EUREKA! "I have found it." The way to make a lot of money, even in these hard times. It is an inspiration — my idea, I mean — nothing less, although I will frankly admit that, whilst the brilliant idea itself sprang into life per saltum, it has been led up to by a long and careful observation of human nature and its legion of problems. One or more of these it is which has evoked my Eureka.

      A Bureau de Crime! One always puts these sort of things in French, you know; doesn't look quite so ugly as in English. One likes to be wicked, but not to be called names. Well, then, my place shall not be a "Criminal Agency" — oh dear, no! — but a Bureau de Crime, where an experienced novelist may always be consulted as to the plotting and entire arrangements of crime, contemplated by perpetrators of the better kind, "who so constantly court detection by the omission of some detail which a professional plottist would have arranged for satisfactorily."

      N.B. That is from my prospectus, you understand.

      Doubtless, two disagreeable factors to be reckoned with in my very original scheme will at once suggest themselves to any well-brought-up citizen, viz.: the law and the said novelist's conscience.

      The first would have to be hoodwinked somehow; that is my very object. The second — well, it is nothing new for one to sit upon poor knocked-about conscience, is it? So we'll put these objections of yours out of court as weaknesses, and suppose the above concern to flourish — as do the wicked-like a green bay tree. By the bye, that would be a splendid name for me, and plain English too: "The Green Bay Tree Agency;" quite pretty, and rurally innocent (only rurals are not a whit more innocent than we urbans).

      Now the especial problem on which I base the idea of my G. B. T. Agency is this. I have always been struck by the extraordinary, nay, fatuously stupid errors almost always committed in their crimes by offenders not of the criminal class born and bred, and I have often thought — jesting apart — that many such better-class criminals would never have committed the very mistakes which, in many instances, have led to their detection, if they could have consulted some experienced plot-constructor. I fully grant the difference between theory and practice in the science of criminal warfare, as in everything else; between the cool-headed, disinterested plan of crime laid out by the strategist in the office, and its practical working out by the person interested, who is, of course, more or less swayed by whatever passion is the raison d'être of the crime, and therefore liable to be flurried or otherwise mentally disturbed, so that he loses perfect coolness.

      I put the criminal classes proper out of court, because their whole position rests on a different basis. They are brutish, ignorant; they care for nothing beyond keeping outside police range. There is no attempt to wear a mask, or pose as respectable. They suffer no shame or disgrace amongst their "pals," in or out of prison; on the contrary, the boldest, most constant miscreant is so much the more a hero to his kind. He makes no ado over his burglaries or murders, whether the latter be committed to prevent capture, or occur in a drunken brawl, and, so long as he gets a good "swag" out of it all, he does not much mind the risk of punishment. Indeed, as to crimes less than murder, he reckons that he must pass so much of existence in the "stone-jug," but calculates that he is still the gainer.

      Well, then, crime to the habitual criminal thus becomes, so to speak, a straightforward matter of course — his whole existence, and no nonsense or disguise about it; he is simply a bird of prey, his one god "Loot"; he has no other stake in the general polity, and therefore has nothing to lose, except, at times, in and out, his liberty, which it is either ignorance or a mere sentimental mistake to suppose he values very highly, quâ liberty, as the educated and higher nature; value freedom. What the criminal hates most about prison life is being cut off from drink, high feeding, and other coarse indulgence.

      But when people of the better classes, with education and a status in the world, having, therefore, a greater moral responsibility, descend into the region of crime, of course they have everything to lose by discovery; their one aim is to gain the mercenary or other advantage of their deed, and yet still retain their repute amongst their social equals. It is to these better-class criminals, to whom crime is, more or less, the exception, not the rule, that crime is so dangerous, and needs such very careful planning. And this brings me back to my bureau, please, which we will suppose to be in full swing, and you and I are talking over things.

      My first and very strongest advice to every client is "DON'T," backing it up with weighty reasons. I am quite safe in doing this, because when a man's (or woman's) evil passions are thoroughly roused and bent on gratification, all advice to forbear is precisely like pulling hard on the tail of the proverbial pig of Drogheda: the harder you pull, the more obstinately it rushes forward.

      A lawyer may as well — as he often does — tell a litigant he has not a leg to stand on, and had better keep out of court. That man will be certain to fight to his last farthing.

      Well, then, I say straight out, especially if it be with regard to a crime of violence, "My dear fellow, don't. The game is never worth the candle in these dangerous days."

      Of course my client stares, and asks what the devil I mean? So do you, perhaps, as that advice in connection with my bureau sounds rather like a paradox.

