell the police to wait calmly in their offices, or clubs, or favorite beauty-parlors—or wherever policemen do their waiting—until a murder ‘outs’? Poor dear!—if you did, they’d ask the Governor for your detention as particeps criminis, or apply for a de lunatico inquirendo.”†

  Markham grunted good-naturedly. He was busy cutting and lighting his cigar.

  “I believe you chaps have another hallucination about crime,” continued Vance, “—namely, that the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. This weird notion is even explained on some recondite and misty psychological ground. But, I assure you, psychology teaches no such prepost’rous doctrine. If ever a murderer returned to the body of his victim for any reason other than to rectify some blunder he had made, then he is a subject for Broadmoor—or Bloomingdale. . . .85 How easy it would be for the police if this fanciful notion were true! They’d merely have to sit down at the scene of a crime, play bezique or Mah Jongg until the murderer returned, and then escort him to the bastille, what? The true psychological instinct in anyone having committed a punishable act, is to get as far away from the scene of it as the limits of this world will permit.”*

  “In the present case, at any rate,” Markham reminded him, “we are neither waiting inactively for the murder to out, nor sitting in Benson’s living-room trusting to the voluntary return of the criminal.”

  “Either course would achieve success as quickly as the one you are now pursuing,” Vance said.

  “Not being gifted with your singular insight,” retorted Markham, “I can only follow the inadequate processes of human reasoning.”

  “No doubt,” Vance agreed commiseratingly. “And the results of your activities thus far force me to the conclusion that a man with a handful of legalistic logic can successfully withstand the most obst’nate and heroic assaults of ordin’ry commonsense.”

  Markham was piqued.

  “Still harping on the St. Clair woman’s innocence, eh? However, in view of the complete absence of any tangible evidence pointing elsewhere, you must admit I have no choice of courses.”

  “I admit nothing of the kind,” Vance told him; “for, I assure you, there is an abundance of evidence pointing elsewhere. You simply failed to see it.”

  “You think so!” Vance’s nonchalant cocksureness had at last overthrown Markham’s equanimity. “Very well, old man; I hereby enter an emphatic denial to all your fine theories; and I challenge you to produce a single piece of this evidence which you say exists.”

  He threw his words out with asperity, and gave a curt, aggressive gesture with his extended fingers, to indicate that, as far as he was concerned, the subject was closed.

  Vance, too, I think, was pricked a little.

  “Y’ know, Markham old dear, I’m no avenger of blood, or vindicator of the honor of society. The rôle would bore me.”

  Markham smiled loftily, but made no reply.

  Vance smoked meditatively for a while. Then, to my amazement, he turned calmly and deliberately to Markham, and said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice:

  “I’m going to accept your challenge. It’s a bit alien to my tastes; but the problem, y’ know, rather appeals to me: it presents the same diff’culties as the Concert Champêtre affair,—a question of disputed authorship, as it were.”*

  Markham abruptly suspended the motion of lifting his cigar to his lips. He had scarcely intended his challenge literally: it had been uttered more in the nature of a verbal defiance; and he scrutinized Vance a bit uncertainly. Little did he realize that the other’s casual acceptance of his unthinking and but half-serious challenge, was to alter the entire criminal history of New York.

  “Just how do you intend to proceed?” he asked.

  Vance waved his hand carelessly.

  “Like Napoleon, je m’en gage, et puis je vois.86 However, I must have your word that you’ll give me every possible assistance, and will refrain from all profound legal objections.”

  Markham pursed his lips. He was frankly perplexed by the unexpected manner in which Vance had met his defiance. But immediately he gave a good-natured laugh, as if, after all, the matter was of no serious consequence.

  “Very well,” he assented. “You have my word. . . . And now what?”

  After a moment Vance lit a fresh cigarette, and rose languidly.

  “First,” he announced, “I shall determine the exact height of the guilty person. Such a fact will, no do
ubt, come under the head of indicat’ry evidence—eh, what?”

  Markham stared at him incredulously.

  “How, in Heaven’s name, are you going to do that?”

  “By those primitive deductive methods to which you so touchingly pin your faith,” he answered easily. “But come; let us repair to the scene of the crime.”

  He moved toward the door, Markham reluctantly following in a state of perplexed irritation.

