Murder!: Lomax Harder, and the Perfect Crime

John Franting

Placing. Franting is Emily's husband, low-browed, heavy-chinned, scowling and defiant, an amateur boxer, a gambler and, in Bennett's phrase, in his spare time a deluder of women.

Bennett makes him hateful with precision. He lives on his wife's money and admits it. He reads her letter aloud, tears it in two and lights his cigarette with one half, which is the single act that makes the reader accept what follows. And he states his creed without embarrassment: a wife's a wife, and she cannot break her word because everything is not lovely in the garden.

But he is not made stupid. His speech is accurate about everything: the ticket to Copenhagen, the passport, the packing, Harder's interests there. He declines to accuse Harder of adultery, saying he will make no wild statements. He is a brute with a clear head, which is why the threat is credible.

And the detail Bennett saves for the last section. He was, a dozen years earlier, perhaps the finest amateur light-weight boxer in England, and dangerous because he was left-handed. The fact is planted as characterisation and used as evidence.

Emily Franting

Placing. Franting's wife, who has decided to leave him and has taken a ticket for Copenhagen.

She is almost absent, and that is a fair criticism. She appears only on the steamer and in the final scene, and everything else about her comes through the two men. Bennett gives her a letter, a decision and a joy at being found, and very little else.

What she is given. The letter, quoted twice, is her voice: she knows he is fond of her but finds his way of showing it too humiliating and painful, and she is saying so for the last time. And the last scene gives her tears at the inquest report and the flat sentence, "I must get some mourning and go back to the flat."

The question the story leaves. She does not know. Harder has decided that she never will, and the reader is left holding a secret with him against her. Whether that is protection or a second injury done to her is the best question a discussion of this story can raise.

Dr Austin Bond, and the failure of detection

Who he is. A celebrated amateur detective, a stout, genial man whose successes are listed with mock grandeur, "The Yellow Hat", "The Three Towns", "The Three Feathers", "The Gold Spoon", and whose friendship with the heads of Scotland Yard obliges the police to be civil to him.

What he gets right. Everything about the Superintendent's case. The finger-prints, the footmarks, the strands of blue cloth and the missing finger all belong to the charwoman, and he proves it in three minutes by having her take off a boot and put her hands on the window. It is a genuine piece of detection and it destroys a description already circulated to the police.

What he gets wrong. The conclusion. He builds a proof of suicide out of the revolver in the dead man's own left-hand pocket, the three empty chambers, Franting's left-handedness as a boxer, and the fragment of Emily's letter, which he reads as a farewell note. Every step is sound and the answer is false.

Why Bennett chose to do it this way. Because a story in which a stupid policeman fails proves nothing. Here the cleverest man available succeeds at every stage of his reasoning and arrives at the wrong result, so the failure is not of intelligence but of method: he is reasoning from a scene that a frightened hall-porter has misdescribed.

The perfect crime, examined as a lawyer would

Ask what actually protected Harder, and the answers are uncomfortable.

The point to make. Two of the five are Harder's doing. The rest are luck and other people's ordinary self-interest. Bennett is not writing a story about a criminal mastermind; he is writing one about how easily the machinery can be defeated by nobody in particular.

And the mistake that helped him. He forgot the unburnt half of the letter and knew it on the train, and it is the single strongest piece of evidence for the verdict he needed. A story of a perfect crime in which the murderer's blunder saves him is Bennett's sharpest joke.

Irony, and the moral question

The structural irony. The reader is told in section I that murderers go undetected, watches one in sections II to V, and then in section VI watches the law demonstrate, brilliantly and publicly, that no murder occurred.

The local ironies. The murder weapon is bought by the victim. The evidence of a break-in belongs to the woman who cleaned the window. The dead man's own boxing career proves he shot himself. And the letter he destroyed in contempt becomes his suicide note.

The moral question, which an essay must take a position on. Bennett refuses to answer it and constructs the story so that the reader cannot avoid it. On one side: Franting had stated an intention to kill, was believed by a man who knew him, and no law available to Emily would have protected her from a determined husband in 1927. On the other: Harder appointed himself judge and executioner on his own assessment of a threat, killed a man who at that moment was standing by a fire smoking, lied to the woman he saved, and left an innocent charwoman under a police description.

