1. Kill A Man In Cold Blood And Then Solve The Crime
Chief Inspector Robert Ledru of the French Surete of the 1880s was the kind of real life police officer who inspires great fictional detectives. As a young man, hed arrested dozens of murderers, broken up cults and arrested violent political anarchists most notably in 1884, a cabal that plotted to overthrow the government. Three years later, he was to become notorious for an entirely different reason. Sent to the port of Le Havre to look into the disappearances of local sailors, the celebrity detective had been dragged into investigating the overnight murder of a Parisian dressmaker by the name of Andre Monet. Monet had been found on the beach that morning, shot through the heart with a single bullet. Without the bullet being recovered, only footprints leading up the beach held a clue as to who the culprit might have been. The great man was greatly troubled by the crime scene, but refused to divulge his concerns to his colleagues. As the day wore on, he took to a far corner of the beach, studying plaster casts of the footprints, so absorbed that the local gendarmes said he appeared to be as still as a statue. Finally, Ledru stood and proclaimed that the case was solved he had identified the killer! And with that, he said no more, returning to his hotel room and locking the door. The following morning, the bullet had been found upon the beach, and Ledru took the spent round and compared it with one taken from his own revolver, confirming his suspicion that he himself was the killer. Upon the morning of the discovery of Monets corpse, Ledru had woken in his hotel room with damp socks. When he had examined the footprints on the beach, he had noted that the fleeing culprit had one missing toe the same toe missing from his own foot. It had taken him all day to confront himself and admit the impossible that somehow, overnight and without realising, he had risen, dressed, left his hotel room, gone to the beach and shot a stranger dead with his police revolver. Unwilling to fully credit this wild story, the authorities could not disprove his findings, and were forced to lock him up while they deliberated. One night, they left a pistol under his pillow filled with blanks and Ledru rose in the early hours, still fast asleep, and fired the prop gun at one of his guards. Ledru would have killed again had the bullets been real. In his account to his superiors reconstructing the events leading up to the crime, Ledru concluded, I dont think the murderer knew what he was doing. I believe that he was walking in his sleep and committed the murder while in a trance. The man is sick, very sick, and could easily kill that way again. Which is why I insist that I be arrested and put somewhere where I can do no more harm. And so he was. Ledru was exiled to a remote farm near Paris for the rest of his life, guarded by doctors and armed police alike. The great detectives last triumph was his final case, and his only defeat.