The great criminal (as you may remember my remarking to you once) is always supremely simple.
The crime passionel! The primitive instinct – to kill! So closely allied to the sex instinct.
That boyish type of criminal is usually intensely vain. Once prick the bubble of their self-esteem and it is finished! They go to pieces like children.
Some say the reason so many criminals go free is that the legal system is a net with a large mesh. But that gives a completely false picture. It’s a thin, fine-meshed net that catches the small fry but tears when the big fish crash into it.
Some of the greatest criminals I have known had the faces of angels. A malformation of the grey cells may coincide quite easily with the face of a Madonna.
One has only to let the criminal talk – sooner or later he will tell you everything.
No crime can be successful without luck!
Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law. If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely.
Loyalty it is a pestilential thing in crime. Again and again it obscures the truth.
It’s a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all.
In war you do not exercise the right of private judgement. That is what is so dangerous. Once a man is imbued with the idea that he knows who ought to be allowed to live and who ought not – then he is halfway to becoming the most dangerous killer there is – the arrogant criminal who kills not for profit – but for an idea. He has usurped the functions of le bon Dieu.
If it is necessary for a criminal to be a consummate actress, then by all means assume her to be one.
