The murderer — A Closer Reading

A Killer's Heightened Senses

The excerpts dwell on the murderer's hyperawareness. He notes "the faint acrid reek of burnt smokeless powder," the "staling scent of the cigarette," and even "the curious humming of the telephone wires." This sensory overload is a hallmark of Leinster's style: the killer's guilt manifests as a kind of super-perception, making every detail ominous. The darkness is described through "vague rectangles of faint grayishness" where windows open onto the rainy night. These details ground the terror in the physical world, not the supernatural.

Yet the story undercuts this intensity. The murderer's fear is real, but the cause is a cat. The narrative voice remains detached, describing the cat's "playful pounces" and the sound like "a man drumming softly." The contrast between the killer's internal horror and the external banality creates a darkly comic tension.

The Cat as Comic Foil

The cat is the story's true agent of chaos. It first appears as a sound—"such a sound as might have been made by a man drumming softly"—that the murderer interprets as the dead man stirring. Later, it pulls at his trousers and makes him scream. The cat's actions are described with playful verbs: "buffeted," "playful pats," "sank its claws." This language contrasts sharply with the earlier horror vocabulary.

At the inquest, the cat's mischief continues. It causes the coroner's cigarette to fall into his pocket, burning him. The coroner's joke—"If that cigarette had been in its case, now"—is the story's punchline. The cat, not the murderer, drives the plot's resolution. The excerpts suggest the story is less about crime and punishment than about how trivial accidents derail official proceedings.

Structure: From Terror to Farce

The story's structure is a deliberate arc from psychological horror to absurdist comedy. The opening paragraphs build dread through repetition: "Something moving in the room!" and "Something alive in the room. Something furtive and horrible and—and terribly playful!" The murderer's physical reactions—"clench his teeth," "cold sweat," "sick with fear"—are described in detail.

Then the revelation: the cat. The tone shifts abruptly. The murderer's scream becomes "sickly, terrified" rather than purely terrified. The final scene, the inquest, is almost farcical: the coroner annoyed by a cat batting his coat-tails. The story does not moralize or explain the murder; it simply presents the killer's terror and the cat's indifference. This structural pivot is the story's most distinctive feature.

Readers should attend to how Leinster balances two registers: the murderer's overwrought interiority and the cat's mundane physicality. The story rewards attention to sound—the drumming, the purring, the humming wires—as a motif that bridges the killer's fear and the cat's play. The excerpts do not reveal the murderer's fate or the crime's motive; the story remains focused on the moment of terror and its deflation. Approach it as a study in tonal contrast rather than a conventional mystery.

Strange, the things that linger. Reading about that murderer startled by a cat in the dark, I remembered how a similar reversal—the ordinary interrupting the ominous—threads through A Transient Guest, and Other Episodes — A Reader’s Guide. That quiet shift from dread to something almost comic feels like an old friend. One story simply calls another to mind, unbidden, and I’m left smiling at the association.