Crooked House

by Agatha Christie

“Nice ordinary fellows like you and me—or like that chap who went out just now—Roger Leonides. Murder, you see, is an amateur crime. I’m speaking of course of the kind of murder you have in mind—not gangster stuff. One feels, very often, as though these nice ordinary chaps had been overtaken, as it were, by murder, almost accidentally. They’ve been in a tight place, or they’ve wanted something very badly, money or a woman—and they’ve killed to get it. The brake that operates with most of us doesn’t operate with them. A child, you know, translates desire into action without compunction. A child is angry with its kitten, says ‘I’ll kill you,’ and hits it on the head with a hammer—and then breaks its heart because the kitten doesn’t come alive again! Lots of kids try to take a baby out of a pram and ‘drown it,’ because it usurps attention—or interferes with their pleasures. They get—very early—to a stage when they know that that is ‘wrong’—that is, that it will be punished. Later, they get to feel that it is wrong. But some people, I suspect, remain morally immature. They continue to be aware that murder is wrong, but they do not feel it. I don’t think, in my experience, that any murderer has really felt remorse … And that, perhaps, is the mark of Cain. Murderers are set apart, they are ‘different’—murder is wrong—but not for them—for them it is necessary—the victim has ‘asked for it,’ it was ‘the only way.’”