Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 27, No. 3. Whole No. 148, March 1956

The Compleat Murderess by Virginia Jones

Virginia Jones’s “The Compleat Murderess” is one of the thirteen “first stories” which won special awards in EQMM’s Tenth Annual Contest. Considering that it is the work of a newcomer to the detective-crime field and a beginner in the art of assembling words and phrases, Mrs. Jones’s story is irresistible: it is delicious and witty.

The author is in her early forties, the mother of two strapping sons. Her husband is an attorney for an oil company. For a full year before writing and submitting her first story, Mrs. Jones attended a creative writing class at the University of Tulsa, under the direction of Mrs. LaVere Anderson. “The Compleat Murderess” was, of course, written between household chores. The only previous writing Mrs. Jones had done were a few book reviews — of detective stories, needless to say — for the “Tulsa World” and a Sunday column for the same paper on “The Effect of Mystery Story Reading on a Busy Housewife” (that was not the exact title, but if Mrs. Jones still has a clipping or carbon copy, we would love to read her column!).

More comment to follow — but only after you have finished Mrs. Jones’s delightful tale of an ineffectual little woman who, in the “sport” of murder, earned the right to be called “the compleat mangier”...

Mrs. Boswell stared moodily at the powdered glass she was stirring into the mashed potatoes. She was busy preparing dinner for a husband who wanted to leave her and she had planned a menu guaranteed to speed his departure. If her method was unorthodox, at least the meal was well-balanced in murderous fashion. The meat patties contained just a touch of roach paste, the salad was sprinkled with bits of bamboo splinters from an old table mat, and the cream pie had been sitting out on the warm back porch for two days, developing its own lethal bacteria.

Her husband entered the house promptly at six o’clock. He threw his hat at the closet and, as usual, missed. He hung his coat over the doorknob, took his shoes off in the living room, and stretched out on the couch to read the evening paper. In five minutes, as usual, he was snoring, and Mrs. Boswell, standing in the doorway, hands on her aproned hips, eyed him happily. “Soon he’ll be sleeping The Big Sleep,” she thought to herself. Then she went over and shook his shoulder, saying, “Frank, dinner’s ready.”

He got up from the couch, pushed past her into the dining room, and looked at the food on the table. He turned down the corners of his mouth and said, “I had the same thing for lunch. Can’t you ever fix anything different? Scramble me a couple of eggs.”

Mrs. Boswell sighed resignedly, threw the dinner into the garbage pail, and scrambled some eggs. She was not surprised that her first plan had miscarried. In the books she had been reading, the murderer nearly always failed the first time. “Try, try again,” she said to herself encouragingly.

Amy Boswell, a small timid woman with the inner strength of a dish of gelatin, was ineffectual in almost everything she tried to do, and she did not really think she would prove any more proficient at murder than she had at being a good wife to Frank.

She had proved ineffectual even on their honeymoon. Frank had spent their wedding night tying trout flies in a cold, rustic cabin in the Rockies, while Amy hunched before an oil stove, doing her best to look feminine and enticing in a long flannelette nightgown topped with a sweat shirt. She had yet to learn from bitter experience that Frank, given even odds, was more ardent as a fisherman than as a lover. Lures were more important to him than allure.

The days that followed were painful to remember. She had proved a disappointment to Frank from the moment her waders sprang a leak and she found herself swamped in the middle of a swift-moving, rocky stream. She could not sleep in the high, rarefied air of the mountains; the half-cooked greasy fish made her ill, and her fair, tender skin attracted mosquitoes from as far away as Cripple Creek.

After the honeymoon Amy discovered that Frank was not only addicted to fishing, he also liked badminton, ice skating, hockey, sail boating, skin-diving, and horses. The garage and his closet was crammed with multitudinous gear, the magazine rack was full of sports magazines, and the basement stocked with goggles, masks, fins, rackets, spears, skis, and a large outboard motor.

