The Amateur Crime

The Amateur Crime

Anthony Berkeley's "The Amateur Crime" (published in Britain as "Mr. Priestley's Problem") opens as a comic crime novel built around a hoax rather than a genuine mystery. Guy Nesbitt, a lanky, bookish amateur criminologist living with his young wife Cynthia at Duffley on the Thames, hosts a dinner party for their neighbor George Howard and George's two irrepressible sisters, Dora and Laura, along with Dora's fiancé, the Irish journalist Pat Doyle. Guy and Doyle, both devoted students of real-life murder cases, fall into an after-dinner argument about how an ordinary, law-abiding man would actually behave if he believed he had committed murder. George, bored by the endless criminological chatter, flippantly suggests they stop merely arguing and stage a fake murder to find out. The suggestion catches fire, and Doyle immediately nominates the perfect subject: Matthew Priestley, a prim, wealthy, sheltered bachelor scholar who has recently been mocked by a young admirer for his vegetable-like passivity and urged to have a real "Adventure." The narrative then follows Priestley himself, who, stung by the accusation that he is essentially inert, breaks his own habits by dining alone at a restaurant, drinking more wine than usual, and lingering in Piccadilly Circus hoping something will happen to him. It does: a young woman mistakes him for a hired confederate, "Mullins," addressing him as though he had answered a classified advertisement. Delighted at the chance to play at adventure, Priestley goes along with the misunderstanding rather than correct it. She turns out to be "Mrs. Spettigue" (in reality Laura Howard, planted by the conspirators), who explains — with practiced, tearful sincerity — that she needs a burglar to recover compromising love letters from a blackmailer before her fictitious husband discovers them. Priestley, thoroughly charmed and eager to prove himself capable of gallantry, agrees to help her break into the house that evening. The burglary, naturally, is a set piece engineered by Guy, Doyle, and George: George plays the "victim," a bearded, bemedaled householder who catches the pair red-handed. When the scene goes off-script, Priestley panics and fires a revolver he has been told is loaded with blanks — but George collapses convincingly, appearing genuinely shot and killed. Before Priestley and Laura can process what has happened, a real, unwitting village constable stumbles in, having heard the shot, and — misreading the entire tableau — handcuffs the pair together as murder suspects. In a moment of genuine resourcefulness, Priestley overpowers the constable, locks him in a cupboard, and flees into the night with Laura still shackled to his wrist, both now genuinely convinced they are fugitives from a killing. Back at the house, the conspirators improvise wildly to cover the "crime scene," dragging George out on a rug to fake a body's removal to the river, smearing red ink for blood, planting footprints, and inventing a lurid backstory — complete with a "Crown Prince" victim and a mysterious "Man with the Broken Nose" — for the benefit of a credulous busybody neighbor, Reginald Foster, who blunders onto the scene. When the real police arrive in the form of the vain, glory-hungry Inspector Cottingham, Guy and Doyle skillfully feed him fabricated clues and flatter his vanity, while Doyle simultaneously phones in an exclusive, sensationalized account to his newspaper, securing himself a lucrative scoop. Meanwhile, Priestley and the handcuffed Laura endure a farcical odyssey through the countryside — failing to find anyone willing to lend them a file to cut the cuffs, being drenched with water by an irritated innkeeper, and finally taking refuge at a country inn where they pose as an eloping couple to avoid suspicion. There, freed at last from the handcuffs by soap and brute effort, and mellowed by the landlady's potent elderberry wine, the initial hostility between the earnest, guilt-ridden Priestley and the mischievous, initially contemptuous Laura dissolves into mutual respect, comedy, and the first stirrings of real attraction, even as Laura continues to let him believe he has killed a man rather than admit the whole affair was a prank. The following morning, the hoax's success is confirmed by lurid newspaper headlines trumpeting the "crime" nationwide, much to Cynthia's alarm and Guy's undisguised delight; Inspector Cottingham, thoroughly hoodwinked, proudly conducts the conspirators on a tour of the "evidence" they themselves planted. With Priestley still laboring under the belief that he is a killer, and Doyle and Guy now scheming to feed the Inspector further false clues while the newspaper story snowballs beyond their control, the stage is set for the group's elaborate practical joke to spiral into consequences well beyond what any of them anticipated — testing not only Priestley's presumed "ordinary" reactions to guilt and danger, but also the conspirators' own ability to keep control of the fiction they have created.

By Anthony Berkeley · First published 1928 · Genre: Mystery/Detective Fiction, Comedy, Satire · 18 chapters

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