Murder — Arnold Bennett

You have watched enough crime shows on your phone to know the pattern: a body, a brilliant detective, a clever reveal, and the killer in handcuffs by the last scene. Arnold Bennett turns that pattern inside out. In “Murder!” you watch the killing happen, you know exactly who did it, and then you watch a famous detective arrive, dazzle the police and get the answer completely wrong. The question the story leaves you with is an uncomfortable one for a future lawyer: how often does the system reach a confident verdict that is simply untrue?

In two minutes

In Murder!, the poet Lomax Harder shoots John Franting to stop him from carrying out his threat to kill his wife Emily, and the celebrated amateur detective Dr. Austin Bond, reasoning brilliantly from the wrong clues, persuades the police that Franting killed himself — so the murderer goes free and the inquest returns a verdict of suicide.

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