“Because we rumbled you, old man. A perfect murder goes undetected. And isn’t it ironical that you chose tonight of all nights?”
“You mean it may not have been necessary?”
“We shall see.”
“Is this true?” Futrelle demanded of Finch. “Did you really murder the Colonel?”
Finch smiled and spread his hands like a conjurer. “Judge for yourselves. Look who’s just got up to dance.”
They stared across the room. In the open space in front of the band, a couple were doing a cake-walk: Colonel Mortimer Hatch, reunited with his flame-haired partner of the previous night. Some of the women had refused to leave the ship, preferring to take their chances with the men.
Stead, piqued, gave a sharp tug at his beard and said, “I’ll be jiggered!”
“Caught us, well and truly,” said Futrelle.
Finch chuckled and poured himself more wine.
“What an anticlimax,” said Stead.
“On the contrary,” said Finch. “Do you want to hear my version? I might as well tell it now, and if either of you survives you must put it into writing because it was an undetected murder. I killed a man tonight in the Colonel’s staterooms, just as you said. Strangled him and pushed his body out of the porthole. Nobody found out. Nobody would have found out.”
“Who the devil was he?”
“The degenerate who seduced my wife. They’re notorious, these stewards.”
“A steward?”
“Perkins?” said Futrelle.
“They’re in a position of trust, and they abuse it. Well, Perkins did, at any rate, aboard the Mauretania, and I suffered the humiliation of being told about it by an acquaintance. So I took it as a point of honour to take my revenge. I made it my business to learn where he’d signed on. Discovered he’d been hired as a first-class steward for the maiden voyage of the Titanic.”
The two older men were stunned into silence.
Eventually, Stead said, “You’ve certainly surprised me. But was it perfect, this murder? Would you have got away with it? Surely, his absence would have been noted, not least by the passengers he attended.”
“The method was foolproof. Of course there would be concern. The Chief Steward would be informed he was missing. It might even reach the Captain’s ears. But the possibility of murder wouldn’t cross their minds. Even if it did, can you imagine White Star conducting a murder inquiry in the first-class accommodation on the maiden voyage of the Titanic? Never. They would cover it up. The passengers Perkins attended would be told he was unwell. And after we docked at New York it would be too late to investigate.”
“He’s right,” said Futrelle. “He was always going to get away with it.”
“What do you think?” asked Finch, leaning forward in anticipation. “Worthy of The Thinking Machine?”
“More a matter of low cunning than the power of logic, in my opinion,” said Stead, “but it might make an interesting story. What say you, Jacques?”
But Futrelle was listening to something else. “What are they playing? Isn’t that ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’?”
“If it is,” said Stead, “I doubt if your story will ever be told, Mr Finch.”
At two-eighteen, the lights dimmed and went out. In two minutes the ship was gone.
Murdering Max
In 1989 I wrote the first youdunnit. A small accomplishment, you may think, not to be compared with the first manned flight or walking on the moon. To me, a humble crime writer, it brought satisfaction. For in 1983, Umberto Eco, the celebrated author of The Name of the Rose, had observed:
“It seems that the Parisian OULIPO group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there has still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.”
Pardon my vanity. Youdunnit is my claim to stand in the Pantheon with the Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong.
Do you doubt the importance of the achievement?
Am I guilty of self-aggrandisement?
Reflect on this. In the long history of the crime story, no one else had succeeded in writing a youdunnit. From Edgar Allan Poe to Umberto Eco himself, no mystery writer found a way to resolve the problem. Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Hammett, Chandler, Simenon, brilliant and ingenious as they were, couldn’t crack it.
I did, in 1989. I pulled it off. And for ten years I stood alone. No other writer matched me. I believed I would see out the century as the one writer to succeed in devising a youdunnit.
And I almost did.
In November, 1999, Francois Gallix, Professor at the Sorbonne, in Paris, wrote to tell me he had prepared a paper on “Twists and Turns in Crime Fiction — Peter Lovesey’s Youdunnit.” It was to be delivered at the Sorbonne before an international audience.
I turned cartwheels of joy.
After ten years my achievement was to get recognition from the academic establishment. You see, for some reason I don’t understand, my story had not (till then) received its due acclaim. In fact it had passed most people by.
Now, however, my reputation would soar. My life was to be transformed. I decided forthwith to go to Paris.
Ladies and gentlemen of the French Academy, meet Peter Lovesey, trail-blazer, pioneer, writer of the first youdunnit.
Bravo!
Then I read the rest of the professor’s letter and received a body blow. “There is a French author, Max Dorra, who also wrote a short story — ‘Vous permettez que je vous dise tue?’ — in which the reader is the murderer.”
Unthinkable.
To say that I was appalled is an understatement. With just a few weeks left, this man Dorra had ruined the twentieth century for me. My claim to be the only man in the century, in the millennium, to write a youdunnit, was dashed.
I hated him.
The professor’s letter went on to state that Dr Dorra was invited to the lecture. In my hour of triumph, this upstart would be there to undermine me, devalue my currency, smirk behind my back. It was insufferable.
For a week, I scarcely slept. Dorra was with me day and night, deep in my psyche, irritating, immovable, the grain of sand in the oyster. I pictured him sitting in the lecture room smiling arrogantly, confident that his youdunnit was superior to mine.
Reader, you will have divined by now that I don’t like competition. Once or twice I’ve been told I’m a monomaniac. I don’t accept that at all. Why should I believe the nonsense fools say about me? But when I am attacked from behind, I fight back.
I would devise a plot even more brilliant, even more ingenious than Youdunnit.
First, it would be necessary to find out more about Dorra. More knowledge of the man would be painful, but necessary. I have a French friend I shall call Gerard. For the purpose of this, I must disguise his identity. Gerard once translated one of my stories (not Youdunnit) and took the trouble to call me about some ironies in the text. That’s unusual in a translator, such care over detail. We became the best of friends.
I phoned Gerard and asked what he could tell me about my rival. He knew very little, but offered to find out, promising to be discreet in his enquiries. In the heart of Paris (Gerard informed me) there is a marvellous library known as the BILIPO (La Bibliotheque des Litteratures Policieres), a superb research facility for scholars of crime fiction. Every crime story published in France is stored there.
Gerard happened to know a Ph.D student, Delphine Kresge, who regularly used the BILIPO and was remarkably well informed about crime writers. This young lady was brilliant at ferreting out information, and could be trusted not to speak to a soul. She was ideally placed to act for us. In a couple of hours studying the cuttings library at the BILIPO, she compiled a dossier. Gerard faxed it to me. Thanks to Delphine, I was informed about Max Dorra’s literary output, career, family, education, daily routine, the papers he read, the way he voted, the glasses he wore, the blend of coffee he preferred. More than enough.