"He Decided That If He Were Committing Suicide, He Would Try To Make Even a Gas-oven As Comfortable As Possible"

"Death in the Kitchen."
By Milward Kennedy (Milward Kennedy Burge, 1894-1968).
First appearance: The Manchester Guardian, 1930 (FictionMags).
Reprinted in The Second Omnibus of Crime (1932), Great Crime Stories (1936), Fifty Masterpieces of Mystery (1937), and Lilliput, July 1937.
Short short short story (4 pages).
Online at UNZ (HERE).

Sorry, Edgar, they misspelled your name—again.

"That gas-oven, sir, that looks like suicide, doesn't it, sir?"

Here's the thing about the perfect crime, see: It's got to be perfect, or it'll just turn into a sloppy mess . . .

The characters:
~ The police sergeant:
  "I can understand how it is he's forgotten every blamed thing about what happened 
last night, but—Hallo, sir, what's up?"
~ Rupert Morrison:
  "The important thing was to be thorough. He had no alibi, and knew that it would be 
folly to fake one."
~ George Manning:
  "George Manning on the other hand had grown foolish, for he had not troubled to 
discover whether his victim had changed."

Resources:
- For more about Milward Kennedy see Wikipedia (HERE) and the GAD Wiki (HERE).

- You can read Sammi Cox's review of our story (HERE), but watch out for SPOILERS.

The bottom line: “Mike wished Mr. Burden had chosen another time to be murdered. He was beginning to see that the hour of dressing for dinner might have been expressly designed for persons who need a quiet spell for the commission of crime.” 
― Eilís Dillon