  “But you know the body was removed,” the latter protested; “and the place by now has no doubt been straightened up.”

  “Thank Heaven for that!” murmured Vance. “I’m not particularly fond of corpses; and untidiness, y’ know, annoys me frightfully.”

  As we emerged into Madison Avenue, he signalled to the commissionnaire for a taxicab, and without a word, urged us into it.

  “This is all nonsense,” Markham declared ill-naturedly, as we started on our journey up town. “How do you expect to find any clues now? By this time everything has been obliterated.”

  “Alas, my dear Markham,” lamented Vance, in a tone of mock solicitude, “how woefully deficient you are in philosophic theory! If anything, no matter how inf’nitesimal, could really be obliterated, the universe, y’ know, would cease to exist,—the cosmic problem would be solved, and the Creator would write Q.E.D. across an empty firmament. Our only chance of going on with this illusion we call Life, d’ ye see, lies in the fact that consciousness is like an inf’nite decimal point. Did you, as a child, ever try to complete the decimal, one-third, by filling a whole sheet of paper with the numeral three? You always had the fraction, one-third, left, don’t y’ know. If you could have eliminated the smallest one-third, after having set down ten thousand threes, the problem would have ended. So with life, my dear fellow. It’s only because we can’t erase or obliterate anything that we go on existing.”

  He made a movement with his fingers, putting a sort of tangible period to his remarks, and looked dreamily out of the window up at the fiery film of sky.

  Markham had settled back into his corner, and was chewing morosely at his cigar. I could see he was fairly simmering with impotent anger at having let himself be goaded into issuing his challenge. But there was no retreating now. As he told me afterward, he was fully convinced he had been dragged forth out of a comfortable chair, on a patent and ridiculous fool’s errand.

  * [Author’s note:] The following conversation in which Vance explains his psychological methods of criminal analysis, is, of course, set down from memory. However, a proof of this passage was sent to him with a request that he revise and alter it in whatever manner he chose; so that, as it now stands, it describes Vance’s theory in practically his own words.

  78.Sherlock Holmes, in The Valley of Fear (1915), said of a crime that he deduced had been planned by his archnemesis Professor James Moriarty: “You can tell an old master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one.”

  79.A reference to John S. Sumner, successor in 1915 to Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Succession of Vice and a leading advocate of censorship. Sumner served as the society’s head for thirty-five years. In 1917, he pressured Theodore Dreiser’s publisher to withdraw publication of the latter’s novel The Genius; H. L. Mencken, then head of the Authors League of America, attempted to rally its members to cry out against the censorship. In 1923, the society lobbied unsuccessfully for revision of the New York obscenity laws. After the defeat of the legislation in 1925, the society continued its efforts (eventually changing its name to the Society to Maintain Public Decency) but its influence faded, and it dissolved after Sumner’s death in 1950.

  80.Obligation or duty.

  81.One of the great Bordeaux wines.

  * [Author’s note:] I don’t know what case Vance was referring to; but there are several instances of this device on record, and writers of detective fiction have often used it. The latest instance is to be found in G. K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown, in the story entitled “The Wrong Shape.”

  82.In Israel Zangwill’s 1891 The Big Bow Mystery, one of the first “locked-room” mysteries, the murder is committed by (spoiler alert!) the detective who entered the room to discover the body!

  83.Cesare Lombroso, the Italian physician and criminologist, made the first use of a scientific instrument to test veracity. He modified an existing instrument called a hydrosphygmograph to measure crime suspects’ blood pressure and pulse rate during interrogation to detect changes. In 1914, another Italian, psychologist Vittorio Benussi, discovered that by using a pneumograph—a device that recorded a subject’s breathing patterns—he could detect respiratory disturbances that indicate an emotional change indicative of great stress or deception. Only a few years before the Benson murder case, in 1915, Dr. William Marston, an American attorney and psychologist renowned for (among other things) later creating the comic book character Wonder Woman, used a standard blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope to test discontinuous systolic blood pressure indicating lying during questioning. In 1918, however, “psychological machines” were at best “int’restin’ toys” with no real evidentiary value.

  84.The Presbyterian minister, speaker, and columnist Frank Crane (1861–1928) wrote a series of popular volumes of Four Minute Essays, published in 1919. These consisted of homilies of populist politics and positive thinking.

