Anthology of the Murderous Mind [antikvár]

Introduction Murder itself is not interesting. It is the impetus to murder, the passions and terrors which bring it to pass and the varieties of feeling surrounding the act that make of a sordid or revolting event compulsive fascination. Even the most ardent readers of detective fiction are not much preoccupied with whether a Colt Magnum revolver or a Bowie knife was used to despatch the victim. The perpetrator's purpose, the 'why', is what impels them to read on. They need to find out what has gone on in his head, whether revealed through action, dialogue, mental activity or the stream of consciousness. They need to follow what goes on in the minds of those others who come within his range, observe him, fear him, or suffer at his hands. In compiling this anthology, I tried to keep this always in mind. I was not cataloguing murders. I was not collecting examples of stab-bings and shootings, stranglings and what Wilde calls 'strange manners of poisoning'. This book was not to be a collection of murder samples from the vast number of true crime works - the majority of them gratuitously ghoulish and indifferently written - nor of acts conceived by crime novelists, however good, however secure their place in literature. My extracts were to be all in the mind, all in the talk, the imagination, the dreams, the boastings and the remorse of people who had killed in fact and in firtion; from their thoughts and from those of observers and bystanders who wondered at their acts and commented on what they had done. Motive, not action; speculation and opinion; thought and theory, not performance. It is no more necessary, of course, to have committed murder in order to write about it than it is for the writer of sea stories to have been in the navy or a chronicler of the sixteenth century to have been born in the reign of Elizabeth I. In fact, whereas these latter must have studied their subject and put in long hours of research, the novelist, playwright or poet who employs murder needs only the writer's imagination and an understanding of the darker side of the human soul. If we have not all wanted at some time or another to commit murder, we have all considered what it must be like so to want. We have all