_The Nature of a Crime_ BY JOSEPH CONRAD AND FORD MADOX FORD (F. M. HUEFFER) [Illustration] GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1924 COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. _First Edition_ _The Nature of a Crime_ BOOKS BY JOSEPH CONRAD ALMAYER’S FOLLY AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS” TALES OF UNREST LORD JIM: A ROMANCE YOUTH: A NARRATIVE TYPHOON FALK, AND OTHER STORIES NOSTROMO: A TALE OF THE SEABOARD THE MIRROR OF THE SEA THE SECRET AGENT A SET OF SIX UNDER WESTERN EYES A PERSONAL RECORD ’TWIXT LAND AND SEA CHANCE WITHIN THE TIDES VICTORY THE SHADOW-LINE THE ARROW OF GOLD THE RESCUE NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS THE ROVER _With Ford Madox Ford_ (_Hueffer_) ROMANCE: A NOVEL THE INHERITORS: AN EXTRAVAGANT STORY THE NATURE OF A CRIME PREFACES I For years my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has been very vague, almost impalpable, like fleeting visits from a ghost. If I ever thought of it, and I must confess that I can hardly remember ever doing it on purpose till it was brought definitely to my notice by my Collaborator, I always regarded it as something in the nature of a fragment. I was surprised and even shocked to discover that it was rounded. But I need not have been. Rounded as it is in form, using the word form in its simplest sense--printed form--it remains yet a fragment from its very nature and also from necessity. It could never have become anything else. And even as a fragment it is but a fragment of something else that might have been--of a mere intention. But, as it stands, what impresses me most is the amount this fragment contains of the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time of its origin, the time when the _English Review_ was founded. It emerges from the depths of a past as distant from us now as the square-skirted, long frock-coats in which unscrupulous, cultivated, high-minded _jouisseurs_ like ours here attended to their strange business activities and cultivated the little blue flower of sentiment. No doubt our man was conceived for purposes of irony; but our conception of him, I fear, is too fantastic. Yet the most fantastic thing of all, it seems to me, is that we two who had so often discussed soberly the limits and methods of literary composition should have believed for a moment that a piece of work in the nature of an analytical confession (produced _in articulo mortis_ as it were) could have been developed and achieved in collaboration!