After spending half a lifetime collecting the detective short story, your Editor has come to the conclusion that there are fifty key books in the field. By key books I mean those books which are outstanding for any of three reasons: sheer quality of contents, historical significance and/or rarity of first edition.

Your Editor has gone further in his bibliographic analysis and divided the fifty books into seven “periods” Chronologically these major periods could be named: Pre-Poe; Poe and Pre-Doyle; Doyle Era; 20th Century, First Decade; 20th Century, Second Decade; 20th Century, Moderns; and 20th Century, Contemporaries. The last group takes in the fourth decade to date — from 1930 to the present.

The books in this Contemporary Period have not, of course, had the opportunity to withstand the acid test of time. But there can be no doubt that one of them — Carter Dickson’s [John Dickson Carps] THE DEPARTMENT OF QUEER COMPLAINTS, published in 1940 — will pass every test and remain one of the important books of modern detective short stories. The volume contains eleven tales of which the first seven concern Colonel March, head of the Scotland Yard Department whose curious name serves as the tide of the book.

All of which is a terse and somewhat academic preamble to a startling announcement — a discovery of epic importance to the American fan. Yes, you may indeed hold your breath — for did you know that there are two Colonel March short stories which were not included in Mr. Carr’s book? These two stories, believe it or not, have never been published in the United States!

We bring one of them to you now — “William Wilson’s Racket” — and we have scheduled the second for an early issue.

In “William Wilson’s Racket,” two great series of detective-mystery stories seem to blend and intermingle. For a fleeting moment Mr. Carr’s THE DEPARTMENT OF QUEER COMPLAINTS and Mr. Chesterton’s the CLUB OF QUEER TRADES seem to meet on the Strand of Detection Town, shake hands, clap each other on the shoulder, chuckle loud enough to be heard all the way to America, and then, arm in arm, strut off together. Could a happier twosome be imagined in all the annals of detective literature?

Colonel March, of the Department of Queer Complaints, has entertained many an odd sort of visitor in his office at New Scotland Yard. But it is seldom that he entertains a Visitor so socially distinguished as Lady Patricia Mortlake, only daughter of the Earl of Cray.

She burst in like a whirlwind, that pleasant, spring morning two or three years ago. She almost snorted through her aristocratic nose. And this despite the fact that Lady Patricia was normally one of those languid ladies, with a bored blank eye and a sullen under-lip, who would have made an ideal heroine for Mr. Coward.

“She refuses to fill up an official form, sir,” Colonel March was told. “And she’s got a blasted Pekingese with her. But she showed me a note from the Commissioner himself—”

“Send her up,” said Colonel March. Lady Patricia subsided into a chair in a whirl and flop of furs, nursing the Pekingese. As a famous beauty, she perhaps photographed better than she looked. It was a highly enamelled sort of beauty, and her jaw looked as hard as porcelain.

She found herself facing a large, amiable man (weight seventeen stone) with a speckled face, a bland eye, and a cropped moustache. He was teetering before the fire, smoking a short pipe; and Inspector Roberts stood by with a notebook.

“I want you to find him,” Lady Patricia said crisply.

“Find him?” repeated Colonel March. “Find whom?”

“Frankie, of course,” said Lady Patricia, with some impatience. “My fiancé. Surely you’ve heard of him?”

Light came to Colonel March. Any newspaper-reader will remember the political reputation which was being made at that time by the Right Hon. Francis Hale, youngest of the Cabinet Ministers. Francis Hale was young. He was rich. He was intelligent. He had a great future ahead of him.

Anything that could be said against him was, so to speak, to his credit. Francis Hale always did the correct thing, even to becoming engaged to the impoverished daughter of an impoverished peer. He was a teetotaller, a non-smoker, and a man of almost painfully strait-laced life. Colonel March privately considered him a good deal of a stuffed shirt.

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Lady Patricia coolly, “I’m finished with him. We’ve done everything for that man. Everything! The right people, the right places, the right contacts. And I do hope I’m broadminded. But when he turned up to make a speech at that Corporation banquet, tight as a tick and practically blind to the world—!”

Now it has been stated before that nothing ever surprised Colonel March. This, however, came close to it.

“And,” continued Lady Patricia, flirting her furs, “when it comes to that red-haired hussy — actually carrying on with her in public — well, really!”

Colonel March coughed.

In fact, he covered his happy smile only just in time. To any normal human being there is something heartening, something wholly satisfying, about seeing any stuffed shirt go on the razzle-dazzle. The colonel was no exception to this rule. But he caught sight of her eye, and was silent. Lady Patricia Mortlake was no fool. Also, it struck him that she had rather a mean eye and jaw.

“I dare say you think this is all very funny?” she inquired.

“Not at all.”

“And I dare say,” she continued, opening her veiled eyes and cuddling the dog with dangerous quietness, “you wonder why this concerns the police?”

“Since you mention it—”

“But it would interest the police, I hope, to hear that Frankie has disappeared? Throwing his whole department into confusion at a critical time; to say nothing of the inconvenience to my parents and me? It would interest you to hear that he vanished out of that horrible office in Piccadilly, where heaven knows what has been happening?”

Colonel March regarded her grimly.

“Go on,” he invited.

“He’s been acting queerly,” said Lady Patricia, “for over a. month. Ever since he first saw this.”

From under her coat she took out a copy of a famous literary weekly, of the conservative and highbrow order, and unfolded it. She turned to the advertisements. With the tip of a scarlet finger-nail she indicated one advertisement printed in bold black type. It said simply:

William and Wilhelmina Wilson, 250A, Piccadilly. Nothing more.

“It’s been appearing in only the best papers,” the girl insisted. “And every time Frankie sees it, he seems to go off his head.”

Colonel March frowned.

“What,” he asked, “is the business of William and Wilhelmina Wilson?”

“That’s just it! I don’t know.”

“But if they’re in a legitimate business, they must be listed?”

“Well, they’re not.” Her upper lip lifted defiantly. “I know, because we’ve had a private detective after Frankie. The detective says they sell vacuum cleaners.”

Though Inspector Roberts had ceased in despair to take notes, Colonel March betrayed only an expression of refreshed interest. He continued to teeter before the fire, and puff at his short pipe.

“It started,” she went on, “one afternoon when I was waiting for him in the car outside the House of Commons. He stayed behind on the steps, talking interminably to that dreadful Labour man What’s-his-name. He simply wouldn’t come on, no matter how many gestures I made. When he did condescend to join me, he looked at me in a queer way, and asked the chauffeur to stop at the nearest newsagents. There he got out and bought a copy of that paper.”

She pointed.

“I couldn’t tell what he was looking at. But I knew there was something wrong with him. I asked him if he couldn’t take any interest in what I was doing for him. Even in the concert of chamber music I’d arranged for that night, where Julio’s Trio was to render selections from the modern masters. And he said—”

“Yes?” prompted Colonel March.

“He said ‘Damn and blast the modern masters.’ It was too utterly tiresome, when Julio is all the rage this season.”

“Indeed?”

“Then I caught him cutting out that advertisement from the paper. That wouldn’t have mattered, and I forgot all about it. But only a week ago I caught him cutting it out again, this time out of The Times. So,” explained Lady Patricia, “I decided to find out who this ‘William and Wilhelmina Wilson’ really were. I paid them a visit yesterday.”

Her eyes took on a shrewd, speculative look.

“Whoever they are,” she said thoughtfully, “they’ve got pots of money. I expected to find the office some dreadful little place: you know. But it wasn’t. My dear man, it’s in a big new block of offices opposite the Green Park. So business-like: that’s what I can’t understand. You go up in a lift, and there’s a big marble corridor and a ground-glass door with ‘William and Wilhelmina Wilson’ on it.”

Her expression was now one of active fury, which she tried to conceal. As though remembering to be maternal, she lifted the Pekingese, shook it in the air, and cooed to it with pouted lips. The dog sneezed the hair out of its eyes, and looked bored.

“I opened the door,” she said, “and there was a big waiting-room. Empty. Some rather good bronzes and etchings, too. I called out. I rapped on the table. But nobody answered. Just when I was wondering what to do, Flopit here... izzums, precious!... Flopit found another door, and began to bark.”

She drew a deep breath.

“I opened that door. It was a big office, like a secretary’s office. In the middle was a big flat-topped desk, with a swivel-chair behind it. In the chair sat Frankie, my Frankie. And on his lap, with her arms round his neck, sat a horrible red-haired hussy, about nineteen years old.”

This time it was a near thing.

Colonel March’s cough was so prolonged and strangled that a blind man would have noticed something wrong. Lady Patricia’s hard eye noted it, and hated it. But she had to speak now.

“Well, really! I mean to say! I hope I’m broad-minded, but—! My dear man, I was boiling; positively boiling. I didn’t say anything. I just picked up Flopit by his precious neck, and walked out, and slammed the door. I walked across the waiting-room, and out into the hall.

“But I didn’t go any farther. After all, I have Frankie’s good at heart. And Frankie is awfully rich, and it didn’t seem right that she should get his money, whereas I... I mean, when you’ve worked and slaved for a man, as I’ve worked and slaved for Frankie... well, it’s rather thick.

“I waited in front of the door. Finally, I decided to go back and have it out with them. Back I marched into the waiting-room; and there I met somebody I hadn’t seen before. A well-dressed elderly man. Rather distinguished-looking: bald except for white hair at the back of his head, curling down nearly to his collar.

“He said, ‘Yes, madam?’

“I said, ‘Who are you?’

“He said, ‘I am William Wilson. Have you an appointment?’

“I just froze him. I asked to see Mr. Hale. He had the nerve to raise his eyebrows and say that Frankie wasn’t there: that he had never heard of any Mr. Hale and didn’t know what I was talking about. I said I also supposed he didn’t know anything about a red-haired girl either? He looked surprised and said he imagined I must mean Miss Wilhelmina Wilson, his niece and secretary — think of it! — but he still knew of no Mr. Hale.

“Well, really, that was too much! I just walked past him and opened the door to the office where I’d seen Frankie before. Frankie wasn’t there; but the red-haired girl was. She was standing in front of another little door, which led to a kind of cloakroom, and looking disgustingly guilty. I simply pushed her out of the way, and looked in. But...”

Lady Patricia Mortlake gulped.

“Yes?” prompted Colonel March.

“Frankie wasn’t there,” she said.

“He wasn’t in the cloakroom?”

“He wasn’t anywhere,” returned the girl, lifting her shoulders. “There was only one other room, a big private office overlooking Piccadilly on the fourth floor. He wasn’t hiding anywhere, because I looked. And there’s no way out of any of the offices except through the door to the main corridor, where I’d been standing. Frankie wasn’t there. But his clothes were.”

“What?” demanded Colonel March.

“His clothes. The suit he’d been wearing: with his watch, and notecase, and papers, and key-ring, and the fountain-pen I gave him for his birthday. They were hanging up in a locker in the cloakroom. Clothes, but no Frankie. And he hasn’t been seen since. Now do you wonder why I’m here?”

Hitherto Colonel March had been listening with an indulgent air. Now his sandy eyebrows drew together.

“Let me understand this,” he said in a sharp and rather sinister voice. “You mean he literally disappeared?”

“Yes!”

