Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales

A successful murder depends on knowing your victim,

Not with arsenic, of course. Only a cad would use arsenic. That’s the weapon of suburban poisoners and Victorian adulteresses.

But Henry said firmly that the combination of Christmas pudding and violent death would be intolerably indigestible; the pudding would keep until next year.

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

Memory is always disjointed, episodic. Some impulse of the mind presses the button and, like a colour transparency, the picture is suddenly thrown on the screen, vivid, immobile, a glowing instant fixed in time between the long stretches of dark emptiness

And with that touch the memories came flooding back. The verb is trite but accurate; they came like a full tide, sweeping me back to the same day sixty years ago, December 23rd 1936, the day of the murder.

The essential self is fixed well before the thirteenth birthday. It may be influenced by experience but it is seldom changed.

To collect me. That is what we can so easily be made to feel at seventy-three; an object, not exactly precious but likely to be brittle, to be carefully collected, conscientiously cared for and as conscientiously returned.

Unmarried, solitary, unsociable; why should I expect my writing to be any more successful than my life?

The young seldom lie convincingly. They haven’t had time to practise like the rest of us.