Murder!

by Arnold Bennett

Genres: Short Stories, Mystery

22 pages

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

First piece of actual fiction I've read by Bennett. Not nearly as entertaining as his non-fiction. This is a short story, the kindle book is very expensive for the length on amazon, but you can find it free online. Not a mystery in the sense that you wonder who did it, as you might expect from the title, more of a weird what-if scenario. It was okay, but not recommended. I'm hoping one of his novels or other stories will prove better.

[Serena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Giant Book of Great Detective Stories

My Rating System:
* couldn't finish, ** wouldn't recommend, *** would recommend, **** would read again, ***** have read again

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lomax Harder
John Franting
Emily Franting
Dr. Austin Bond - amateur detective

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐

Instead of a classic whodunit, Murder explores the emotional and ethical consequences of the act itself. The suspense arises not from solving the crime but from witnessing the protagonist’s internal struggle, his guilt, rationalizations, and fear. The story follows the life of a seemingly ordinary man, Lormax Harder who becomes embroiled in the murder of John Franting. As the plot unfolds, readers are taken on a journey through the Harder's mind, exploring his motivations, fears, and the societal pressures that lead to his drastic actions. The author masterfully portrays the tension between societal expectations and personal desires, making the reader question the nature of morality and justice.

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just look at your hands and know they could be tools of death. Scary.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murder! By Arnold Bennett



It is possible to find great stories on the internet: the copyright is long gone and you can read them in complete legality, free of charge. I guess the best, most complete source would be the Gutenberg project, where you can find and access without charge- again respecting all the laws- about half of the list of the best 100 books ever. About fifty of these books are more than one hundred years old, some go back a few thousand: Gilgamesh, Medeea, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Oedipus King, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses, The Arabian (or outside the English language – 1001) Nights.

You can read Jane Austen, Rabelais, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, Balzac and more.

Scattered over the web, we find other tales, like the excellent Murder! By Arnold Bennett, which can be read online (I do not know what the permissions are for downloading it) at: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/murder.htm

„MANY great ones of the earth have justified murder as a social act, defensible, and even laudable in certain instances. There is something to be said for murder, though perhaps not much. All of us, or nearly all of us, have at one time or another had the desire and the impulse to commit murder. At any rate, murder is not an uncommon affair. On an average, two people are murdered every week in England, and probably about two hundred every week in the United States. And forty per cent of the murderers are not brought to justice. These figures take no account of the undoubtedly numerous cases where murder has been done but never suspected. Murders and murderesses walk safely abroad among us, and it may happen to us to shake hands with them. A disturbing thought! But such is life, and such is homicide...”

As you can see, the start is...startling!!

And it got worse since 1927, when the author wrote the statement. It is shocking to think that murders go unpunished and killers are roaming free. As a matter of fact, the most efficient of them are even worshipped: you find communists today, when their „venerable”dead leaders are known to have killed hundreds of millions.

In North Korea a mass murderer is in charge – as I write this, some people are dying of starvation, they resort to eating grass or the bark of the trees.

In the short story of Arnold Bennett, the murderer has a classic motive – he is in love. Besides, the would be dead man is a cruel individual, determined to take revenge upon his wife.

So we’re back to the intial statement: „murder as a social, defensible act”

It gets more complicated, once we go down that path: I have seen a movie with Cameron Diaz, the name escapes me now, but for whoever is ineterested- it can easily be found on IMDB or elsewhere on the net, and in that movie they took this social reason for murder to a new level:

A group of young, liberal people were outraged by the racism, bigotry and hatred of some public speakers. They brought in their discussion Hitler.

Indeed, what would you do if you had had the chance to meet Hitler, before the whole massacre got started, but knew that the failed painter would become the most evil dictator, aside from Stalin and Mao who killed even more (of their own) people.

You would have to kill him, obviously.

Our group has started to kill: first a racist, then a anti- gay priest, after that a young bigot girl, then a police woman, until the tables were turned on them.

In Murder! It is simpler than that, but some humor is added to make for a pleasant, enjoyable read.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: a 1927 short. Two men enter a shop and obtain revolvers, one by purchase and the other by theft.