“The story of the perfect crime, I said earlier, is the story of the perfect crime’s failure; let me now add that, normally, that failure doesn’t affect the story’s form. On the contrary, it is precisely the crime’s failure that allows the story form to display the superiority of its own contrivance. The character whose mandate is to make a mistake is caught in a duel with the author whose equally mandated prescience is always exploiting the mistake
to successful narrative effect. In this structurally unequal contest, the protagonist’s not quite-perfect crime proves the foil for the author’s infallible perfect-crime story.”

From Issue #121 (available here)