“He couldn’t, for instance, have slipped out while you were examining the various offices?”

“Without his clothes?” asked Patricia unanswerably.

There was a silence.

“Frankie!” she almost wailed. “Of all people, Frankie! Of course I suppose he could have sneaked out. For that matter, he could have climbed out of a window and down the face of the building into Piccadilly. But in his underwear? Frankie?”

“Suppose he had another suit of clothes there?”

“Why?” asked Patricia, again unanswerably.

It is not often that Colonel March finds himself stumped, definitely left flat and up against it. This appeared to be one of the times.

“And what have you done since?”

“What could I do? He’s not at his flat here, or at his place in the country. Not one of his friends, including his private secretary, seems to know where he is. I even tackled that dreadful Labour man he seems to have been so thick with recently; and I thought for a second he was going to burst out laughing. But even he swore he didn’t know where Frankie was.”

“H’m,” said Colonel March.

“We can’t make this public, you see. That would be dreadful. And so you’re our last hope. Haven’t you got any theory?”

“Oh, theories!” said Colonel March, waving a big arm irritably. “I can think of half a dozen theories. But they don’t explain the main difficulty. Suppose any lurid theory you like. Suppose the mysterious William and Wilhelmina Wilson have murdered him and hidden his body. Suppose there is a sinister political conspiracy against him. Suppose Francis Hale has disguised himself and is masquerading as the distinguished-looking old gentleman with the white hair...”

Patricia sat up straight.

“A supposition,” said the colonel grimly, “about as likely as any idea that he went walking about the streets in his underwear. But I repeat: suppose anything you like! It still won’t explain what puzzles me most.”

“Which is?”

“The profession of William and Wilhelmina Wilson,” answered Colonel March. “Any ideas, Roberts?”

Inspector Roberts, shutting up his notebook, ruminated on this.

“Well, sir—” he began hesitantly.

“Yes, yes; go on!”

“Well, sir, the point seems to be this. Either Mr. Hale disappeared of his own free will, or else he didn’t. It looks to me as though he didn’t.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“The personal effects,” said Roberts. “The watch and the notecase and the rest of it. If you were going to do a bunk somewhere, wouldn’t those be the very things you’d take with you? It isn’t as though he were trying to stage a fake suicide, or anything like that. One minute he’s comfortably in that office, with the young lady in his lap” — Roberts coughed, and looked swiftly away from their guest — “and the next he’s gone. That’s the part I don’t like.”

Colonel March grunted.

“And yet,” pursued Roberts, “if that pair have managed to make away with him, I can’t for the life of me see how or why. It’s like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.”

He broke off, for a curious expression crossed Colonel March’s face: it was as though he had been hit across the back of the head with a club.

“Good lord!” he muttered, in a hollow voice like a ghost. “I wonder if that could be it?”

“If it could be what?” demanded Lady Patricia.

“The name,” argued Colonel March, half to himself, “might be a coincidence. On the other hand, it might be most infernally apt: the seal of Wilson.” He turned to Lady Patricia. “Tell me. Can Francis Hale hold his liquor?”

She stared back at him.

“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about!”

“Yes, you do.” The colonel was irritable. “You told me a while ago that Hale, in one of his fits of being fed up — ahem! — in one of his more erratic moments, got tight at a Corporation banquet. What did he drink?”

His visitor set her jaw.

“Everything,” she said. “Beginning with cocktails and going all the way through to brandy. He simply sloshed it down. My father was frantic.”

“And how did it affect him? Hale, I mean?”

“They said he never made a better speech. He mixed up the pages in reading it; and, to anybody who really knew what the speech was about, it sounded horrible. But nobody noticed anything. They even seemed to like it: which was a mercy, because—”

Colonel March rubbed his hands together. He was utterly pleased and absorbed, with a smile which threatened to dislodge the pipe from his mouth. Then he went over and patted his guest on the shoulder.

“Go home,” he said. “Go home, take an aspirin, and stop worrying. Inspector Roberts and I are going to call on the Wilsons. I have every reason to believe I see a way out of the difficulty. In fact, I think I can promise it, now that I am able to guess—”

“Guess what?” demanded Lady Patricia, lifting the dog and shaking it at him.

“The racket of William Wilson,” said Colonel March.

A smooth-slipping lift took them up to the fourth floor of number 250A Piccadilly. A holy calm, as of a temple, pervaded these marble premises. The names William and Wilhelmina Wilson were printed on the ground-glass door in black lettering as discreet as a visiting-card. Motioning Inspector Roberts to precede him, Colonel March opened the door.

The waiting-room inside was softly lighted and carpeted. Magazines were scattered on a centre table for the convenience of those who waited; the point which racked Inspector Roberts’s wits was what in blazes they were supposed to be waiting for. And behind the reception-desk at the far end sat a small, sleek, trim young lady with red hair. She was glancing through a copy of a fashionable weekly.

“Miss Wilson?” said Colonel March.

“Yes?” said Miss Wilson with polite briskness.

“I should like to see your uncle.”

Colonel March laid his official card on the desk.

For a few seconds Miss Wilson looked at it gravely, and then raised her head. If the notoriously frigid Francis Hale had fallen for Miss Wilson, Inspector Roberts for one did not blame him; she had blue eyes of a deceptive demureness, and a mouth of the sort called generous.

But if Roberts expected to see any sign of guilt or even nervousness, he was disappointed. What flashed across her face was a smile of almost unholy glee, which she instantly corrected.

“My uncle has been rather expecting you,” she admitted. “Will you walk into our parlour?”

She led them through the secretary’s office — with its famous desk and swivel-chair — to a third office overlooking Piccadilly. Here, behind another flat-topped desk, sat a stout old gentleman with the manners of a cardinal. His glossy bald head was set off by a fringe of white hair which curved down to the back of his collar. He wore pince-nez, through which he was studying a pile of large photographs. He welcomed his visitors courteously.

“As my niece says,” he told them, “I have been rather expecting you.” His mouth tightened. “Please sit down. You had better remain too, Wilhelmina, my dear.”

“In that case,” said Colonel March, “I’ll come straight to the point. Of course, your name isn’t really Wilson?”

Mr. Wilson looked pained.

“Naturally not. It is a trade name. A” — he waved his hand — “a flight of poetic fancy, if you like.”

“Yes,” said Colonel March. “That’s what I thought, as soon as I guessed what your racket was.”

Now Mr. Wilson seemed more than pained; he seemed hurt.

“Racket!” he protested. “My dear sir! No, no, no, no! That is too much. Profession, if you like. Business, if you insist. Yes: say a business, and on a large scale. After all, I am a modern man who has simply seen a modern need for those who can afford it. I supply that need. And there you are.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll give you away?”

Mr. Wilson permitted himself a slight smile.

“Hardly. If you were to look in there” — he indicated a row of filing-cases along one wall — “and see the names of some of my more illustrious clients, I hardly think you would talk of exposure. There is one client, for instance... but we must not be indiscreet.” He returned to an old grievance. “Profession, yes. Business, yes. But racket? Really, now! On the contrary, I flatter myself that I am something of a public benefactor.”

Inspector Roberts was a patient man. As Colonel March’s assistant, he had to be. But there are limits to the human curiosity of even the best-trained subordinate.

“Sir,” he suddenly cried, “I can’t stand any more of this. Before I go completely off my chump, will you tell me what this is all about? What’s going on here? What is the fellow’s racket? And why should he call himself Wilson?”

All three of them looked at him— Mr. Wilson with a reproving cluck of the tongue, Miss Wilson with a smile, and Colonel March with blandness.

“He calls himself William Wilson,” replied Colonel March, “after the story of the same name. That story was written by Edgar Allan Poe, as you so helpfully suggested. You don’t remember the story?”

“No, sir, I can’t say I do.”

“William Wilson,” said Colonel March, “met himself.”

Roberts blinked.

“Met himself?”

“He met his own image,” explained Colonel March, settling back comfortably. “I rather admire Mr. Wilson here. He is the proprietor of a unique Agency. He provides doubles for eminent men and women in their unimportant public appearances, so that the real men can stop at home and get on with their work.”

Mr. Wilson leaned across the desk and spoke earnestly.

“You would be surprised,” he said, “at the call there is for our services. Consider the life of a public man I While he should be at work, custom demands that he make endless public appearances, none of them in the least an iota of good. He makes interminable tours of inspection; he lays corner-stones; he addresses mothers’ meetings. Few if any of the people he meets have ever seen him before, or will ever see him again. And a good double—!”

Mr. Wilson drew a deep breath, rather sadly.

“I fear the idea is not mine,” he went on. “It was tried out a few years ago by a very eminent American. He simply could not stand all the handshaking.”

Wilhelmina Wilson intervened loyally.

“But you were the only one who saw its commercial possibilities,” she cried, and sat down on the edge of his desk as though to defend him. She somewhat spoiled the effect of this by winking at Colonel March.

“Thank you, my dear,” said Mr. Wilson. He turned back to his guests.

“Our fees, of course, are considerable,” he added apologetically. “But you have no idea of the difficulties. Once I had to send all the way to South Africa to get a passable double for... well, well, again we mustn’t be indiscreet!” He closed his eyes and smiled happily. “Then there is the question of elocution, voice-training, and so on. On the whole, I am proud of my handiwork. The next time you go to a cinema and see a newsreel, watch very closely! You may see something that will surprise you.”

Inspector Roberts was getting his breath back.

“Then Mr. Hale—” he began.

“Ah, yes,” murmured the proprietor of the Agency, brushing his dry palms together and frowning at Colonel March. “Mr. Hale! I imagine you saw a discrepancy when Mr. Hale’s double, a promising young actor named Gabriel Fisk, got drunk at that banquet?”

“A discrepancy,” said Colonel March; “but probably not the discrepancy you mean. Wasn’t that rather rash of him, by the way?”

“Perhaps,” admitted Mr. Wilson sadly. “But the lesser of two evils. You see, we hadn’t known that Mr. Hale’s fiancée was to be present; otherwise we should not have risked it. So, in case Fisk made a bad slip of some kind, he had to have an excuse for making a slip. Mr. Hale is a notorious and genuine teetotaller. But then (I thought) even a teetotaller can change his mind.”

Colonel March chuckled.

“He can change his mind,” said the colonel. “What he can’t change is his digestive system. He can’t work his way through a huge wine-list, from cocktails to brandy, without either becoming ill or going to sleep. In a man who has never taken a drink in his life, I submit that it’s a physical impossibility. When I heard of that little performance, I said to myself: ‘It is magnificent; but it isn’t Hale.’ And, speaking of his fiancée...”

Wilhelmina Wilson stiffened.

Throughout this conversation, she had several times seemed on the point of speaking. She still sat on the edge of her uncle’s desk, staring moodily at the toe of her slipper. When Colonel March spoke, she looked at her uncle as though with appeal.

But Mr. Wilson remained unruffled.

“Ah, yes!” he said. “That unfortunate affair yesterday morning!”

“What was unfortunate about it?” the girl demanded, with sudden passion.

“Tush!” said her uncle, raising a gentle but admonitory forefinger. He looked distressed. “Colonel March, my niece is — impulsive. Like her poor mother, my sister. And she is very fond of young Gabriel Fisk.