To Amy, whose idea of a good time was lunch in town and an afternoon at a movie, Frank was an enigma. And to Frank, Amy was a sportsman’s Jonah. No matter how hard she tried, during the long years of their marriage, she could never catch a fish; her line invariably caught in a bush or snagged on Frank’s pants. Outboard motors quit dead the moment she stepped into a boat. Sails ripped, golf balls gravitated toward water hazards, and tennis balls flew to the net like homing pigeons. Her ankles had a tendency to weaken on a hike, and she could not even play ping-pong without cracking her head on the furnace pipes in their basement clubroom.

Frank did not give up easily. For many years he took her with him on hunting trips, and other hunters scurried prayerfully whenever Amy appeared, middle-aged and shapeless in her red flannel shirt and khaki pants, firing her gun wildly at anything that moved. It was not until she shot Frank’s hat off one early morning in a duck blind that he finally decided it was hopeless.

Then he began leaving her at home while he went off with more congenial hunting partners. In the meantime, however, he had discovered that Amy’s ineptness was not confined solely to field and stream. She not only couldn’t cook greasy fish, she couldn’t cook anything well. Meals were never on time, and when they belatedly arrived, they were likely to consist chiefly of a badly made noodle casserole which she had run across in an old cookbook. Shirts not only failed to come back from the laundry, sometimes she couldn’t even remember which laundry she had sent them to. It was not a lack of intelligence. It was just that her mind skipped blithely over the more mundane matters of daily living.

Even so, all might have gone well with this ill-matched pair if Frank had not eventually met Someone Else at the country club where he played tennis every Saturday afternoon. One day he was paired with an attractive divorcee in a mixed-doubles game. She was trim and capable in her crisp, white shorts. Her serve was strong, her backhand superb, and they easily won the first two sets, 6–2, 6–1. Afterward they sat on the shady lawn and drank Martinis, and Frank discovered that she was as pretty as she was athletic. He did not think it necessary to tell Amy just how many times he played golf and tennis with Sylvia Morton from then on. But Amy found out for herself one summer night at the club, when Frank had a few drinks too many and publicly fondled the athletic Sylvia while Amy sat white-faced and bewildered at a table with some friends.

“I want a divorce,” he told her later that night, as they sat quarreling in the living room.

“I won’t give you one,” Amy had said, showing a degree of courage she did not know she possessed. “I love you, Frank.”

“But I don’t love you,” Frank had replied, with undisguised candor. “You know we’re not happy together.”

“Why, I’m perfectly happy,” Amy had answered, looking startled.

“Well, I’m not, and if you won’t give me a divorce, I’ll get one!”

“You haven’t any grounds,” said Amy mildly. “You know I’ve never done anything wrong.”

“You’ve never done anything right, you mean,” yelled Frank. “You’re an incompetent, irresponsible fool, and I’m sick of you!”

Amy looked at him in shocked silence. She was as slow to anger as she was to any other emotion, but as she began to remember their life together, she was filled with bitterness.

“Just not getting a divorce isn’t enough. He ought to suffer the way I have,” she thought. She remembered the times she had trudged, wet and tired, through the woods with Frank; the days spent in a boat, wet sails flapping in her sunburned face; the dead, cold eyes of the fish she had scaled...

It wasn’t long before she began to plan a campaign of torture, designed ultimately, she hoped, to end in murder. She started, crudely enough, with the powdered glass in the mashed potatoes. After the first fiasco, she tried one night to smash him up against the garage door with the car, as he was raising the overhead door.

“What the hell you trying to do, kill me?” he bellowed as he dodged nimbly out of the way.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, more regretfully than Frank knew. “I put my foot on the wrong pedal.”

She went with him to their summer home on the lake to close the cottage for the season and she overturned the canoe, which was nothing unusual for Amy. But in the water she clamped her arms about Frank’s neck and held his head under water for two minutes. The record is supposed to be only three, though at the time Frank didn’t even know he was competing. Lying wet and disgruntled on the bank, she thought with regret of the day she had muffed her chance in the duck blind, when she had shot off Frank’s hat instead of his head.

