"Another Perfect Crime"

This post is about an American crime story from 1925, though one that casts a disdainfully satirical eye at English crime stories of the time (and their American imitators).

The story is Dashiell Hammett's "Another Perfect Crime," published in Dashiell Hammett: Lost Stories, another in that valuable and informative Hammett library from Vince Emery Productions. Here's how the story ends:

"It came out later that this would-be sleuth whose salary the property holders were paying had never read a detective story in his life, and so had not even suspected that the evidence had been too solidly against me for me to be anything but innocent."

You can use you superior powers of deduction to figure out what went before. Or track the story down and read it. I think you'll like it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012