“You understand now what happened, I hope? That suit of clothes, with the notecase and watch and the rest of it, has nothing to do with the case. It’s a supernumerary. Mr. Hale provided us with an exact duplicate of his possessions. I am an artist, sir, or I am nothing. Neither the suit nor its contents has been worn for a week. Fisk left it hanging there in the locker when he changed in that cloakroom after appearing at the Muswell Hill Flower Show last Tuesday week.

“Yesterday Fisk, in his ordinary clothes, came in for instructions. He and my niece—” Mr. Wilson coughed. “It was unfortunate that Lady Patricia Mortlake walked in when she did. Fisk, of course, simply slipped out when her back was turned. Unfortunately, Lady Patricia is a strong-minded person. She ransacked the place, found the suit, and suspected I hate to think what.”

“And Hale?” asked Colonel March, without batting an eyelid. “The real Hale? Where is he now?”

Again Mr. Wilson was apologetic.

“At his country place, with his head under the bedclothes, until he can think up an excuse to explain his supposed conduct. Even if he tells the truth, I’m afraid Lady Patricia will not like it. And I shall probably... er... lose a client. Life,” said Mr. Wilson, shaking his head, “is difficult.”

“Yes.”

“In any case, as I said before, you will respect our little secret? Our racket, as you prefer to call it?” Colonel March got to his feet. Always an impressive figure, he now seemed to fill the room. He put on his soft hat at a more rakish angle than was seemly, and picked up his silver-headed stick. His speckled face was aglow.

“Candidly,” he said, “I can’t do anything else. You’ve got me. If I understand the situation, to show up this racket would be to wreck half the public reputations in England. We can’t have that. The public demands to be deceived. By gad, it shall be deceived! So, if Miss Wilson vouches for the truth of this story—?”

“Yes,” said the girl, with her eyes on the floor.

“Then there’s nothing more to be said. Sir, good day to you!”

“And to you, Colonel March,” beamed Mr. Wilson. “Wilhelmina, my dear, will you show these gentlemen out?”

Wilhelmina did show them out. Yet she did not appear to be happy about anything. For the first time her manner displayed a trace of nervousness. In the outer office she suddenly stopped, and whirled round on them.

“You old—” she began explosively, and then broke off to laugh; or cry — Colonel March was not sure which. “What are you thinking?”

“Thinking?” repeated Colonel March, with massive innocence.

“Yes, you were! You know you were! I could see it in your face. What’s the matter? Don’t you believe our story even now? I swear to you that that suit of clothes hasn’t been touched for a week!”

“Oh, that?” said the colonel, as though enlightened. “I believe that.”

“Then what is it? What were you thinking?”

“Well,” said Colonel March, “since you ask, I was thinking about the dog.”

“Dog?” she echoed blankly.

“Lady Patricia Mortlake’s dog. An objectionable dog. But then I don’t like Pekes.” Colonel March reflected. “It had one quality, though, that I did notice. The dog Flopit took absolutely no interest in strangers. You could show it the whole personnel of Scotland Yard, and it never so much as opened an eye — let alone barking. It’s the sort of dog which barks only when it scents or senses someone it knows very well. So, if it was Gabriel Fisk who was here with you yesterday, I only wondered why Flopit set up the clamour that drew Lady Patricia Mortlake’s attention to you both.”

While the blue eyes never left him, and an expression of impish animation survived even the embarrassed colour of her face, Colonel March added a last word.

“Stick to him,” he advised in an even lower voice. “You’ll be much better for him than that high-born shrew who’s got his life planned out to the last musicale and reception.”

“I’ve been in love with Frank Hale for a long time,” the girl confessed. “But I thought it might be better for him if we said—”

“There’s no reason for you and your uncle to lie in order to please her,” said Colonel March. “As for Hale, there are still a few gleams of humanity in him. Under you, please God, he may yet develop into a statesman. Good afternoon, Miss Wilson. Come, Roberts. We must go and find some more queer complaints.”

The only contemporary detective novel in the Modern Library series is Dashiell Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON. From the standpoints of historical importance, vigor of style, and creative originality, no worthier American standard-bearer could have been selected.

For the Modem Library edition, Mr. Hammett wrote a special introduction in which he mentioned an earlier story called “The Gutting of Couffignal.” He confessed that in this earlier tale he had failed to bring off a “promising dénouement” but thought that he “might have better luck” if he incorporated the same climax in THE MALTESE FALCON, combined with another failure of the past.

Obviously, it was your Editor’s duty to unearth “The Gutting of Couffignal” and find out what Mr. Hammett was talking about. Disguised as a literary detective, your Editor followed up an ingenious clue and nailed “The Gutting” in its hideout. On reading the story, the mystery was solved. Mr. Hammett’s allusion refers to the climactic scene between The Continental Op and Princess Zhukovski which in conception bears a strong resemblance to the climactic scene between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy at the end of THE MALTESE FALCON. Otherwise the two stories are completely different.

Aside from this interesting historical point, “The Gutting” is an excellent example of Hammett’s startling powers — a tremendously effective thriller in which The Continental Op operates at the top of his form. It is a privilege to reprint this “forgotten” Hammett, now destined to become an anthological favorite.

Wedge-shaped Couffignal is not a large island, and not far from the mainland, to which it is linked by a wooden bridge. Its western shore is a high, straight cliff that jumps abruptly up out of San Pablo Bay. From the top of this cliff the island slopes eastward, down to a smooth pebble beach that runs into the water again, where there are piers and a clubhouse and moored pleasure boats.

Couffignal’s main street, paralleling the beach, has the usual bank, hotel, moving-picture theater, and stores. But it differs from most main streets of its size in that it is more carefully arranged and preserved. There are trees and hedges and strips of lawn on it, and no glaring signs. The buildings seem to belong beside one another, as if they had been designed by the same architect, and in the stores you will find goods of a quality to match the best city stores.

The intersecting streets — running between rows of neat cottages near the foot of the slope — become winding hedged roads as they climb toward the cliff. The higher these roads get, the farther apart and larger are the houses they lead to. The occupants of these higher houses are the owners and rulers of the island. Most of them are well-fed old gentlemen who, the profits they took from the world with both hands in their younger days now stowed away at safe percentages, have bought into the island colony so they may spend what is left of their lives nursing their livers and improving their golf among their kind. They admit to the island only as many storekeepers, working-people, and similar riffraff as are needed to keep them comfortably served.

That is Couffignal.

It was some time after midnight. I was sitting in a second-story room in Couffignal’s largest house, surrounded by wedding presents whose value would add up to something between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.

Of all the work that comes to a private detective (except divorce work, which the Continental Detective Agency doesn’t handle) I like weddings as little as any. Usually I manage to avoid them, but this time I hadn’t been able to. Dick Foley, who had been slated for the job, had been handed a black eye by an unfriendly pickpocket the day before. That let Dick out and me in. I had come up to Couffignal — a two-hour ride from San Francisco by ferry and auto stage — that morning, and would return the next.

This had been neither better nor worse than the usual wedding detail. The ceremony had been performed in a little stone church down the hill. Then the house had begun to fill with reception guests. They had kept it filled to overflowing until some time after the bride and groom had sneaked off to their eastern train.

The world had been well represented. There had been an admiral and an earl or two from England; an ex-president of a South American country; a Danish baron; a tall young Russian princess surrounded by lesser titles, including a fat, bald, jovial and black-bearded Russian general who had talked to me for a solid hour about prize fights, in which he had a lot of interest, but not so much knowledge as was possible; an ambassador from one of the Central European countries; a justice of the Supreme Court; and a mob of people whose prominence and near-prominence didn’t carry labels.

In theory, a detective guarding wedding presents is supposed to make himself indistinguishable from the other guests. In practice, it never works out that way. He has to spend most of his time within sight of the booty, so he’s easily spotted. Besides that, eight or ten people I recognized among the guests were clients or former clients of the Agency, and so knew me. However, being known doesn’t make so much difference as you might think, and everything had gone off smoothly.

Shortly after dark a wind smelling of rain began to pile storm clouds up over the bay. Those guests who lived at a distance, especially those who had water to cross, hurried off for their homes. Those who lived on the island stayed until the first raindrops began to patter down. Then they left.

The Hendrixson house quieted down. Musicians and extra servants left. The weary house servants began to disappear in the direction of their bedrooms. I found some sandwiches, a couple of books and a comfortable armchair, and took them up to the room where the presents were now hidden under grey-white sheeting.

Keith Hendrixson, the bride’s grandfather — she was an orphan — put his head in at the door.

“Have you everything you need for your comfort?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

He said good night and went off to bed — a tall old man, slim as a boy.

The wind and the rain were hard at it when I went downstairs to give the lower windows and doors the up-and-down. Everything on the first floor was tight and secure, everything in the cellar. I went upstairs again.

Pulling my chair over by a floor lamp, I put sandwiches, books, ashtray, gun and flashlight on a small table beside it. Then I switched off the other lights, set fire to a Fatima, sat down, wriggled my spine comfortably into the chair’s padding, picked up one of the books, and prepared to make a night of it.

The book was called The Lord of the Sea, and had to do with a strong, tough and violent fellow named Hogarth, whose modest plan was to hold the world in one hand. There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats and floating forts larger than Couffignal. It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.

Hogarth was still going strong when the lights went out.

The first story to be offered to the American public about Fidelity Dove, Lady Larcenist Extraordinary, was “The Great Kabul Diamond” which your Editor included in his feminology, THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES. In this story the saint-faced and ethereal Fidelity invented a new way of stealing a world-famous diamond — by buying a house!

In “The Meanest Man in Europe” (B. H. — Before Hitler) our modem Miss Robin Hood invents a new way of forcing an old Scrooge to pay a hospital bill — by buying £50,000 worth of pearls!

Did we tell you about that amazing exploit in which Fidelity stole the entire landscape of Swallowsbath — complete with woods, hills, river, meadows, quarry, saw-mill and village? Yes, the whole countryside — and we don’t mean a painting! One of these issues we’ll bring you that one...

The case of Mr. Jabez Crewde gives us another reason to believe that Fidelity Dove was at this time developing a conscience. She did not make very much money out of Jabez Crewde. True, she cleared her expenses, which were, as usual, on the grand scale, and she paid herself and her staff well for their time. It was the Grey Friars Hospital which benefited chiefly by this exploit. You, if you are of those who refuse to believe that she had a spark of goodness in her, you may say that she simply indulged her sense of humour in making the meanest man in Europe subscribe twenty thousand pounds to a hospital.

Jabez Crewde deserved his title. He was worth close upon two hundred thousand pounds, which he had made as a financier — for which you can read moneylender, though he never took ordinary moneylenders’ risks. Moneylender’s interest — banker’s risk — that was the formula on which he had grown rich. He lived in a small, drab house in a drab quarter of Islington.

Fidelity would never have heard of him if he had not had a very mild attack of appendicitis. Feeling unwell one day, he had gone in his shabbiest clothes to the surgery of a struggling slum doctor. The doctor diagnosed appendicitis, and recommended an operation. Jabez was no physical coward, but he expressed the utmost horror. An operation would ruin him. So the doctor, having been persuaded to accept half a crown instead of his usual fee of five shillings, recommended the meanest man in Europe for free treatment at the Grey Friars Hospital.

