How to Commit a Murder

HOW TO COMMIT A MURDER “What sort of third degree do they give you for murder?” “Listen, mister,” said Danny, and began. He told me how one went about covering one’s tracks after committing a murder, then branched out into a description of the underworld and its professions. All unconsciously he gave me the underworld’s point of view, which is his own―the underworld’s code of ethics, its needs, and its safeguards against attack. He made me realize for the first time that there existed in our midst a people as foreign to our own society as any group of raw immigrants―a group that thought differently, lived differently, and reacted differently to social standards and customs. Prompted occasionally by a question he talked for four and a half solid hours―from two-thirty to seven―painting a picture of the underworld which was fascinating in its color and intimacy. “Will you put all that into a book?” I asked finally. “Sure I will. Anything you say. And not a thing I can’t prove.” And that is the way How to Commit a Murder was conceived.

Danny Ahearn was born Daniel Francis A‘Hearn on September 8, 1901, the oldest of nine children. In 1926 he was wounded in a gun battle in Brooklyn where two men were killed. In 1934 he received 2 ½ years in New York’s notorious Sing Sing Prison for fraud―his second term there also for fraud came in 1937. Though not a writer of any sort―he was, in fact, a career criminal at this time―he wrote How to Commit Murder in 1930. Later on he would be a reporter for The Daily Worker and several newspapers, as well as script writer for Warner Brothers in Hollywood in 1932-33. At 45 years of age, he was sentenced to 20 years to life for robbery. Ahearn died in Manhattan on November 3, 1960.