She began spending hours in the public library, browsing through detective and murder stories, gathering ideas but discarding most of them. “It’s got to look like an accident,” she thought. “The poison caper was a bust. I don’t want to take a murder rap for that bum.” Her speech began to take on the flavor of the books she was reading.

One day she discovered a little volume half hidden in the dusty stacks. Murder for the Connoisseur, it said on the faded vellum cover.

She opened it and found an alphabetical list of esoteric methods of murder, beginning with Anaphylaxis. Anaphylaxis sounded nice. Frank was allergic to wasps, but it would not be easy to get him to hold still while a wasp stung him. Curare was also interesting, but where was she to obtain a pigmy with a poisoned spear? She came at last to Zombie and closed the book regretfully. There was nothing at all she could do with Zombie except hope that Frank would soon join their ranks.

All sorts of improbable ideas crossed her mind. “If we just lived in a bigger city,” she thought, “I could push him in front of a subway train.” She envisioned him trampled by a bull, caught in an elevator shaft, falling from a Ferris wheel, and once, growing reckless, she almost tipped her hand when they were playing darts with neighbors in the clubroom. Throwing wildly at the board while Frank was still plucking darts from the cork board, she nearly pinned his ear to the wall.

The inability to find a Perfect Plan began to tell on Amy. Her nerves were stretched taut as fiddle strings and for a while she thought of giving up the whole idea. Still, one or two more avenues of approach were open. One Friday night, Frank went into the den and took down his twelve-gauge shotgun from the rack on the pine-paneled wall, and while he was smoothing the velvety stock, he nearly shot off the toe of his right foot. When Amy came running into the den, an incensed Frank met her at the door. “Have you been fiddling around with my guns?” he shouted.

Amy looked innocent and her lips trembled with disappointment.

“Why, dear, you know I never touch your guns! You’ve told me often enough how dangerous they are.”

Frank pointed to the hole in the floor and said, “I damned near shot off my foot. Must be losing my mind. I never left a gun loaded before.”

Amy went into her room and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’d better slow down,” she said to herself. “I don’t want to get in a panic and beat him to death with a duck decoy.”

So for a full week nothing at all happened, and she didn’t put much of anything in his food except a small dose of Black Leaf 40 in his tomato soup, and that only to keep her hand in while she bided her time.

The following Thursday night, Frank said casually, “I’m going out for the evening.”

Amy looked at him and shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said quietly.

As Frank lay stretched out in a bathtub full of hot water, contemplating the thought of an evening of bowling with Sylvia, Amy came into the bathroom carrying her little table radio.

“Thought you might like to listen to the sports news,” she said, placing the radio on a shelf above the basin. As she turned to go out, her heel seemed to tangle in the cord, and the little radio came tumbling down off the shelf. Unfortunately for Amy, the force of the fall pulled the cord out of the electric outlet in the wall and the radio merely hit Frank on the head.

“Damn it to hell,” he shouted. “Get that thing out of here!” He stomped from the bathroom, pulled on his clothes, and opened the front door. He hesitated on the steps of the porch for just a moment.

“You’re an absolute jinx,” he yelled. “My life isn’t worth a plugged nickel around you.”

Then, as he started to run down the steps, his toe caught on a loose brick and he went plunging headlong to the sidewalk. His head hit dully on the cement and he did not get up.

Amy stood at the door and watched as a crowd gathered in response to her screams. She ran down the stairs and pillowed his head in her lap. “Call a doctor, someone,” she begged. Frank moaned once, then tried to sit up, but he couldn’t make it. He looked up at Amy’s face bent over him.

He had a moment or two of consciousness before he died, and he made the most of it. Whatever he saw in Amy’s eyes — relief, satisfaction, or shocked surprise — he realized it was certainly not love, for he said, plainly and distinctly, to the policeman who was now crouching beside him on the sidewalk, “She did it. She pushed me.”