It was a simple operation — the convalescence was short. It was during the latter period that Gorse, more or less by chance, got to know about it and related it to Fidelity. Fidelity crossed her hands across the bosom of her dream-grey gown and sadly shook her head.

“Avarice is the very leprosy of the soul,” she said. “I am revolted, Cuthbert.”

“For once I feel myself able to echo your sentiments,” said Gorse. “He’s worth about a couple of hundred thousand.”

“Those poor, underpaid doctors!” said Fidelity. “And the overworked nurses! And the needy cases crying for admission — or is it perhaps a wealthy hospital?”

“There’s a notice up saying if they don’t get twenty thousand in three months they will have to close a wing,” said Gorse.

“They have given their skill unstintingly to a suffering fellow creature. They have but cast their bread upon the waters—”

“Fidelity!” groaned Gorse. He would have died for Fidelity, as would any other member of her gang, but he alone believed her to be an utter humbug.

“My friend, you are always cruel to me, though you love me,” sighed Fidelity. “And because I love you, I must please you. Listen, and tell me if this pleases you.”

“I’m listening,” grunted Gorse, and waited.

Fidelity’s voice, when she spoke again, held the low call of birds at dusk.

“Tell Varley, our jeweller, to buy fifty thousand pounds’ worth of pearls from the best firms he can,” she said.

Gorse brightened.

“I thought you’d get down to brass tacks sooner or later, Fidelity!” he said, and left the room to carry out her order.

P. Moran, correspondence-school sleuth, 1944 model, is another old friend. His first appearance in our September 1943 issue met with instant and unanimous approval. Even before you asked us to, we had already persuaded Percival Wilde to have Pete cut another caper and apply his marvelous deductive talents to the defeat of crime.

P. Moran is indeed a rare bird — the comic sleuth. Only a small coterie of these droll detectives, these farcical ferrets, these humorous Holmeses, these burlesque bloodhounds, these ludicrous Lecoqs — only a handful have laughed their way into our plethoric literature of crime. Until Mr. Wilde created P. Moran for EQMM, the best of them included Ellis Parker Butler’s Philo Gubb, Sir Basil Thomson’s Mr. Pepper, and W. A. Darlington’s Mr. Gronk. Now — well, our vote goes to “gorjous” Pete, who, in the great tradition, plays a criminous fiddle when the occasion demands.

From: Chief Inspector, Acme International Detective. Correspondence School, South Kingston, N.Y.

To: Operative P. Moran, c/o Mr. R. B. McRae, Surrey, Conn.

...No subject is more important than that of occupational deduction. The occupation marks the man. The horny-handed son of toil who has spent forty years digging ditches will not look like the cloistered professor who has given a lifetime to the teaching of mathematics. The salty mariner who has sailed the seven seas will not resemble the apothecary who makes up your doctor s prescription. With a single glance the trained detective will determine the occupation of a total stranger. “This man,” he will say, “is obviously a streetcar motor-man: notice the large hands, the distended stomach, and the left foot larger than the right from stamping on the gong. This is a bookkeeper: observe the mark of the eyeshade on his forehead, see the groove over his right ear where he puts his pen, and notice the red ink at the side of his right forefinger. This is a riding-master: notice the bow-legs, observe the peculiar way in which he walks, and smell the odor of the stable.”

Think what it will mean if you know that a certain murder has been committed by a pastry-cook, and you can go out into a crowd and positively identify every pastry-cook in it. You will let ninety-nine men pass, but you will snap your handcuffs on the one hundredth and you will say, “John Doe, the game is up. I arrest you as the mysterious murderer of the wealthy millionaire, Richard Roe. Come to Headquarters with me.”

Read over the section which we have entitled “The Impress of an Occupation,” and particularly read over our long quotation from Dr. Wm. E. Presbrey, formerly professor of Medical Jurisprudence at the Philadelphia University Medical School, who combed Europe and America in his search for facts regarding the influence of occupations on the body. Then, after you think you have mastered everything in this lesson, take a long ride in the subway, jotting down on a piece of paper the occupations of all the men who take seats opposite you, and try to confirm your deductions by supplementary observations. For example, a plumber will not be reading a book of poetry and a clergyman will not be studying the racetrack results. A steamfitter’s assistant will not have well manicured fingernails and a choir singer will not be chewing tobacco. If you decide the man facing you is a prizefighter, and you see him sniff furtively at a bunch of flowers, you may be sure something is wrong somewhere.

J. J. O’B.

P. S. I repeat what I said in my previous letters. Now that you have a dictionary do not be ashamed to look up the spellings of words. You will not find “gorjous” in the dictionary.

J. J. O’B.

EQMM boasts an honorable roster of husband-and-wife detective teams. True, we have not brought you an escapade of Mr. and Mrs. North, or an exploit of Nick and Nora Charles, but we cannot be held responsible for these glaring omissions — neither duo exists in short-story form. We have brought you, however, Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Margaret Manners’s Desdemona (Squeakie) and David Meadow, and Cyril Plunkett’s Joe and Jeri Jones, And now we offer another domestic duet, another ’tecting twosome, another crime-crushing couple. Flippancy aside, meet “Professor” Hollis Mears and his wife Marjorie, in the strange case that linked Honeymoon Island and Mangrove Island. It happened in tropical Florida during that languid period when the south wind, like the mistral of Mediterranean France, blew hot and sultry and maddening... when sabotage and death were invisible fingers of the wind...

Your Editor found a certain fascinating femininity in this story — in the domestic scenes, in the romantic interludes, even in Miss Clark’s deft strokes of characterization. Women readers will recognize the authentic touch of a talented woman-writer; and male fans will welcome a distaff detective story that skillfully avoids the down filling and purple patchwork of the Had-I-But-Known school of sleuthery.

Little Mrs. Mears sometimes felt that there was a great scarcity of really good murders on an isolated Florida island — until the letter that morning. She was engaged in making over her poky little historian husband into a world-famous detective. Naturally he did not know this.

She scowled up at him reproachfully, from the letter, over the mid-morning coffee in his study. “I didn’t know you knew the Riders, Hollis!”

His magnificent forehead (it was startlingly brown from the sun beneath the silver crest of hair, it dwarfed everything about him) lifted to her from the eternal book list from his bookseller. Hollis was fenced in by books so that you could scarcely get to him. He was writing a History of the American Civil War, and the current world war could have been fought and won by the sheer tonnage of the tomes they already owned — all their money went for reference books — but still he was never through buying. “Are you reading my letters again?” he asked, resigned. “I don’t. Who are the Riders?”

“Tobacco. Fifty million dollars. Kidnaping.”

She passed to him the incredible, inconsequential, alarming letter:

“So that,” exclaimed Mr. Mears, “is what I get for helping the Sheriff solve two murder cases! Just wait till I get at him! Any job he does not fancy—”

“ ‘Helping’ him,” scoffed Marjorie. “You mean solving them. That stupid Tice did not have a bean in that soup. You are always too modest, Hollis. It is a good thing you have a wife who—”

“Wire her at once that we are not having any Anastasia.”

“It would be too late,” demurred Marjorie cozily. “Anastasia would already be in full flight.”

“Marjorie, I will not allow—!”

“Darling.” She was a pretty, bright young thing with very blue eyes and very pink cheeks and snapping curly black hair. “The money will come in handy.”

“Money!” he scorned.

“Yes, money,” firmly. “There are some things I want besides your old Civil War books.”

“I... never knew you felt like that,” he choked. He gazed at her with his blue eyes — that deep-sea blue that you could drown in. “I... I guess the honeymoon is over. All right. Just you wait, my dear, if it’s money you’re after, till my book is publish—”

“I can’t. The old glass coffee drip is broken, we have got to have a new one. And my bathing suit has no seat to the pants,” she giggled, “a new one is absolutely indicated. Besides, I have always wanted to see what the principal of a famous kidnaping case is like grown up.”

“From this letter, she is obviously a mental victim from the experience. Even if I were a detective, which I do not admit, that does not make me a psychiatrist. Get this clear, Marjorie. She can be kidnaped AND murdered. I am not again being deflected from my book.”

Marjorie gazed at her husband through welling tears. “I guess... the honeymoon is over.”

They were always saying that to each other. After three years, it never was over. So suddenly she was flung into his arms, a fence of tomes avalanching with the passionate abruptness of her movement, but nobody noticed. He held her with such tenderness, such shyness growing bolder — he had been a bachelor so long that he did not take easily to the privileges of matrimony. So then they were conscious only of their multiple heart beat, joined — like the multiple engine beat of those army planes overhead. The planes distanced; came the phut-phut-phut of rapid machine-gun fire. Again phut-phut-phut. One young aviator after another taking his morning drill at the target set up in the lagoon of the neighboring Honeymoon Island.

“That target practice is too near. Honeymoon Island, my eye,” he muttered, once more claiming her lips.

“This is,” she blissfully sighed. “Little Mangrove Island has been misnamed...”

Many years ago Maurice Leblanc, in a pugilistic mood, conceived the idea of matching his undefeated master-rogue, Arsène Lupin, against the detective champion of the worlds Sherlock Holmes. The bout lasted four years, from 1907 to 1911, and extended through three of M. Leblanc’s books — THE EXPLOITS OF ARSÈNE LUPIN, ARSÈNE LUPIN VERSUS SHERLOCK HOLMES (also known, among other titles, as THE BLONDE LADY), and THE HOLLOW NEEDLE. There was no knockout, no decision; the final result, by and large, was a draw — a monumental tribute to Holmes considering that M. Leblanc was not only the promoter of the match but also the official timekeeper and referee.

It is a matter of record that the great English author never returned the great French author’s compliment. Conan Doyle never wrote a story that could have been called SHERLOCK HOLMES VERSUS ARSÈNE LUPIN. More’s the pity — what a classic tale it might have been! It remained, after all these years, for an American author, Mr. Anthony Boucher, to make up in part for Doyle’s dereliction. Mr. Boucher, himself the creator of three stellar detectives — Fergus O’Breen, Sister Ursula, and EQMM’s own Nick Noble — now gives us the first pastiche (serious and sincere imitation) of Arsène Lupin; and while Sherlock Holmes is regrettably absent, even in adumbration, we have enormous reason to be grateful to Mr. Boucher for what is in essence a “new” Lupin story.

There is a French legend that in times of extreme peril Charlemagne himself would return to save France. Surely Arsène Lupin — yes, the great Arsène, the man who singlehanded won France her vast colonial empire in Africa[1] — is, and always will be, the spiritual descendant of the great emperor.

The landmarks that Max Blanchard had memorized so carefully a month ago — the red barn, the lane of poplars — stood out in the starlight with the too vivid clarity of a surrealist painting. The pump with the broken handle was the last signpost on a nightmare road. Now he could stop crawling. He had been crawling ever since he was a young man and that was long years ago.

Max Blanchard is not, of course, his real name. Even now, they say, it’s better not to print his name nor the exact nature of his mission in France. But Max Blanchard will do. It’s the kind of name he had, being a San Franciscan whose father was born in France. In the army they called him “Frenchie,” and he took a fair amount of ribbing from the average American’s automatic distrust of a bilingual man; but his harshest ribbers owned up to a sort of admiration when he was chosen for this mission.

