"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:

"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 hardihood to show it justified immediate arrest."

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

~ ~ ~

"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 . . .

~ ~ ~

"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 . . .

~ ~ ~

"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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