e linked with the chain of evidence. To attempt to explain
everything is always the mark of the tyro. The fog and Mrs. Drabdump's
oversleeping herself were mere accidents. There are always these
irrelevant accompaniments, and the true scientist allows for this
element of (so to speak) chemically unrelated detail. Even I never
counted on the unfortunate series of accidental phenomena which have led
to Mortlake's implication in a network of suspicion. On the other hand,
the fact that my servant Jane, who usually goes about ten, left a few
minutes earlier on the night of December 3d, so that she didn't know of
Constant's visit, was a relevant accident. In fact, just as the art of
the artist or the editor consists largely in knowing what to leave out,
so does the art of the scientific detector of crime consist in knowing
what details to ignore. In short, to explain everything is to explain
too much. And too much is worse than too little. To return to my
experiment. My success exceeded my wildest dreams. None had an inkling
of the truth. The insolubility of the Big Bow Mystery teased the acutest
minds in Europe and the civilized world. That a man could have been
murdered in a thoroughly inaccessible room savored of the ages of magic.
The redoubtable Wimp, who had been blazoned as my successor, fell back
on the theory of suicide. The mystery would have slept till my death,
but--I fear--for my own ingenuity. I tried to stand outside myself, and
to look at the crime with the eyes of another, or of my old self. I
found the work of art so perfect as to leave only one sublimely simple
solution. The very terms of the problem were so inconceivable that, had
I not been the murderer, I should have suspected myself, in conjunction
of course with Mrs. Drabdump. The first persons to enter the room would
have seemed to me guilty. I wrote at once (in a disguised hand and over
the signature of 'One Who Looks Through His Own Spectacles') to the
'Pell Mell Press' to suggest this. By associating myself thus with Mrs.
Drabdump I made it difficult for people to dissociate the two who
entered the room together. To dash a half-truth in the world's eyes is
the surest way of blinding it altogether. This letter of mine I
contradicted myself (in my own name) the next day, and in the course of
the long letter which I was tempted to write I adduced fresh evidence
against the theory of suicide. I was disgusted with the open verdict,
and wanted men to be up