It’s still wise, they say, not to describe how Blanchard got into France nor where he was going nor how he received the wound. But the part of the story that can be told (and that should be told for the glimpse it gives you of the spirit still living in France) starts near dawn one winter morning in a village that might be named Rozy-sur-Marne, with Blanchard crawling through back hedges and damning the clear sharp starlight and wondering how much longer he can remain conscious after that loss of blood.

Now, with the landmarks in sight, he knew his lifelong crawl was over. Here at this underground station he could snatch a few hours of rest, the last before he reached his destination.

The man who answered Blanchard’s knock was, as he had been described, sharp-featured and black-eyed. Blanchard said, “M. Duval?”

The man said, “Yes.”

“The celebrated collector of fishing rods?”

The man half-smiled and nodded at the password. He stepped aside to let Blanchard into the hall. Blanchard tripped on the threshold and the man took his arm. He drew in a sharp breath as he saw the blood, but said nothing. He led Blanchard down the hall into a shabby but spotless room.

Blanchard saw nothing in the room save the two men in Gestapo uniforms. He heard nothing but Duval’s unctuous voice saying, “Messieurs, behold the American spy!” Then as they stepped forward he saw and heard nothing at all...

Oberleutnant Siegmund von Keller tapped nervously on his desk. “I do not see,” he said, “why I was not informed directly of Colonel Linnaus’ tour of inspection.”

The thin bearded old Frenchman made a conciliatory gesture. “Misguided though they may be, the Underground is singularly efficient. Doubtless the Colonel’s inspection is intended to catch you unawares; it is fortunate that I have been able to forewarn you through my... unorthodox channels.”

Keller smiled stiffly. “You are invaluable, M. Lenormand. You are, if I may speak frankly, a higher caliber of individual than is often willing to assist us among a conquered people. Your training as one-time Chief of the Sûreté, your uncanny ability to nose out traitors, so often among those whom we have prized as our most loyal collaborators—”

M. Lenormand waved a deprecating hand. “I have a duty to my country. I feel I can serve her best through my assistance to you.”

“I could wish,” said Keller, “that such good sense were more common. These stubborn dogs clinging to the past, listening to the empty mouthings of Moscow and Washington...”

M. Lenormand said, “You have the American spy now. He will be a fine exhibit to display to Colonel Linnaus.”

The thought warmed Oberleutnant von Keller. He sat basking in it for some minutes after the local police chief had left him. He roused himself and sat up stiffly when a guard entered to announce M. Duval.

Keller managed to be both stern and affable as he congratulated Duval upon his sensible heroism in betraying the local Underground station. He was somewhat more stem than affable as he went on to point out that Duval’s life depended upon his future usefulness, which would best consist in maintaining that station as a trap.

“But monsieur...” Duval hesitated. “You do not know these men of the Underground. They are fierce and terrible. When they realize that travelers go no farther than my station...”

“Do you think they can be more terrible than we?” The Oberleutnant’s voice was quiet and deadly.

“It shall be as you wish, M. le lieutenant,” Duval hastened to assure him. “I shall maintain the station.”

“And you will give us complete information on all disloyal French when you know.” A fine bag for Colonel Linnaus, he thought. “Rut wait. I am sure that your American friend will be interested in learning to what manner of man he trusted his life.” He beckoned to a guard.

Max Blanchard had not been mistreated since he was brought to Gestapo headquarters. There was little need to mistreat a man with bleeding wounds and a soaring fever; neglect was simpler. Blanchard was conscious now, and dripping from the pail of cold water which had made him conscious. His legs buckled under him as the guards released their hold. One of the guards struck him, and he stood wavering in front of Keller’s desk.

“Oberleutnant von Keller,” the officer identified himself. “And this is M. Duval, journalist and reformed traitor.” He paused. “Well?” he snapped. “And your name, American?” He made the word an epithet beside which Schweinehund would have seemed endearing.

Blanchard said nothing.

Keller smiled. “We can take up your questioning later. At leisure... Meanwhile I want you to hear what we know of your subversive plots, so that you may see how futile it is to oppose the Master Race, Go on, Duval.”

Duval hesitated and looked about him.

“Your fierce terrible men are not here,” Keller laughed. “You are safe — and I trust you remember the matter of the reward. Come: who is the local leader of your so-called Underground?”

“M... monsieur Lenormand,” Duval stammered.

Keller started from his seat. “Lenormand? Impossible. You’re lying, you French dog. The chief of police is our friend, our ally. He has been invaluable to us. He—”

A strange voice barked, “Guard! Go to the prefecture at once and arrest M. Lenormand. I want him here.”

Max Blanchard’s eyes turned to the doorway. A tall slender man stood there in a resplendent black uniform. His moustache was meticulously waxed, and his waist could have resulted only from a corset. One even suspected a touch of makeup on the face; the fresh cheeks, scars and all, were so much younger than the shrewd old eyes.

“I give orders—” the Oberleutnant started to say.

The newcomer was drawing off his gloves with negligent grace. “Oberst Linnaus,” he said tersely. “You were not expecting me?”

“I beg the Colonel’s pardon. I—”

“I know. Oberleutnant von Keller. Standard brand. Devotion to duty, ninety-five per cent. Devotion to the Fatherland, one hundred. To the party, one hundred and five. Imagination, zero.”

Keller stiffened, and visibly repressed his retort.

“Did I understand this Frenchman correctly?” Linnaus went on. “Did he tell you that you have been putting your trust in a traiter?”

“So he says, Herr Oberst.”

“He says? God in heaven, Lieutenant, have you no flair for your own profession? You have been trusting, I gather, a police chief named Lenormand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“An old man? Even older than I? Thin and stooped? Sparse gray goatee? Formerly chief of the Sûreté in Paris?”

Keller nodded yes to each of the questions. Colonel Linnaus threw his head back and laughed a harsh high laugh. “Within five minutes,” he announced, “that guard will return to tell us that M. Lenormand is not at the prefecture. He will not be found at his house either. You will search in vain for him for months, while he laughs at you.”

Keller bridled. “I may not, as the Colonel says, have imagination; but I am efficient. Any man who lives I can arrest. What is this Lenormand? A ghost?”

The Colonel smiled. “A ghost? No... not quite...”

“Then why can I not arrest him?”

“Because,” Colonel Linnaus said slowly, “no one has ever successfully arrested Arsène Lupin.”

Max Blanchard blinked his fever-reddened eyes. He saw the startled face of M. Duval, the puzzlement of the Oberleutnant. “Arsène Lupin?” Keller asked.

“You may check the records in Paris,” Linnaus said. “M. Lenormand[2] was indeed Chief of the Sûreté, in 1906 if my memory is correct. He was also one of the many avatars of that multifaceted genius whom we know as Lupin.”

“But Arsène Lupin...” Keller protested. “He’s not real. He’s in a book.”

“Our Fuehrer,” the Colonel said gravely, “has been in many books, and shall figure in more till the end of the making of books.”

“That’s history. But Lupin is in novels.”

“There is a worthy novel of Ewers’ entitled Horst Wessel. Does that make you doubt the true life of our hero?”

“But even if he’s real, he must be dead by now. You said 1906?”

Colonel Linnaus sighed lightly. “Let me explain, while we wait for the guard’s report to confirm me. These French... they are a strange people. I do not understand them well. When I was working in Norway with Jonas Lie, I knew where I was. I am a collateral descendant of Linnaeus, and my Norse mother named me Peer to honor Ibsen’s hero. Yes, I understand the Scandinavians, even those who most bitterly resist us, as I understand our own race, but these French...—”

“There is something in them that we cannot touch. Something that can be said only in their own language. Esprit... élan... panache... gloire... How can one translate a single one of those words into German? And all those words mean: Arsine Lupin. He is madness and wit and grace and moon-touched audacity. He is—”

The Colonel paused, coughed, and resumed more soberly: “He is the effrontery of the individual who dares oppose himself to the State. He is the outrage of anarchy, the fallacy of individualism. And he refuses to die.

“There was a French legend that in times of great peril the horn of Roland would sound and Charlemagne himself would return to save France. Well, the times of great peril came for the contemptible Third Republic. But the horn that sounded was the claxon of a Paris cab, and there returned... Arsène Lupin.”

For a moment there was silence in the room. Blanchard saw the Colonel’s painted face lit with a half-admiration for the man he must pursue and destroy. Then a guard came in, heiled, and said, “Herr Oberst, M. Lenormand is nowhere to be found.”

Keller looked convinced. Still he protested. “But he worked for us—”

“There is no limit,” Linnaus snapped, “to the man’s highfantastic enterprise. Did he not make himself head of the very Sûreté that had sworn his capture? Did he not once force our Kaiser himself to become his accomplice in an escape? Working ‘for’ us would suit his humor. And what did he do for you?”

“He betrayed de Gaullists, Underground workers—”

“— whom you had hitherto considered loyal collaborators? Of course. Ass! Cannot you see what he was doing? He simply turned genuine collaborators over to you and tricked you into executing them. Ah, the devil is sly. And he has never met his match. What was Ganimard?[3] A plodding bourgeois. Herlock Sholmes?[4] An Englishman. Never has he been faced with a detective of his own caliber... until now.”

Colonel Linnaus’ thin lips curved into a smile, twisting his saber scars into the grimace of a sadistic clown. “First these,” he said. “The American and your helpful betrayer of the Underground. And then... Arsène Lupin!”

Fever and all, Max Blanchard shuddered. There was a chill resolution about this ancient dandy that made his spine crawl.

“Shall I summon Grussmann?” Keller asked. “He has a skill all his own in extracting information.”

“I am not without skill myself,” Colonel Linnaus said coldly. “You may leave us, Herr Oberleutnant.”

Keller’s voice hardened. “Does not the Colonel presume upon his rank? May I remind him that these are my prisoners?”

Linnaus slapped his black glove against his palm. “May I remind the Lieutenant that these men should yield valuable information, and that one does not care to reveal that information before a self-avowed colleague of Arsène Lupin?”

Keller said stubbornly, “I stand upon my rights as senior in command of this station.”

Linnaus began to draw on his gloves. “There will be time later to consider your proper reward. Poland, I imagine; the death rate will be high there — the Red Army draws near. At present I have no time to palter.” He turned to the door and shouted a command outside. “These men go with me.”

Max Blanchard saw Duval’s face turn ashen and almost sympathized with the traitor. The evil efficiency of Oberleutnant von Keller had been dangerous enough; but this rouged and scarred old man who added imagination to his evil...

There was only one solution. Blanchard knew too much to take chances on what he might reveal under torture or in the delirium of fever. He groped in his bloodstained rags for the capsule of cyanide, praying that his captors had overlooked it. If only he could somehow share it with Duval before that craven revealed all the secrets of the Underground...

His fingers found the minute secret pocket and closed on something that was not a capsule. The cyanide had been removed, and in its place was a wad of paper. The two Gestapo men were too intent on their private duel to notice him closely. He unfolded the paper in his palm and glanced down at it. It bore two words:

Blanchard’s head swam as the guards lifted him and bore him to Colonel Linnaus’ waiting black automobile.

