The Interpretation Of Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

why should this
inexplicable faltering - this seeming weakness, this almost cowardice - be
capable of riveting audiences around the world for three centuries? The
greatest literary minds of our era, Goethe and Coleridge, tried but failed to
pull the sword from this stone, and hundreds of lesser lights have broken their
heads on it.
        I didn't like Freud's Oedipal answer.
In fact, I was disgusted by it. I didn't want to believe it, any more than I
wanted to believe in the Oedipus complex itself. I needed to disprove Freud's
shocking theories, I needed to find their flaw, but I could not. My back
against a tree, I sat in the Yard day after day for hours at a time, poring
over Freud and Shakespeare. Freud's diagnosis of Hamlet came to seem
increasingly irresistible to me, not only yielding the first complete solution
to the riddle of the play, but explaining why no one else had been able to
solve it, and at the same time making lucid the tragedy's mesmerizing,
universal grip. Here was a scientist applying his discoveries to Shakespeare.
Here was medicine making contact with the soul. When I read those two pages of
Dr Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, my future was determined.
        If I could not refute Freud's
psychology, I would devote my life to it.

 
        Coroner Charles Hugel had not liked
the peculiar noise that came from the walls of Miss Riverford's bedroom, like
an immured spirit wailing for its life. The coroner could not get that sound
out of his head. Moreover, something had been missing from the room; he was
sure of it. Back downtown, Hugel rang for a messenger boy and sent him running
up the street for Detective Littlemore.
        Yet another thing Hugel did not like
was the location of his own office. The coroner had not been invited to move
into the resplendent new police headquarters or the new First Precinct house
being built on Old Slip, both of which would be equipped with telephones. The
judges had got their Parthenon not long ago. Yet he, not only the city's chief
medical examiner but a magistrate by law, and far more in need of modern
utilities, had been left behind in the crumbling Van den Heuvel building, with
its chipping plaster, its mold, and, worst of all, its water-stained ceilings.
He abhorred the sight of those stains, with their brownish- yellow jagged
edges. He particularly abhorred them today; he felt the stains were larger, and
he wondered if the ceiling might crack open and fall down on him. Of course a
coroner had to be attached to a morgue; he understood that. But he emphatically
did not understand why a new and modern morgue could not have been built into
the new police headquarters.
        Littlemore ambled into the coroner's
office. The detective was twenty-five. Neither tall nor short Jimmy Littlemore
wasn't bad-looking, but he wasn't quite good-looking either. His close-cropped
hair was neither dark nor fair; if anything, it was closer to red. He had a
distinctly American face, open and friendly, which, apart from a few freckles,
was not particularly memorable. If you passed him in the street, you were not
likely to recall him later. You might, however, remember the ready smile or the
red bow tie he liked to sport below his straw boater.
        The coroner ordered Littlemore to
tell him what he had found out about the Riverford case, trying his best to
sound commanding and peremptory. Only in the most exceptional matters was the
coroner placed directly in charge of an investigation. He meant Littlemore to
understand that serious consequences would follow if the detective did not
produce results.
        The coroner's magisterial tone
evidently failed to impress the detective. Although Littlemore had never worked
on a case with the coroner, he doubtless knew, as did everyone else on the
force, that Hugel was disliked by the new commissioner, that his nickname was
'the ghoul' because of the eagerness with which he performed his postmortems,
and that he had no