"When He Told the Police Who I Was, They Hit Me Over the Head with a Police Club Till I Was Quiet and Then Gave Me Some Coffee"

IT'S WIDELY ACCEPTED that humor is a highly subjective thing, so if you read the following sketches by Stephen Leacock and find them funny, you have no one to blame but him:

(1) "The Criminal Face."
By Stephen Leacock (1869-1944).
Collected in The Iron Man & The Tin Woman: A Book of Little Sketches of To-Day and To-Morrow (1929).
Short short story (9 pages).
Online at Faded Page (HERE).

   "The brachiocephalic index of nearly every one of them was of a kind to alarm the police force, while the facial angle of those who had the hardi-hood to show it justified immediate arrest."

Biometric analysis can certainly be useful—if it's done by people with no preconceptions . . .

~ ~ ~

(2) "Confessions of a Super-Extra-Criminal."

By Stephen Leacock (1869-1944).
Collected in The Iron Man & The Tin Woman: A Book of Little Sketches of To-Day and To-Morrow (1929).
Short story (10 pages).
Online at Faded Page (HERE).

   "However, nothing would do me but loafing around with a loose crowd of boys and talking about this man or that who’d made a clean-up as a plumber or garage man or a dry cleaning explosives expert, and never got caught."

He really shoulda listened to his muddah . . .

~ ~ ~

(3) "A Midsummer Detective Mystery."
By Stephen Leacock (1869-1944).
Collected in The Iron Man & The Tin Woman: A Book of Little Sketches of To-Day and To-Morrow (1929).
Short story (10 pages).
Online at Faded Page (HERE).

   "Oh, yes, sir. What would you like, sir? We could give you a cold chicken, a made-up salad, sir, with a cold meat pie, if you care for it."

Ah, those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, when even murder must take a backseat to excellent brook trout . . .

~ ~ ~

(4) "Living with Murder."
By Stephen Leacock (1869-1944).
Collected in Last Leaves (1945).
Short short story (5 pages).
Online at Faded Page (HERE).

   "I am a great reader of detective fiction. That is, I have been up to now, but I see I shall have to give it up."

If you're unwilling to chance contracting a case of full-blown paranoia, then by all means follow our narrator's example . . .

Pretend it says 7:01 . . . and ¼.

Resources:
- This week marks our latest—and it saddens us to say it—possibly last encounter with Stephen Leacock, relative to crime fiction anyway; see (HERE) for last week's contact with him.
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