The first book of detective stories published on this planet was Edgar Allan Poe’s TALES, which appeared in 1845 and contained the great Dupin trilogy. Incredible as it may seem today, Poe’s experiments in fictional ratiocination fell on deaf ears: they were not popular with contemporary readers and they failed to impress contemporary writers. For consider: in the seventeen years that followed the first edition of Poe’s TALES, not a single book was published in the United States that contained a detective story!

In the eighteenth year A.P. (After Poe) — in 1863 — two books finally appeared to crack the long silence. One was STRANGE STORIES OF A DETECTIVE; OR, CURIOSITIES OF CRIME, by “a retired member of the detective police,” brought out by Dick & Fitzgerald of New York; the other was THE AMBER GODS AND OTHER STORIES, by Harriet Prescott (Spofford), issued by Ticknor and Fields of Boston, and containing one detective story called “In a Cellar” Two years later, in 1863, Dick & Fitzgerald published LEAVES FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A NEW YORK DETECTIVE: THE PRIVATE RECORD OF J.B., written by a Dr. John B. Williams, and containing no less than 22 exploits of detective James Brampton, This book has barely survived the years — have you ever even heard of sleuth James Brampton?

Three volumes in 20 years! Indeed, it may be said that the detective story was born with Poe and almost died with him.

In London the seed of Poe’s noble experiment took firmer root, sprouted, and bore more abundant fruit, Jolted by the appearance in 1830 of four police articles in “Household Words,” a magazine edited by Charles Dickens, English writers heard the knock of Opportunity on their door; for nearly half a century (1850–1896), they spewed forth a spate of detective “reminiscences” As John Carter has pointed out, most of these so-called real-life “diaries” were thinly disguised fiction, written by anonymous and pseudonymous hacks of the day. Immensely popular and literally read to death, these “revelations” vanished into limbo: less than half a hundred different titles remain with us. The survivors include the work of “Waters” (Thomas Russell), Andrew Forrester, Jr., Charles Martel (Thomas Delf), Alfred Hughes, and a few others. Rare today and extremely desirable for historical and collectival reasons, they are nevertheless a purple patch on the CORPUS DETECTIVUS.

But during the 50s and 60s in the United States there was no corresponding flood of pseudo “memoirs,” Over here the “revelations” were to come later — in our lush Dime Novel Era; the first Dime Novel detective, Old Sleuth, did not appear until 1872. From 1845 to 1862 the American detective story lapsed (to coin a word) into biblivion. In all those seventeen years not a single book of detective stories achieved the immortality of cloth, wrappers, or pictorial boards. But what about the many “household” magazines that flourished so romantically in this period? Surely there must have been at least occasional appearances of the detective story in these embryonic “Females’ Home Companions”?

Working on this theory, your Editor determined to unearth a sample of the detective story as it was written between 1845 and 1862 — and at long last we found one! Here, with an appropriate ta-ra, is a slightly condensed version of “The Garnet Ring,” by one M. Lindsay. It comes, foxed by the years, from Ballou’s “Dollar Monthly Magazine” (slogan: The Cheapest Magazine in the World), published in Boston, issue of May 1861.

Reader, peruse and compare. Compare this detective short story, vintage 1861, with the highly developed modern form which we take so much for granted these days that we are indifferent to its remarkable excellences. Only by going back into the past, into those vaunted “good old days,” can we realize fully how superb in technique, how rich in imagination, are the offerings of our Hammetts, our Carrs, our Chestertons, our Christies, our Sayerses, in these “the good new days.”

Poe, the Great Father of us all, died in 1849. He could not have read “The Garnet Ring.” Had he lived long enough to stumble on it, he would have wept melancholy tears. But if in some celestial cottage Poe has been following the careers of Uncle Abner, Father Brown, Sam Spade, Dr. Gideon Fell, and all the others we take too much for granted, he will not regret having invented what is now the most fabulous literary form in the history of man’s eternal search for les mots justes.

During the first year of my practice as an attorney, clients and cases were so few with me, that I found it an agreeable change from the dullness of an almost unfurnished and unfrequented back office, to visit the court rooms, where I not only became familiar with the usages, arts and means of success employed by skilful lawyers, but where I could see human nature in its perplexities and struggles, its feebleness and power, exciting in me an interest and sympathy that the drama has never equalled.

One freezing morning during the first week of December, my office having been wholly innocent for the season of all artificial warmth, was too cold and cheerless to be endured any longer. It was enough to quench the light of hope and fire of courage in the most hot-headed and enthusiastic young man, so I determined to leave it for a while. I took down from its hook my old overcoat, the ever ready and unflinching friend of two or three winters, which, regardless of its dignity as an outsider, had never shrunk from the duties of frock-coat, dressing-gown, sick-gown and bedclothes. But alas! on this fireless cold morning, when it would have been so grateful to my poor heart and poorer purse to have found it transformed into one of the thickest beavers, fur-lined and fur trimmed, invincible to the fiercest northwester, it looked to me, spite of my old attachment to it, and my gratitude for its services, it looked quite used up, brown and rusty, thin and threadbare; its collar sadly soiled, its button-holes rent, its buttons lonesome, no two standing together.

I hurried away to the police courtroom, where the hopeless and frantic agony of crime makes us feel ourselves fortunate in innocence, however else unfortunate.

As I entered, a girl was put on trial for larceny; a common case, as that stated: yet I saw something in my first glance at her that made me forget lack of clients, cheerless office and telltale overcoat. She was about eighteen; fair and fresh-looking; with soft light hair brushed neatly over her ears; large blue eyes, the lids very much swollen by crying; and small, unmarked features. She was clad in a dark blue merino dress and a plain white collar. I felt that there was undoubtedly something wrong in the case; that decent looking young person, so neat and proper in dress, did not belong in a prisoner’s dock.

I watched her and watched the trial. The clerk read the indictment. The girl stood up and heard herself, Selina White, charged with stealing a shawl and dress, the property of one Mary Wilson. The tears rolling in streams down her cheeks, and her voice scarcely audible from emotion, she pleaded “not guilty.”

The first witness was the policeman who arrested her. His testimony amounted to nothing more than that he had found the clothes alleged to have been stolen in a carpet-bag marked with the prisoner’s name, and claimed by her. The prisoner was told by the judge, whose sympathy she had evidently enlisted, that it was proper for her to ask any questions bearing on the case, and I now perceived that she had no one to defend her, or give her special advice and aid. She availed herself of the privilege with which the judge had made her acquainted, and endeavored to draw from the officer the admission that she had shown more surprise when the stolen articles were found in her carpet-bag than any one else present, but in this she failed. He was altogether incommunicative and evasive in his answers to her.

One Mary Wilson testified to the loss of some clothes which she described; some garments were shown her which she identified. In answer to questions she stated that they had been lying in a trunk; that she had not laid eyes on them for three months or more till she found them in the prisoner’s carpet-bag, and that one Mary Murray had suggested her looking there for them.

Mary Murray was now called. She was a very bold girl, showy in dress and airy in manners. Her fingers were loaded with cheap rings, the most conspicuous of which was a large garnet. While the stolen garments were being shown, I had observed a young man crowd as far forward as he could get to look at them. My eyes happened to be on him when he first caught sight of the witness’s rings, and the expression which then covered his face excited my interest scarcely less than that of the prisoner had done. I approached him and inquired, “Do you know anything of this case?”

“Not much,” he answered, coloring deeply.

“If you know anything that can be brought to bear in favor of the prisoner tell me forthwith,” I said, “for she is innocent looking and I am afraid things will go hard with her.”

“She never stole them things,” he said.

“They were found in her possession; that is strong legal proof, and I am afraid it will decide the case against her.”

“Are you her lawyer?” he asked.

“I am now going to offer to defend her; if you can tell me anything, there is not a moment to lose.”

“Well, then, some of the same fuzz and trimmings that’s on them stolen clothes is on this girl on the stand.”

“Is that so? Are you sure?”

“Sure as can be. Then I know that big ring on her forefinger as well as I know my hand.”

“Do you?”

“I’d swear to it.”

“Well, we’ll give you a chance to. What is your name?”

“Miles Allen.”

“Keep on hand and we’ll take care of this poor girl, if we can.”

I sent up a line to the judge, in which I offered to defend the prisoner. He announced this fact, I took a seat beside her, and the trial went on. The interview with Allen and the note to the judge had prevented me from hearing much of Mary Murray’s testimony; but the prisoner seemed to have lost nothing of it. She questioned her closely as to their personal relations, and from the answers she drew out, it was evident that Selina’s pretty face had excited considerable admiration in a young man who boarded at Mrs. Wilson’s, and whom Mary Murray chose to consider her beau; that Mary had shown ill-will towards Selina on making this discovery, and had even uttered a few threats for her warning. I permitted the prisoner to elicit these facts without interruption, and I must acknowledge she did it with a tact which surprised me, and which I could ascribe only to strong woman-wit quickened and urged on by the extremity of her circumstances. Mary Murray was leaving, when I detained her for further examination.

“Have you any employment?” I inquired.

She answered in the affirmative.

“What is it?”

“Cap-making.”

“Do you work at the shop, or at your own lodgings?”

“Sometimes at the shop, and sometimes at my lodgings.”

“Where have you worked during the last week?”

“At my lodgings.”

“What kind of caps do you make?”

“Plush.”

“Of what color?”

“Mostly brown.”

“Was that bit of brown plush now hanging to your shawl-fringe from the caps?”

The witness did not answer, but impatiently catching up the end of her shawl, shook off the shred.

I turned to the judge. “Will your honor direct that that shred be secured? I shall have something to do with it.”

It was picked up and handed to the clerk.

Mary Murray was still on the stand. I resumed my questions. “You board in the same house with Selina White?”

“Yes.”

“Was Selina ever in your room?”

“No; she never was; I never had anything to do with her.”

“Were you ever in Selina’s room?”

“Not while she had it; except the day the policeman searched it.”

“Did you then handle the clothes found in the carpet-bag?”

“No; the policeman allowed no one to touch them.”

“When did you last see Mrs. Wilson wear the delaine dress shown here?”

“I can’t tell exactly; not for some months.”

“Has it been in your room among the plush caps to your knowledge?”

“No, sir.”

Mary Murray was dismissed.

I now called Miles Allen. At mention of this name, the little girl at my side started forward as if she had received an electric shock, then sank back and held her hands tightly together as if she was struggling with some powerful feeling. She looked steadily at this witness as she had done at those who preceded him, but her color kept coming and going, and she was excited and anxious. Miles Allen answered to his name and employment; he was a carpenter; came from New Jersey; had been here about six months.

“Do you know the prisoner?” I asked.

The girl’s eyes were full of tears, but there was a look of hope, almost of triumph, on her face as he bluntly answered, “Yes, sir, I do.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Ever since she was born. And I know her too well to believe she’s a thief.”

“Never mind your opinion of her character now,” said the judge: “Do you know anything about this case?”

“I know that there’s the same fuzz on the clothes they say Selina stole, as was hanging to that gay girl’s shawl.”

“Do you know the witness, Mary Murray?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you know the ring she wore on her finger this morning?”

“Yes, sir,” with emphasis.

“What do you know about it?”