The strongest thing to say. The opening essay asked whether murder can be defensible, and the story is the case put to the reader rather than the answer given. Bennett's own position is visible only in the arrangement: he makes the killing sympathetic, the escape thrilling, the detection wrong, and the last line comfortable, and then leaves the reader with the discomfort of having enjoyed all four.

A worked answer

Question. MU's own, February 2026: "Character-sketch of Lomax Harder." Six marks.

A model answer. Lomax Harder is the poet who murders John Franting in Arnold Bennett's story, and the interest of the character is that nothing about him fits the act. He is drawn as the opposite of a killer: refined features, an enormous forehead, fair hair and a delicate, almost apologetic manner, and Bennett says he corresponded with the popular notion of a poet and in fact was one. His crime begins in accident rather than design, since he pockets the revolver Franting had rejected only because a door startles him, in what Bennett calls a thoughtless, quite unpremeditated act, and leaves the shop a thief. Yet once the killing is done he is remarkably cool: he replaces the fallen cigarette, puts on his gloves, leaves by the window, and then walks back into the same hotel by the front door and orders a cocktail from the hall-porter. He feels no guilt, and Bennett states it directly, that he regretted the necessity but felt no slightest twinge of conscience, because somebody had to die and it was better a brute than Emily. He is also capable of deceiving the woman he has saved, telling her that he never went, on the reasoning that one lie was better than twenty and that the deception was for her sake. What he is finally for is to prove the essay with which the story opens: that murderers walk safely among us, and that one of them may be a gentle and scrupulous man who took the weapon by accident and will keep the secret for ever.

Why it scores. Placing, five qualities each proved from the text, and a closing judgment about the character's function.

Quick revision

Harder: refined, apologetic, a poet; the revolver taken by accident; cool afterwards; no conscience; lies to Emily; the last line is his.

Franting: brutal, left-handed boxer, lives on his wife's money, tears her letter for a spill, threatens to follow and kill her anywhere.

Emily: mostly absent, a letter, a decision, and a widow who does not know.

Dr Austin Bond: right about every clue, wrong about the conclusion.

What saved Harder: an accidental weapon, gloves, nerve at the front door, a hall-porter's lie, and his own forgotten mistake read as a suicide note.

The moral question is put and not answered, and the arrangement of the story is Bennett's only comment.

Test yourself

1. Why does Bennett make Harder a poet with an apologetic manner? To defeat the reader's expectations and to support the claim of the opening essay, that murderers are not a recognisable class of person but walk among us and may be shaken hands with. The gentleness also makes the killing readable as a rescue rather than as violence.

2. What is the single act that makes the reader accept the murder? Franting tearing his wife's letter in two and twisting one half into a spill to light his cigarette. It is contempt made physical, and it comes immediately before the threat to kill her.

3. Why is Dr Austin Bond's failure more damaging than a policeman's would be? Because he succeeds at everything else. He demolishes the Superintendent's entire case in minutes and proves the clues belong to the charwoman, so the reader cannot dismiss him as incompetent. A brilliant man reasoning correctly to a false conclusion shows that the failure lies in the scene he was given, not in his ability.

4. List what actually protected Harder, and say how much of it was his doing. An untraceable weapon taken by accident and dropped in the sea; the absence of prints and footmarks; his innocent reappearance at the hotel's front entrance; the hall-porter's false statement that nobody entered; and the forgotten letter, read as a suicide note. Only the second and third were his own doing; the rest were accident or other people's self-interest.

5. Does the story defend the murder? It puts the case and refuses to decide. The opening essay raises the question whether murder can be defensible; Franting had announced his intention to kill and was believed by a man who knew him; but Harder made himself judge and executioner, shot a man who was standing by a fire, lied to the woman he saved, and left an innocent charwoman circulated in a police description. Bennett's only comment is the arrangement, which makes the reader enjoy the escape and then notice having enjoyed it.