Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime is a darkly comic tale by Oscar Wilde, first published in 1887 and later collected in 1891.

On the eve of marriage, a fashionable gentleman hears a palm reader’s prediction that he will commit murder. Determined to preserve his future happiness, he decides to fulfill the prophecy on his own terms, plotting a tidy, victimless solution that spirals into a farce of misguided schemes and near-misses.

As polite dinners and drawing-room visits give way to poison capsules, explosive devices, and elaborate alibis, the story turns into a satire of Victorian respectability. Wilde exposes how obsession with destiny and propriety can warp reason—and how good intentions, cloaked in etiquette, may hide absurdity.

With crisp irony and a twist worthy of a stage curtain, the novella becomes a witty meditation on fate versus free will and the comic hazards of moral certainty, proving that the greatest crimes may be those committed in the name of keeping one’s life perfectly in order.

"It was Lady Windermere’s last reception before Easter, and Bentinck House was even more crowded than usual. Six Cabinet Ministers had come on from the Speaker’s Levée in their stars and ribands, all the pretty women wore their smartest dresses, and at the end of the picture-gallery stood the Princess Sophia of Carlsrühe, a heavy Tartar-looking lady, with tiny black eyes and wonderful emeralds, talking bad French at the top of her voice, and laughing immoderately at everything that was said to her."