ingenious writer John Collier wrote several stories in the perfect-crime sub genre. One of them is "De Mortuis," in which the readers knows the protagonist is going to get away with murdering his wife because he already has an air-tight alibi. In Collier's story "Back for Christmas," a man murders his wife and buries her in the basement, but he is caught because he finds out from a letter he receives in America that his wife had previously ordered an English firm to do some digging in the cellar to make a wine bin as a surprise present for her husband.

Many of the Sherlock Holmes stories are perfect crime stories in which the perpetrator is thwarted by the great detective. Two of these which are frequently assigned as reading in English classes are "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and "The Red-Headed League." In the latter story the criminals do not commit murder but intend to loot a bank of a huge fortune in gold coins. The author of these stories freely acknowledged his indebtedness to the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe, who was probably the originator of perfect crime stories with "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Black Cat."

The primary genre that the story would fit into is crime fiction. Mary commits the murder of her husband and the ensuing conflict and plot revolve around the detectives trying to figure out the murder and Mary trying to cover it up. However, the story is humorous as well. Since the humor comes from the tragic circumstances, though, it wouldn't fall exactly into the genre of a comedy, but the sub-genre of a "black comedy" or "black humor."

Black humor refers to a comedy that looks at tragic events and human suffering as ridiculous and random, rather than merely sad. The irony of the detectives eating the leg of lamb that was used as the murder weapon is funny because of its randomness, particularly when they comment that the murder weapon must be "under [their] noses."