...This work, along with The Secret Player, were the two largest paintings Magritte had completed to date, leading some scholars to speculate that they are pendants. The subject is a crime scene: a female corpse with blood around the mouth lies on a red chaise lounge in a room while a man listens to a phonograph. Two bowler-hatted men, one with a cudgel and the other with a net, flank the doorway to the room while three men appear outside a window and peer over a balcony railing.... [https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2013/11/21/magrittes-the-menaced-assassin-1927-treatment-and-research-2/] Magritte had a hankering for crime, and he even had a favorite (fictional) murderer. Almost a century before Michael C. Hall became Dexter, Fantômas was the original pop culture serial killer who was a star in both print and on the big screen. Magritte adapted a scene from the 1913 Fantômas flick... [http://blog.sartle.com/post/174683023661/new-at-sartlecom-the-menaced-assassin-by-ren%C3%A9]