Payment Deferred

Payment Deferred is an unusual crime novel in the sense that the murder happens at the outset, and there’s no mystery as to who did it or why. Rather, taking cues from “The Telltale Heart”, the novel focuses on the state of mind of a guilty criminal. Marble’s increasingly elaborate attempts to keep his crime secret from both his family and the authorities become a study of the damage that guilt can do to a person’s psyche. Marble soon finds himself wealthy beyond necessity, but his fixation on his money problems is quickly replaced by an all-consuming obsession over this much, much darker problem.

This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.