Hugh Bennett, young reporter on a local paper, witnessed a terrible crime – a group of boys stabbed a man to death on Guy Fawkes' night, right in front of the fire on the village green. But as Bennett attempts to write the story for his paper, doubts begin to creep in about what he had actually seen, and he finds himself facing an immense moral dilemma. On first publication, The 'Progress of a Crime' was seen as setting new standards in crime fiction.