The Collected Dashiell Hammett

Another Perfect Crime

Experience, February 1925

Although convicted of Boardman Bowlby Bunce’s murder, I did kill him. I forget why; I dare say there was something about the man I disliked. That is not important; but I feel that the attentiveness with which the public has read the interviews I did not give and looked at photographs of photographers’ personal friends entitles that public to know why, here in the death cell, I have made a new will, giving my fortune to the fiction department of the Public Library. (Before starting that, however, I wish to state that while I do not object to having been born in any of the other houses pictured in various newspapers, I must, in justice to my parents, repudiate the ice-house shown in Wednesdays Examiner.)

To get on with my story: when I determined, for doubtless sufficient if not clearly remembered reasons, to kill Boardman Bowlby Bunce, I planned the murder with the most careful attention to every detail. A life-long reader of literature dealing with the gaudier illegalities, I flattered myself that I of all men was equipped to commit the perfect crime.

I went to his office in the middle of the afternoon, when I knew his employees would be all present. In the outer office I attracted their attention to my presence and to the exact time by arguing heatedly that the clock there was a minute fast. Then I went into Bunce’s private office. He was alone. Out of m\ pockets I took the hammer and nails I had bought the day before from a hardware dealer who knew me, and, paving no attention to the astonished Bunce, nailed every window and door securely shut.

That done, I spit out the lozenge with which I had prepared my voice, and yelled loudly at him: “I hate you! You should be killed! I shall injure you!”

The surprise on his face became even more complete.

“Sit still,” I ordered in a low voice, taking a revolver from my pocket — a silver-mounted revolver with my initials engraved in it in four places.

Walking around behind him, carefully keeping the weapon too far away to leave the powder-marks that might make the wound seem self-inflicted, I shot him in the back of the head. While the door was being broken in I busied myself with the ink-pad on his desk, putting the prints of my fingers neatly and clearly on the butt of the revolver, the handle of the hammer, Bunce’s white collar, and some convenient sheets of paper; and hurriedly stuffed the dead man’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief into my pockets just as the door burst open.

After a while a detective came. I refused to answer his questions. Searching me, he found Bunce’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief. He examined the room — doors and windows nailed on the inside with my hammer, my monogrammed revolver beside the dead man, my finger-prints everywhere. He questioned Bunce’s employees. They told of my entrance, my passing into the office where Bunce was alone, the sound of hammering, my voice shouting threats, and the shot.

And then — then the detective arrested me!

It came out later that this would-be sleuth whose salary the property holders were paying had never read a detective story in his life, and so had not even suspected that the evidence had been too solidly against me for me to be anything but innocent.