“I owned that ring once myself, and Selina White owns it now, for I give it to her, and she ain’t the girl to give it away.”

“How did you recognize it?”

“I’d know it any where as soon as I’d set my eyes on’t; but if you’re a mind to, I’ll tell you how anybody may know that that ring don’t belong to the girl that’s got it. Inside on’t you’ll find my name ‘Miles Allen’ pretty plain and a little something else.”

“Have you anything further to tell us with regard to this case?”

“Only that the gay girl proved plain that she never know’d or loved Selina enough to make her give her the ring, and so I’d like to ask how’d she get it? and then who’s the thief?”

“Those points will be settled at a proper time,” said the judge, and at my request he ordered Mary Murray to be re-called. She appeared, quite red with anger. I examined her as to where she obtained the garnet ring, and as I anticipated received only unsatisfactory and contradictory answers. The judge requested her to remove it from her finger. She refused. An officer in attendance soon relieved her of the ornament which he handed up to the bench. The judge looked at it carefully, and then read from the inside, “Miles Allen. To the girl I love best.”

There was a general titter through the courtroom. I glanced at Miles. He was smiling and blushing, but showed no shame or embarrassment. It was plain that he thought it no unmanly thing to give a ring to the girl he loved best.

“Now,” said the judge, turning to the clerk, “I think we will look at those stolen clothes again.” They were produced, and on being examined, there was found fastened to some bead trimming which ornamented the dress a bit of brown plush, the same in shade and fabric with that the clerk had secured. In the meantime an officer had returned from Mary Murray’s lodgings (where he had gone at my suggestion) with a brown plush cap, which she had lately finished, and on comparison it was found that its material was the same with the shreds in court.

The testimony was now all in, and I rose to make the defence. I went over the evidence and showed that there was nothing against the prisoner but the one fact of possession, always a strong one, I admitted, but in this case outweighed by the too apparent malice and guilt of the girl Murray, who had not only hated and plotted to ruin her, but had stolen from her herself. In proof of this, I alluded to her jealousy, her threats, and her too great readiness in throwing suspicion upon Selina; I dwelt upon the circumstance that a bit of plush which appeared to be a cutting from Mary Murray’s work was found upon the stolen dress although it had been packed away for a long time previous to being found in the prisoner’s possession. It had not been shown that Selina White ever had any plush or had ever been in Mary Murray’s room to obtain it. “Then how,” I asked, “did this detective shred find an opportunity to fasten itself upon the dress in a sudden transit from its owner’s trunk to a stranger’s travelling-bag? Perhaps,” I suggested, “Mary Murray might tell us. She had a similar shred attached to her shawl, and is it not possible, nay probable, that she could tell how and where its fellow became attached to the trimming of the stolen dress? Might it not have been caught in a temporary lodgment in her room, or by contact with her own clothes? How else?” In view of all the circumstances proved, it was easier to believe that Mary Murray had stolen the clothes and then put them in Selina White’s carpet-bag in order to ruin her than that Selina had stolen them.

I then touched upon the garnet ring, showing that it undoubtedly belonged to the prisoner, and had been taken from her carpet-bag when the stolen articles had been deposited there. The judge whispered a moment with one of the officers near him; then rose and pronounced Selina White innocent of the charge preferred against her. There was a loud burst of applause. I took Selina’s little cold hand in mine and told her she had better leave with me at once. We had just reached the door when Miles Allen joined us, shaking hands and laughing and talking so fast that one could hardly understand him. I learned this, however, that he and Selina loved each other too well to be far separated; that Selina had come to get work near Miles at his suggestion; that, owing to a series of blunders not so easily explained as frequently met with, she had failed to find him on her arrival, but that certain of meeting him soon she had spent her time in looking for employment till she was arrested for theft and lodged in jail. Miles declared himself to have been surprised beyond expression when on going to the court-room to make complaint of some wrong done to himself, he saw the very “girl he loved best” in the dock on trial.

But the lovers were happy now. And so was I, notwithstanding my old overcoat. I don’t know whether or not Miles Allen noticed that I was thinly clad and that spite of a strong effort of will, I showed great sensitiveness to the cold on reaching the outer air, but this I know, that the warm-hearted fellow gave into my hand (I don’t say paid for of course I never charged him or Selina anything) the price of one of the very best overcoats I ever wore.

There may be some who are desirous to know whatever more I can tell them about the garnet ring. I will therefore add that soon after the trial the morning papers reported Mary Murray to have been convicted of stealing a ring and fined twenty dollars, failing to pay which, she was sent to jail.

We welcome the first appearance in EQMM of Baynard Kendrick whose Captain Duncan Maclain is easily the best-known blind detective on the contemporary scene — a worthy successor to Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, the first and most famous of all blind sleuths. Captain Maclain, you’ll remember, crashed Hollywood in a Class A picture — “Eyes in the Dark” starring Edward Arnold as the blind detective whose assistant was a Seeing Eye dog.

Unfortunately Mr. Kendrick has never written a short story about Captain Maclain. Perhaps one of these days... But he has written shorts about Cliff Chandler who as a manhunting “type” is even more unusual than Captain Maclain. Indeed Cliff Chandler may actually be unique — your Editor knows of no other detective in fiction who specializes in protecting the welfare of transatlantic passengers on a giant ocean liner. Cliff Chandler is a ship’s detective. Odd? Not a bit: if a hotel can have a house detective, why not a ship, which is a hotel afloat.

Tired? Need a vacation? We prescribe an exhilarating trip on the S. S. Moriander...

Cliff Chandler, slim and debonair from crisp black hair to patent-leather pumps, stopped at the door of the Gold Lounge and looked inside. A delightful odor of expensive perfume drifted out into the corridor. Mingled with it was the soft laughter of many women.

The combination appealed to Cliff. In his capacity as ship’s detective of the luxurious S. S. Moriander, he was beginning to feel that life was unbearably dull. She was on her tenth voyage from Southampton to New York, and even the usual run of petty cardsharps seemed to have deserted her.

Of course you couldn’t expect trouble every time the Moriander shoved her flaring prow out into the Atlantic, but Cliff thrived on excitement. The lure of it had taken him into a private agency after college. There, his quick grasp of languages, his natural good breeding, and his hard common sense had rapidly carried him to the top. After six exciting years abroad he found himself comfortably ensconced guarding the passengers’ welfare on one of the largest ships afloat.

He leaned against the door of the Gold Lounge and looked inside. A long table had been set up near the center of the lounge. It was covered with a cloth of shimmering gold texture and topped with an array of cut-glass bottles and small ornate boxes of various shapes and sizes.

Presiding over the display was a dapper little Frenchman, Cliff recognized him from a previous trip as M. Jean Martone, manufacturer extraordinary of a select line of cosmetics. Gurgling enthusiastically over his wares were a dozen or more of the best-looking women on board.

As Cliff watched, M. Martone came around from behind the table to stand in front of a modishly gowned girl. She was touching powder to her cheeks, aided by a small mirror in a gold vanity. The Frenchman cocked his head to one side, and gave vent to a couple of disapproving clucks.

“Non! Non! Non! Mademoiselle. Not that shade, I beg of you! It is too dark, by far!” With a quick motion he reached for an open box on the table, and applied a different shade to her cheeks, wielding the tiny powder rag with a delicate touch. “Voilà!” He stepped back to regard his handiwork, twisting a waist so slender that Cliff suspected corsets under the French-cut evening clothes.

A quick flush colored the girl’s face at the Frenchman’s familiarity. With lifted chin she turned and started from the lounge. As she faced Cliff, he suddenly remembered that he had seen her once before. It had only been a brief glimpse in Clonnet’s jewelry shop in Paris, but the girl wasn’t a type easily forgotten. Her white evening gown was fitted close. Under its smooth embrace her rounded figure was slim and graceful.

Cliff followed her toward the dining saloon. It was no part of his duties to police the passengers in social pastimes, but the girl had a winsomeness which was appealing.

Several men looked up from a table in the corner. The girl passed them by unseeingly and followed the steward to a small table on the far side of the room. Cliff was pleasantly surprised to see that it was his table, too; for the rest of the voyage they would eat together, at least. Two minutes later he had introduced himself.

The girl’s name was Elsa Graves. She gave Cliff the kind of handclasp he liked, and said: “I’m such a dope at traveling. I’m scared to speak to people — and scared to tell them to go away when they speak to me.”

“If you’re traveling alone, I’d like to apply for the position of guardian for the voyage.” Cliff gave her his disarming smile.

Her deep blue eyes, watchful at first, softened as she estimated the set of Cliff’s shoulders and the cut of his evening clothes. Her answering smile started in her eyes and worked down to disclose even white teeth between parted red lips.

“That may be quite an order, Mr. Chandler, unless you can persuade this ship to stand on its own feet and behave!”

“You’ve been ill?” he asked sympathetically.

“I’ll?” She wrinkled her nose delightfully. “For two days I’ve been trying to die in 115. I’m rooming with a French girl named Dorette Maupin. She’s a dear. Only the fact that she’s been worse than I have has helped me to survive. We’ve shared our lemon juice and—”

“You’re in stateroom 115?” Cliff asked, surprised. “We’re neighbors. I’m in 114, right across the hall.”

“I know!” Elsa laughed. “I spied on you once — when you came down last night. I hoped you’d be a motherly old soul who could look in on me if I were ill. I hated you desperately when you turned out to be a man.”

“I trust that’s diminished this evening — with the storm.”

“This evening,” said Elsa, “I’ve reached a point where I can enjoy my dinner.”

Cliff signaled the steward, gave the order, and turned back to the girl. She was carrying a gold-trimmed white handbag. As Cliff turned back, she held it open in her hand and was busy with lipstick, using the open top of the bag for a mirror. Unexpectedly she raised her eyes and saw him watching her.

Cliff smiled quickly, but he was glad the steward appeared just then and saved his making any remark. Unless he was badly mistaken, the delightful Elsa Graves was packing a gun.

“Pat Hand” wrote your Editor that pending the birth of another Careful Jones exploit, he had dashed off a short-short about twenty cents’ worth of cannel coal and how it played a strange role in a murder case. Here is a peep into Bagdad-on-the-Hudson’s eternal “human comedy” — Second Ave. vs. Park Ave., with Nick Sforzak carrying on the O. Henry tradition.

His name was Nick Sforzak and he did business in a twelve-by-twelve cellar under the least appetizing looking butcher shop in all Manhattan. Nick’s line was coal, firewood and ice, purveyed in small quantities and at a minute profit. He was short and chunky and the expression on his face made one think of a lost dog.

His favorite customer was Miss Martie Allen, who was young and redheaded and pretty but who, in spite of these desirable assets, was finding it hard to make a place for herself in show business. She did not hold this spot in his esteem because her business was profitable to him. Her purchases, in fact, were always small and more often than not had to be put on the cuff. It was because she was usually at home when Nick made his deliveries, being at liberty so much, and was always ready to talk to him as though he were really a human being. She called him Keed and would ask him if he thought Shicklegruber could keep the lid on much longer. She would say things like: “Keed, I’m going to set you up in business with a shop and a truck of your own when He crashes through with a platinum circlet, which ought to be any day now,” or “Lissen, if he doesn’t get down to cases soon, you and I will run away and set ourselves up in business together in Philly or Dog Lake, Kan., or some such place.”