      Well, I will answer you — mind, from a strictly cold-blooded, business point of view. Ethics are beside the question at present, because it goes without saying that crime is decidedly an ugly job for the soul, whatever be the gain in this life.

      And, on this ground of policy alone, then, I assert that in far the majority of cases, crime, in the non-criminal class, does not pay because of the danger that in these days surrounds every step, and makes discovery at least a hundred chances to one against safety.

      Firstly, then, the said criminal has relatives, friends, acquaintances, all more or less aware of his ways and means and movements. The victim or victims of his nefarious deed, ditto. Ergo, it is sure to be somebody's interest to notice and inquire into any unusual departure from accustomed ways in either party, if only from idle curiosity. A friendless nobody has much more immunity than his betters.

      Again, directly a man commits a crime (especially if it be murder) he has to face the fact that, should the least trifle arouse suspicion, his hand is against every man's and every man's hand is against him. The Press, the public, are, as much as the law authorities, on the qui vive to aid in his detection; their varied motives are quite immaterial. The dangerous fact remains grimly in the foreground, that his one mind has to match itself against and outwit a legion of minds, many of them equal to his own, all either bent on, or ready to aid, the outwitting of his; and they are in cold blood, remember. Looking at the position in this way I do not think that it is possible for one brain (as a rule) to be capable of foreseeing and guarding against every contingency, fencing round every possible point of danger — not in these days, when the forces arrayed against that one offender have such enormous resources at command, a very network of machinery, which the least false step on the criminal's part may put in motion with results fatal to his safety. Why, fifty years ago, in fact and fiction, as one reads, crime was easy — plain sailing to what it is now with modern sciences and appliances. Don't I know too well, as a novelist, the trouble and difficulty of arranging my people's crimes and escapes? And fact is ten times worse of course; because, for instance, if I am desperate, I can bring along a veritable cyclone or a snow-storm, and break down telegraph wires till my hero or my villain is out of the country. But here, in real life, in this bureau, I can't arrange that matter so comfortably for my assassin-client; those horrid wires stick in their places — or there is a telephone, and it's ten to one that when he steps jauntily from the train at Dover to cross to Calais, he walks straight into the arms of a smiling detective, who is coolly waiting for him. Or it may be at New York that this happens; the wire precedes you all the same, and Mr. Byrne's officers will take care of you till their English confrère arrives. Electricity and steam, then, are enemies to our crimes, in fact and fiction; photography is another difficulty; the entire extradition treaty system another, and one of the deadliest. I must say, it is really too bad and inconsiderate of international law-makers that now there is scarcely a corner of the globe where one can set a creature down in peace to snap his fingers at any "bobby" in creation. Then there is the whole phalanx of those dreadful newspapers, and advertisements in them and out of them; and sometimes — if it can be done — a rough sketch of the suspected person is added. This last item among modern perils was the one which led to the detection of that most stupid of criminals — Lefroy, who murdered poor old Mr. Gold in the train, near Brighton, a few years ago. And this again brings me back to the premisses which led to the suggestion of my agency — the almost unaccountable stupidity, shortsightedness, and lack of common-sense shown in the records of crime by those who are otherwise no fools. It amounts to an absolute fatuity. Certainly it presents a problem in metaphysics which it is difficult to solve. It really seems as if the mind, directly it passes into the realm of crime, takes a curious twist or becomes purblind. I will give book for my remarks presently, and if cleverer heads than mine find my humble deductions all wrong (as may be perhaps), I cannot help it; you must simply take my offered remarks for what they may be worth.

      Well, then, in my opinion, foremost in this curious state of mind is that passion for the Diary, the manifestation of which is rather the rule than the exception in the records of various trials — notably, I may add, in divorce cases, breaches of promise, and commercial or other fraud cases. It is simple madness ever to commit to black and white any record of, or allusion to, anything nefarious, which, if found, is fatal evidence. You cannot get out of it, or twist it, or out-lie it. It is like a recurring decimal — you can't get rid of your own entry; it comes back and back eternally, and pins you — self-incriminated. If your memory is so bad that you cannot remember an assignation, or what you have done, or intend doing, in the name of sense make up your mind, perforce, to live in safe respectability. Personally, I hold a diary of all one's thoughts, feelings, doings, &c., as a horror, and dangerous as a Palace of Truth itself, the world being what it is. I thoroughly endorse the Jesuit maxim, which I shall have put up in red letters in my bureau: "Write so that even if the letters should come into other hands they should not give offence."

