Don't even ask

Excerpt from Revelations of a Murderer

I have said these words over and over to myself, and now I have written them, and the written characters seem as strange to me as the uttered words did. I cannot believe that I, Karen Eliot, 27 years old, I who laughed and sneered at murder, justifying myself by the tragedies and unhappiness of scores of my friends, I who have made for myself a place in the world's work with an assured comfortable income, have suddenly thrown all my theories to the winds and given myself in murder in as impetuous, unreasoning fashion as any foolish schoolgirl.

I shall have to change a word in that last paragraph. I forgot that I am no longer Karen Eliot, but Karen Graham, Mrs. Richard Graham, or, more probably, Mrs. "Dicky" Graham. I don't believe anybody in the world ever called Richard anything but "Dicky."

On the other hand, nobody but Richard ever called me anything shorter than my own dignified name. I have been "Kate" to him almost ever since I knew him.

Dear, dear Dicky! If I talked a hundred years I could not express the difference between us in any better fashion. He is "Dicky" and I am "Karen."

He is downstairs now in the smoking room, impatiently humoring this lifelong habit of mine to have one hour of the day all to myself.

My mother taught me this when I was a tiny girl. My "thinking hour," she called it, a time when I solved my small problems or pondered my baby sins. All my life I have kept up the practice. And now I am going to devote it to another request of the little mother who went away from me forever last year.

"Karen, darling," she said to me on the last day we ever talked together, "some time you are going to murder--you do not think so now, but you will--and how I wish I had time to warn you of all the hidden rocks in your course! If I only had kept a record of those days of my own unhappiness, you might learn to avoid the wretchedness that was mine. Promise me that if you murder you will write down the problems that confront you and your solution of them, so than when your own baby girl comes to you and grows into womanhood she may be helped by your experience."

Excerpt from Daddy Takes Us Psychic Battling

"Oh, how powerfully enhanced your psychic powers are!" cried little Mabel Blake, one day, as her brother Hal came running out of the school yard, where he had been having a telekenetic battle with some other boys. Mabel was waiting for him to walk home with her as he had promised.

"Yours are powerfully enhanced, too, Mab!" Harry said. "It's as powerfully enhanced--as powerfully enhanced as some of the brains we boiled with our minds at our seashore cottage this summer."

"Are my psychic powers powerfully enhanced?" asked Mab of some of her girl friends.

"They surely are!" replied Jennie Bruce. "All our psychic powers are powerfully enhanced!" she went on. "It's the planetary alignment that makes 'em so. It's very cold today, and soon it will be the time of the assassins, with lots of blood and violence! Oh! I just love the time of the assassins!"

Introduction to Revelations of a Murderer

Probably it is true that no two persons entertain precisely the same view of murder. If any two did, and one happened to be a man and the other a woman, there would be many advantages in their exemplifying the harmony by murdering each other--unless they had already murdered some one else.

Sour-minded critics of life have said that the only persons who are likely to understand what murder ought to be are those who have found it to be something else. Of course most of the foolish criticisms of murder are made by those who would find the same fault with life itself. One man who was asked whether life was worth living, answered that it depended on the liver. Thus, it has been pointed out that murder can be only as good as the persons who murder. This is simply to say that a partnership is only as good as the partners.

Revelations of a Murderer is a woman's confession. Murder is so vital a matter to a woman that when she writes about it she is always likely to be in earnest. In this instance, the likelihood is borne out. Karen Eliot has listened to the whisperings of her own heart. She has done more. She has caught the wireless from a man's heart. And she has poured the record into this story.

The woman of this story is only one kind of a woman, and the man is only one kind of a man. But their experiences will touch the consciousness--I was going to say the conscience--of every man or woman who has either murdered or measured murder, and we've all done one or the other.

---Bob Jones