Murder Gone Wrong

Greenway, Agatha Christie's summer home.

In The Body in the Library Miss Marple says "I think there was a very careful plan made. What happened was that the plan went wrong." I'm drawn to the clever murder in which the plan went wrong. In fact, the best murder mysteries are just that. Clever but not clever enough. Clever but not as clever as our brilliant detective. The majority of real murders are not the result of careful planning. They're royal screw-ups committed by people with limited problem-solving skills. I'm thinking of the man who killed his wife then drove around for days depositing portions of her dismembered body first one place then another. No, that's not a good place. Someone will find it. Maybe in city park?   Why didn't he consider that before he killed her?

My father used to say, "There's no such thing as a perfect crime." He may have said that to steer me along the straight and narrow, but my impudent young self came back with, "Maybe not perfect, but plenty are good enough. If they don't get caught, that's good enough." I'd have slapped me for that, but I did have a point. If a murder is never solved it may not have been perfect, but it was good enough. The famous Bobby Franks murder by Leopold and Loeb was committed for the express purpose of "committing the perfect crime." They didn't quite make it.

More often than not, murder is what happens when another crime, poorly planned, goes wrong. The home invasion, the robbery, the sexual assault, the drug deal goes wrong, somebody sees or somebody squeals. They have to be killed. If the thief has a weapon at all (and they often don't) it's to use only if things go wrong. The carjacker doesn't plan to steal a car with a baby in the back seat. There just is a baby in the back seat. The second story man prefers to work when no one is home.

In a good murder mystery a careful plan is made. One that is good enough to challenge our detective for 300 pages or so. In the real world that's rare. Most criminals are stupid. BTW, I love stupid criminal stories. I'll tell you some in a future post.