Murder comes in two familiar forms. Both are heinous and most unlikely to gather any sympathy for the actual act itself from anyone, whatever the circumstances or the reasons. Whether as a crime of passion with high emotions or a cold dispassionate plot to take life in order to gain in some way, the act strikes us all as somehow inhuman. Beneath us as civilised beings. But however we cloak our animal instincts the need to remove a human being and gain relief from abuse or gain from money, the term is just the same – MURDER.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, W W Jacobs and many others bring their literary heft to bear in as calculating a way as any killer could.

1 - Short Stories About Murder - An Introduction

2 - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - Part 1 by Edgar Allan Poe

3 - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - Part 2 by Edgar Allan Poe

4 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson

5 - The Vendetta by Guy de Maupassant

6 - The Story of B 24 by Arthur Conan Doyle

7 - A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

8 - The Trial for Murder by Charles Dickens

9 - The Caballero's Way by O. Henry

10 - Better Dead by J. M. Barrie

11 - The Easter Egg by Saki

12 - Mother Sauvage (La Mere Sauvage) by Guy de Maupassant

13 - The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

14 - Cheating The Gallows by Israel Zangwill

15 - In A Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

16 - August Heat by W. F. Harvey

17 - Brothers by Sherwood Anderson

18 - The Green Light by Barry Pain

19 - The Hand by Guy de Maupassant

20 - The Cask of Amontillardo by Edgar Allan Poe

21 - A Pastoral Horror by Arthur Conan Doyle

22 - In The Dark by Edith Nesbit

23 - Lost Hearts by M. R. James

24 - Ben Pitcher's Elly by Mary E. Mann

25 - The Hounds of Fate by Saki

26 - Claude Gueux by Victor Hugo

27 - The Repairer of Reputations - Part 1 by Robert W. Chambers

28 - The Repairer of Reputations - Part 2 by Robert W. Chambers

29 - The Limping Ghost by Frederick Cowles

30 - The Story of the Green House, Wallington by Allen Upward

31 - The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

32 - Talma Gordon by Pauline E. Hopkins

33 - The Moonlit Road by Ambrose Bierce

34 - The Murderer by Mikhail Bulgakov

35 - For the Blood is the Life by F. Marion Crawford

36 - A Twin Identity by Edith Stewart Drewery

37 - The Octoroon's Revenge by Ruth D. Todd

38 - An Expiation by Arabella Kenealy

39 - God Sees The Truth But Waits by Leo Tolstoy

40 - The Kit Bag by Algernon Blackwood

41 - The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller by Gustave Flaubert

42 - The Murder in an Omnibus by Harold Begbie

43 - Lord Arthur Savile's Crime - Part 1 by Oscar Wilde

44 - Lord Arthur Savile's Crime - Part 2 by Oscar Wilde

45 - The Absence of Mr Glass by G. K. Chesterton

46 - The Middle Toe of the Right Foot by Ambrose Bierce

47 - The Lie by Leonid Andreyev

48 - The Three Sisters by W. W. Jacobs

49 - Mateo Falcone by Prosper Merimee