  * [Author’s note:] It was Pearson and Goring who, about twenty years ago, made an extensive investigation and tabulation of professional criminals in England, the results of which showed (1) that criminal careers began mostly between the ages of 16 and 21; (2) that over ninety per cent of criminals were mentally normal; and (3) that more criminals had criminal older brothers than criminal fathers.

  [Editor’s note: English criminologist Charles Goring’s The English Convict (1913) challenged Lombroso’s findings of significant physiological differences between criminals and non-criminals. Karl Pearson was an English mathematician who used statistical analysis on populations, disputing Lombroso’s conclusions. W. E. B. Dubois, the great American sociologist and (later) civil rights leader disputed that race was a determining factor in a predisposition toward criminality, though he argued that the social consequences of racial discrimination bred crime.]

  † [Author’s note:] Sir Basil Thomson, K.C.B., former Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, London, writing in The Saturday Evening Post several years after this conversation, said: “Take, for example, the proverb that murder will out, which is employed whenever one out of many thousands of undiscovered murderers is caught through a chance coincidence that captures the popular imagination. It is because murder will not out that the pleasant shock of surprise when it does out calls for a proverb to enshrine the phenomenon. The poisoner who is brought to justice has almost invariably proved to have killed other victims without exciting suspicion until he has grown careless.”

  85.Broadmoor was an infamous asylum in Berkshire, England; Bloomingdale was the name of a New York insane asylum that in 1889 changed its name to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic; and departed from its home in Morningside Heights moving to White Plains, New York.

  * [Author’s note:] In “Popular Fallacies About Crime” (The Saturday Evening Post: April 21, 1923, p. 8) Sir Basil Thomson also upheld this point of view.

  * [Author’s note:] For years the famous Concert Champêtre in the Louvre was officially attributed to Titian. Vance, however, took it upon himself to convince the Curator, M. Lepelletier, that it was a Giorgione, with the result that the painting is now credited to that artist.

  Le Concert Champêtre, by Titian or Gorgione (1509).

  86.Generally attributed to Napoleon, it means something like “First you commit yourself, then you figure out what to do.”

  CHAPTER IX

  The Height of the Murderer

  (Saturday, June 15; 5 p.m.)

  When we arrived at Benson’s house a patrolman leaning somnolently against the iron paling of the are
away came suddenly to attention and saluted. He eyed Vance and me hopefully, regarding us no doubt as suspects being taken to the scene of the crime for questioning by the District Attorney. We were admitted by one of the men from the Homicide Bureau who had been in the house on the morning of the investigation.

  Markham greeted him with a nod.

  “Everything going all right?”

  “Sure,” the man replied good-naturedly. “The old lady’s as meek as a cat—and a swell cook.”

  “We want to be alone for a while, Sniffin,” said Markham, as we passed into the living-room.

  “The gastronome’s name is Snitkin—not Sniffin,” Vance corrected him, when the door had closed on us.

  “Wonderful memory,” muttered Markham churlishly.

  “A failing of mine,” said Vance. “I suppose you are one of those rare persons who never forget a face but just can’t recall names, what?”

  But Markham was in no mood to be twitted.

  “Now that you’ve dragged me here, what are you going to do?” He waved his hand depreciatingly, and sank into a chair with an air of contemptuous abdication.

  The living-room looked much the same as when we saw it last, except that it had been put neatly in order. The shades were up, and the late afternoon light was flooding in profusely. The ornateness of the room’s furnishings seemed intensified by the glare.

  Vance glanced about him and gave a shudder.

  “I’m half inclined to turn back,” he drawled. “It’s a clear case of justifiable homicide by an outraged interior decorator.”

  “My dear æsthete,” Markham urged impatiently, “be good enough to bury your artistic prejudices, and to proceed with your problem. . . . Of course,” he added, with a malicious smile, “if you fear the result, you may still withdraw, and thereby preserve your charming theories in their present virgin state.”

  “And permit you to send an innocent maiden to the chair!” exclaimed Vance, in mock indignation. “Fie, fie! La politesse alone forbids my withdrawal. May I never have to lament, with Prince Henry, that ‘to my shame I have a truant been to chivalry’.”87