In "Your Murder, Sir!" by John L. Benton (Thrilling Detective Novel--January 1946), it's no secret who the killer is. The very first sentence tells us:
Williams, the perfect butler, was planning the perfect murder.
Williams is the butler to Eric Hathaway, who inherited a family fortune and spends his life in his home reading detective novels. This is a genre Williams loathed--considering them to be unrealistic tripe.
Anyway, Hathaway trusts Williams completely. If Williams gives him a stack of papers to sign, Hathaway will at the most glance at the top paper before signing all of them. So gradually embezzling Hathaway's fortune wasn't difficult. And, when it comes time to do away with the old boy, it's just as easy to get Hathaway to sign a suicide note without knowing it.
Williams has the whole thing planned out carefully: How to kill his boss; how to set things up to make it look like suicide; how to stash away the money he's stolen in different banks without leaving a trail. It's the perfect murder.
Well, it WOULD be the perfect murder if a police detective didn't pull off a trick that was felt like it was taken right out of a detective novel.
This is a very short, but very fun novel. You go into it knowing that Williams' plan is going to go awry, so the fun is in finding out exactly how this happens. You can read it yourself HERE, starting on page 89.
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