      Only a few words those, but they inclose volumes of commonsense and astute worldly wisdom that will bear a wide application.

      I remember — in the early '80's, I think — a divorce case in which the parties were people of position. The wife was the respondent. She and the co-respondent strenuously denied guilt, fought hard, and yet with incredible folly she had actually noted down in her diary every assignation with her paramour — date, place, name. Still more idiotically she had not destroyed this damnatory evidence directly she knew that suspicion was aroused. Of course, the diary was got hold of, and was mainly instrumental in convicting her. This is but one out of many instances in cases of various kinds. Another instance, still more incomprehensible, occurred recently in the case of a charge brought in the English courts against a man of position, for fraudulently appropriating trust money of some £20,000 value. Before a warrant was issued he went abroad secretly, but later, finding himself obliged to be in England, he returned, also secretly, but was, to his amazement, arrested on landing at Dover. Of course he was searched, and on him was found a diary, and in this book, each under its date, were entries, amongst others, which noted being at a certain hotel under a false name, with expressions of apprehension appended; another noting that on the boat a passenger had looked hard at him — "I hope he did not recognize me, but I fear he did," or words to that effect were added. Now, imagine any man presumably sane who, knowing himself to be under suspicion of a crime, in hourly dread of discovery and arrest, yet actually puts down in black and white such fatally compromising matter as this, and carries it about on his person, which, should he be arrested, he must know would immediately be searched. He did the very things which, according to the dictates of common-sense, he should have left undone. Is it that, in a certain strained state of mind and nerves, there is a morbid excitement which finds a curious and irresistible safety valve in thus expending itself on paper?

      Akin to the above is another striking fact in the history of crime, viz., the way in which criminals so constantly keep in existence, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by neglecting to destroy, papers, documents, weapons, or other things which are fatally compromising. More than one forger, for instance, has been convicted mainly through the discovery of the sheets of paper on which he has practised the imitation of the forged handwriting. Or, where the illicit document was a will or deed, the real instrument has been found, when all common-sense and caution should have burned it. The fire — is my advice to my clients, and pulverize the ashes even then. In the famous Bidwell Bank of England forgery (about '74), the police found in Austin Bidwell's lodgings, in St. James's Place, a blotting pad which had distinctly blotted most compromising writing. It is true that these really very clever criminals were at the last surprised through a small oversight, sufficiently curious in such cool-headed offenders, and I have little doubt that Austin intended to destroy every such evidence before the final absconding so neatly pre-arranged. But if Austin Bidwell had been in my bureau to be aided in his plans of safety, I should have said at once: "Don't keep for a minute a bit of blotting-paper that has once been used to blot a dangerous document. Burn it directly. Always burn blotting-paper so used, my worthy sir. And also carry in your memory the addresses of die-sinkers. Don't copy them down; don't cut them out of the directory [that is what the Bidwells did], unless you burn up your copy of it without delay."

      These and one or two more apparently insignificant but really grave errors in detail of construction, proved to be among the most fatal flaws in a gigantic forgery, which, on the whole, stands nearly, if not quite, alone for the daring, the manifestation of business capability and patience in the working out, the admirable scientific construction and remarkable cleverness — up to a certain point — of the four men who formed the syndicate. The object was, at any rate, worth the risk from their platform, they being swindlers by trade, who had no credit or status to lose by failure.

      But of all offenders, I do think those who most constantly fail in the ways I have mentioned — the offenders who certainly most need my professional aid — are the disciples of Cain. The records of murder are full of evidence that the assassin did, or left undone, precisely those things which he should have been most careful to do, or to avoid doing, as the case may be. Indeed, the well-laid plan and carefully guarded outposts are, in the great majority of cases, conspicuous by their absence, although murder is of all crimes that which most needs every possible safeguard, being the crime, of all others, most beset with perils from without and from within. From without, for reasons of which I have already spoken; from within, because it is, undoubtedly, calculated to upset the nerves and the normal conditions of the mind, and therefore to render the criminal unfit, in truth, to cope with the endless dangers surrounding him.

