From Agatha Christie to Gillian Flynn, readers love an untraceable method or a villain who wins. Author Peter Swanson says there are eight examples of the perfect murder

Is there such a thing as a perfect murder? In real life, the answer is probably yes, though how would we know about it? Perfection demands that the murder be unsolvable, maybe even unrecorded – a victim disappearing off the face of the earth, a body never found, a killer never caught. In our world of forensic science and DNA evidence, the perfect murder must be as rare as a reclusive celebrity.

But we have fiction, and this is where we find an abundance of perfect murder attempts. I say attempts because the allure of most detective fiction hinges on the existence of an investigator – a Holmes, a Poirot, a Lisbeth Salander – who is smarter than the smartest of criminals. The perfect murder – like a perfect sonnet or a perfect roast chicken – is an ideal that can be approached but never entirely reached. Detectives, and storytelling tradition, get in the way.

When I set out to write a book in which a bookseller publishes a blog about his favourite fictional murders, only to find out that someone else is using the list as a blueprint for real crimes, I knew that part of the process of writing was going to be a whole lot of reading. So I set out to find a definitive list of perfect crimes and came up with a final tally of eight (or rather, my narrator Malcolm Kershaw did).

Christie's use of thallium as a fatal poison in The Pale Horse caused a brief uptick in the toxin’s presence in real-life crime