An Oxford Tragedy Read Online Free PDF

almost menacingly as he spoke, and his voice had grown harsh with suppressed feeling.
    In a moment he went on in a quieter voice, ‘Of course, I am speaking of the real murders, the murders that are planned and contrived and executed with intention. I don’t mean those wretched crimes of brute violence, when some poor fellow is knocked on the head for the sake of a few pounds. They’re just sordid and wretched. No, nor your American crimes either.’ He smiled and glanced round the room. I think that he wanted to be sure that there was no American among us, whose susceptibilities he might offend.‘I love America and the Americans; they’re the kindest and most hospitable …’ He checked himself abruptly and his smile became a little chuckling laugh.
    â€˜So I’ve nearly, oh, so nearly – but what’s your odd expression for making a mistake?’
    â€˜Dropped a brick,’ said Doyne, laughing with him.
    â€˜That’s it. Dropped a brick.’ He repeated it slowly as though memorizing it for future use. ‘My poor little brick, you must forgive it. Well, I should have said that nowhere except at Oxford is there hospitality to compare with that of the Americans. But when it comes to crime, why then I find them just a little vulgar. “Bump off, shoot up,” what expressions!’ He shrugged his shoulders with an ineffable suggestion of distaste. ‘Of course some of you know Theodore Dreiser’s
American Tragedy
; that’s a great book. I learned much from that. But somehow I still believe that the newer countries have not risen to great murders yet; they seem to lack the dignity, the aristocratic touch.’
    â€˜The dignity of murder,’ said Prendergast, ‘not a bad title that, for a book.’
    â€˜When you’ve cut out all the casual crimes, all these modern senseless slaughters,’ Brendel went on, ‘you’re left with murders that are worth study – the great murders; and it’s then that detection becomes a great art, too. And the motives. Sometimes it’s love of gain. At first the desire for wealth and all that it brings with it, and then the birth of temptation – the realization, perhaps, that one frail life stands between a man and all his material desires – and after that slowly, slowly, the growth of the idea, and finally the great gamble, the murder itself. Or sometimes it’s just hatred, sheer personal hatred, which grows and grows until it becomes an overmastering passion. And sometimes that hatred has begun from something in itself so trivial that only a psycho-analyst could trace it. Think of a man married to a woman whom he does not love; think of somesmall action at first only an irritation, and then, repeated day by day, a burden, a cancer, a disease worse than death! And then the thought of freedom, at first only a hope, then a plan, then an overmastering impulse. Yes, some murders have grown from what we lightly call incompatibility. Or again there’s sexual jealousy, jealousy that distorts the vision and blinds the judgement till it leads the straight way to disaster and to death. But all murders, using the word as I do, have this in common. They’re the result of long preparation, or desperate planning, of the struggle of some tortured soul for freedom at any cost. And that’s where the detective comes in; he’s like a historian, tracing the hidden threads, diving into the forgotten past, exposing the plans and the motives of men, or like a surgeon, cutting down deep into a malignant growth, till at last he reaches its hidden source and origin. Do you see what I mean?’
    â€˜I think I appreciate the point about the little sources of friction, and all that at the beginning,’ said Maurice Hargreaves with a laugh. ‘When I first came to St Thomas’s I remember being told a story about old Fothergill, who was still about the place though he must have