      Take, for instance, the case I have alluded to by name — the Gold-Lefroy murder. It was too utterly stupid throughout to deserve anything but contempt. As a matter of fact, a railway carriage in England (in America, the open cars make any secret crime impossible) is the worst place for a murder — above all, a first-class compartment. The guard has an uncomfortably sharp knack of noticing the passengers during the journey; people look out of windows at the train rushing by and see into this coach or that; tickets are so easily traced, too, and pin you to time and place so objectionably. Then, a shabby, hangdog-looking fellow, such as Lefroy was, being in a first-class carriage was in itself noticeable, the more so as Mr. Gold was the only other passenger and was well known on the line. Then the struggle was seen for a moment from a cottage window, and at Preston (near Brighton) Lefroy was observed to leave the carriage, and it was noticed also that the old gentleman was no longer in the compartment. Even when, through the stupidity of the country official, the murderer got to his sister's house and thence escaped to London — having no money to enable him to get out of the country — neither of the two foolish people thought of destroying every photo of the man. The police naturally "went" for that at once, searching the house, and the photo of this rather peculiar-looking man mainly led to his capture, for the Daily Telegraph published from it a rough sketch, which Lefroy's landlady recognized, and in consequence gave information. He had not had the means to fly the country and was arrested. It never does, you see, to commit a murder without a good supply of money. I never advise it in my Bureau de Crime.

      Another instance, yet worse, is that of the murder in Scotland of young Rose, by one Laurie, for here the latter literally flung away the advantages of time, place and circumstance. His deed was positively made to his hand to pass for an accident, and the "fool in his folly" took all the trouble in the world to prove it impossible for it to be anything but a murder of his committing. He got Mr. Rose to go for a walk over a mountain pass, on one side of which was a precipice. A man on another hill saw them near the fatal spot — and, by the way, I never advise high, open places for this sort of business; you never know from how great a distance you are seen. In a lonely spot Laurie pushed his victim over the precipice, and then descended it by a path to make sure of him and rob him. The fall was deep and steep enough to insure death. Laurie had only then, in the name of all sense, to go back to the inn, unconcernedly saying that Rose had gone on farther, they having parted, pro tem., in the pass, and that Rose would be back presently; then quietly to steal the money in his friend's valise (no one knew what was in it), and when Rose failed to appear, evince natural friendly alarm. The body, when found, would tell no tales save of a fall over the precipice. However strong the moral suspicion or belief that the fall was not an accident, nothing could ever have convicted Laurie of murder. Of robbery he might have been convicted, but the law must have acquitted him on the capital charge. Instead of this, what did the fool do, in the hopes of hiding the body? He dragged it to some little distance, where the gorge opened near the beach, and built it over with boulders of rock, and, strangest of all, pulled off Rose's boots and left them unburied! Then he walked off to the inn, said Rose had gone on for a few days, and that night he (Laurie) went away, taking with him his friend's valise and the silver watch he had worn on his person. Conceive such folly throughout! It pales the very crime.

      Of course, when poor Rose's friends missed him, the whole country side was searched, and after a week the body was found — a murder, unmistakably. A dead man could not bury himself. Laurie had got away, but even then, after three weeks, must needs hark back to the very neighbourhood of his crime, hiding about, till he was found and arrested and was finally convicted.

      The "Wimbledon Murder" — the case of Dr. Lamson, who murdered his crippled young brother-in-law, is another instance in point of bad planning and worse execution. Primarily, it is nearly always an initial mistake to murder any person in whose death you are known to have an interest, whether that interest be pecuniary or be the result of jealousy, revenge, or any other motive. If there is the slightest reason to apprehend that the death was not "from natural causes," as the coroner's verdict puts it, suspicion very naturally directs itself to you, the gainer by that person's death. Some poisons can be used so as to produce the appearances of certain complaints, but even then, time, great care, and constant personal intercourse between victim and poisoner are absolutely essential to success. The least error means suspicion, an inquest, post mortem, and probably detection of poison. In these days medical science knows too much, from the murderer's point of view, of course, and poison is, I consider, on the whole the most easily traced and most dangerous mode of killing. Lamson set about it, too, in a very stupid manner, although as a doctor he might account for the aconite being in his possession. But he actually sent the poor lad — his victim — poisoned chocolate drops, some of which the boy naturally bestowed on a chum, whose symptoms of sickness resembled those of the victim. Then, at the last, the murderer got impatient, desperate, and "hurried up" (a fatal error in crime), giving with his own hands, in some sugar, a dose so large and so ill calculated — as he was in a hurry — that it quickly produced in the boy violent symptoms of its presence. Result — failure of the scheme, arrest and hanging of the schemer.

      In still further support of my remarks, I could mention many more cases, but space does not allow me. Perhaps I have already trespassed too far thereon. I think, however, that I have in some measure well supported the substance of my dicta: that, since crimes will go on as long as the world wags, my Bureau de Crime ought to be a grand success; that (my business interest apart) the very best advice I can give my would-be clients is emphatically: "Crime is too dangerous ever to be worth while; once for all — DON'T."