Nick always went away chuckling. It helped a lot, for most of his customers were like Mr. Cyrus Hubbard Cleve in the next block. Mr. Cleve had been a small executive once in a large corporation and he kept saying that if the Mayor would forget about blackouts and establish compulsory municipal baths for coal merchants, it would be a better thing for the city.

One morning Nick delivered a small order of cannel coal to Martie Allen and saw that her eyes were redder even than her hair. Her one room, without bath, was littered with newspapers telling about the murder the night before of Ramsay Hames III in his Park Avenue apartment. Ramsay Hames III, she explained, had been he and it was certain his intentions could never have been honest, for the papers made it clear he had been putting his chips down on a lot of numbers. One of them had rewarded his failure to produce a platinum circlet by shooting him through the head.

“He had me kidded to the ears, Nick,” she said, with a gulp. “I don’t think life’s so hot, do you?”

She had been at liberty a much longer time than usual, but she insisted on paying him from a purse containing three one-dollar bills and eighty cents in silver. He went away feeling very sorry for her.

Two days later he felt still more sorry for her. Her name had been dragged into the case. The day after that he felt very sorry for her indeed. Detectives had taken Martie Allen away in a taxi and had booked her on a charge of murder.

Nick did not read Manhattanese very well, but he worked through the newspapers with two bulging eyes and a dirty thumb, and his heart nearly stopped with fright when he found what a strong case the police had on Martie Allen. It seemed she had visited Ramsay Hames III on the evening of the murder and had taken part in an argument which had disturbed the people in the next apartment. She claimed she had left by eight-thirty, which would have made everything all right, the doctors having fixed the time of the killing at nine-thirty or shortly thereafter. Unfortunately she could not remember what she did on leaving, except that she went home, and the doorman of Hames’s Park Avenue apartment-house was sure it was nine-thirty when she left. As no — other clues had been found, it looked very bad even to Nick.

Nick did a lot of worrying about her. He also worried about his business which seemed to be falling off some. It could not fall off much, being so small to begin with. A week or so after Martie’s arrest he met Mr. Cyrus Hubbard Cleve on the street and stopped him to ask why he had not been receiving any more orders.

“Sforzak,” said Mr. Cleve, frowning in his minor executive manner, “the last business I put your way was a rush order for kindling wood. I did not get it until noon the next day. That’s why I am no longer a customer of yours.”

Nick prided himself on being prompt and businesslike in his dealings. He checked over his records to find why he had been slow in delivering the last Cleve order. It took a lot of thumbing of sheets to arrive at the reason. He had gone first, he found, to Martie Allen’s apartment and had learned there about the murder, after which he had been so disturbed over the blighting of her romance he had bought a paper of his own and had read it through. This had made him late in his deliveries. He was wondering how he could square himself with Mr. Cleve when his eye happened to go back to the sheet containing the order.

Twenty minutes later the district police station was disrupted by the entrance of a highly excited Nick with Mr. Cyrus Hubbard Cleve in tow. Mr. Cleve, collarless and in carpet slippers, did not seem to know what it was all about.

“She’s not guilty, Mr. Officer, she’s not guilty!” Nick kept repeating. He was waving a dirty sheet of foolscap in the air.

“Lissen,” said the sergeant, shoving him back from the desk. “Who’s not guilty? And who in hell are you?”

“I am Nick Sforzak, merchant, Second Avenue. Mr. Officer, see, I have system. I keep sheets at door so customers can write down orders when I’m not there. Mr. Cleve, who is prominent citizen, will swear he write his order down at quarter to nine.”

“So what?” demanded the law impatiently.

“So this, Mr. Officer. It was night of Mr. Hames’s murder. Officer, please, I close always nine o’clock sharp. I swear to that. So order after Mr. Cleve’s was written on sheet between quarter to nine and nine sharp. Can be no mistake. Here, see, plain as day.”

The sergeant, beginning to feel that he might have his hands on something after all, took the sheet and studied the last two entries. He read first what the retired executive had written in his neat Spencerian hand:

The entry beneath was in a large and sprawling hand:

Graham Greene, as you know, is the author of THIS GUN FOR HIRE and THE MINISTRY OF FEAR. It has been said that his literary preoccupation is with abnormal psychology — remember Alan Ladd in the moving picture version of THIS GUN FOR HIRE? Phyllis Bentley once wrote that Graham Greene “seems able to investigate sinister psychologies without sentimentalizing them.”

And yet the story we bring you by Graham Greene is not one of abnormal psychology at all Quite the contrary, it illustrates an heroic form of normal psychology. Nor does this story avoid sentimentality. Quite the contrary, it illustrates an heroic form of sentimentality. It illustrates something else too — what William Rose Benét meant when he said of Mr. Greene that “no man writing today is more a master of suspense.”

“The News in English” is one of the finest secret service stories to come out of The War of Liberation.

Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen was off the air.

All over England the new voice was noticed: precise and rather lifeless, it was the voice of a typical English don.

In his first broadcast he referred to himself as a man young enough to sympathize with what he called “the resurgence of youth all over the new Germany,” and that was the reason — combined with the pedantic tone — he was at once nicknamed Dr. Funkhole.

It is the tragedy of such men that they are never alone in the world.

Old Mrs. Bishop was knitting by the fire at her house in Crowborough when young Mrs. Bishop tuned in to Zeesen. The sock was khaki: it was as if she had picked up at the point where she had dropped a stitch in 1918. The grim comfortable house stood in one of the long avenues, all spruce and laurel and a coating of snow, which are used to nothing but the footsteps of old retired people. Young Mrs. Bishop never forgot that moment: the wind beating up across Ashdown Forest against the blacked-out window, and her mother-in-law happily knitting, and the sense of everything waiting for this moment. Then the voice came into the room from Zeesen in the middle of a sentence, and old Mrs. Bishop said firmly, “That’s David.”

Young Mary Bishop made a hopeless protest — “It can’t be,” but she knew.

“I know my son if you don’t know your husband.”

It seemed incredible that the man speaking couldn’t hear them, that he should just go on, reiterating for the hundredth time the old lies, as if there were nobody anywhere in the world who knew him — a wife or a mother.

Old Mrs. Bishop had stopped knitting. She said, “Is that the man they’ve been writing about — Doctor Funkhole?”

“It must be.”

“It’s David.”

The voice was extraordinarily convincing: he was going into exact engineering details — David Bishop had been a mathematics don at Oxford. Mary Bishop twisted the wireless off and sat down beside her mother-in-law. “They’ll want to know who it is,” Mrs. Bishop said.

“We mustn’t tell them,” said Mary.

The old fingers had begun again on the khaki sock. She said, “It’s our duty.” Duty, it seemed to Mary Bishop, was a disease you caught with age: you ceased to feel the tug of personal ties; you gave yourself up to the great tides of patriotism and hate. She said, “They must have made him do it. We don’t know what threats...”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

She gave weakly in to hopeless wishes. “If only he’d got away in time. I never wanted him to give that lecture course.”

“He always was stubborn,” said old Mrs. Bishop.

“He said there wouldn’t be a war.”

“Give me the telephone.”

“But you see what it means,” said Mary Bishop. “He may be tried for treason if we win.”

“When we win,” old Mrs. Bishop said.

The nickname was not altered, even after the interviews with the two Mrs. Bishops, even after the sub-acid derogatory little article about David Bishop’s previous career. It was suggested now that he had known all along that war was coming, that he had gone to Germany to evade military service, leaving his wife and his mother to be bombed. Mary Bishop fought, almost in vain, with the reporters for some recognition that he might have been forced... by threats or even physical violence. The most one paper would admit was that if threats had been used David Bishop had taken a very unheroic way out. We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism. The name Dr. Funkhole stuck.

But the worst of it to Mary Bishop was old Mrs. Bishop’s attitude. She turned a knife in the wound every evening at 9.15. The radio set must be tuned in to Zeesen, and there she sat listening to her son’s voice and knitting socks for some unknown soldier on the Maginot Line. To young Mrs. Bishop none of it made sense — least of all that flat, pedantic voice with its smooth, well-thought-out elaborate lies. She was afraid to go out now into Crowborough: the whispers in the post office, the old faces watching her covertly in the library. Sometimes she thought almost with hatred, why has David done this to me? Why?

Then suddenly she got her answer.

The voice for once broke new ground. It said, “Somewhere back in England my wife may be listening to me. I am a stranger to the rest of you, but she knows that I am not in the habit of lying.”

A personal appeal was too much. Mary Bishop had faced her mother-in-law and the reporters: she couldn’t face her husband. She began to cry, sitting close beside the radio set like a child beside its doll’s house when something has been broken in it which nobody can repair. She heard the voice of her husband speaking as if he were at her elbow from a country which was now as distant and as inaccessible as another planet.

“The fact of the matter is...”

The words came slowly out as if he were emphasizing a point in a lecture, and then he went on — to what would concern a wife. The low price of food, the quantity of meat in the shops: he went into great detail, giving figures, picking out odd, irrelevant things — like Mandarin oranges and toy zebras — perhaps to give an effect of richness and variety.

Suddenly Mary Bishop sat up with a jerk as if she had been asleep. She said “Oh, God, where’s that pencil?” and upset one of the too many ornaments looking for one. Then she began to write, but in no time at all the voice was saying, “Thank you for having listened to me so attentively,” and Zeesen had died out on the air. She said, “Too late.”

“What’s too late?” said old Mrs. Bishop sharply. “Why did you want a pencil?”

“Just an idea,” Mary Bishop said.

She was led next day up and down the cold, unheated corridors of a War Office in which half the rooms were empty, evacuated. Oddly enough, her relationship to David Bishop was of use to her now, if only because it evoked some curiosity and a little pity. But she no longer wanted the pity, and at last she reached the right man.

He listened to her with great politeness. He was not in uniform: his rather good tweeds made him look as if he had just come up from the country for a day or two, to attend to the war. When she had finished he said, “It’s rather a tall story, you know, Mrs. Bishop. Of course it’s been a great shock to you — this — well... action of your husband’s.”

“I’m proud of it.”

“Just because in the old days you had this — scheme, you really believe...?”

“If he was away from me and he telephoned ‘The fact of the matter is’ it always meant, ‘this is all lies, but take the initial letters which follow...?’ Oh, Colonel, if you only knew the number of unhappy week-ends I’ve saved him from — because, you see, he could always telephone to me, even in front of his host.” She said with tears in her voice, “Then I’d send him a telegram...”

“Yes. But still... you didn’t get anything this time, did you?”

“I was too late. I hadn’t a pencil. I only got this — I know it doesn’t seem to make sense.” She pushed the paper across. SOSPIC. “I know it might easily be coincidence — that it does seem to make a kind of word.”

“An odd word.”

“Mightn’t it be a man’s name?”

The officer in tweeds was looking at it, she suddenly realized, with real interest — as if it was a rare kind of pheasant. He said, “Excuse me a moment,” and left her. She could hear him telephoning to somebody from another room: the little ting of the bell, silence, and then a low voice she couldn’t overhear. Then he returned, and she could tell at once from his face that all was well.

He sat down and fiddled with a fountain-pen: he was obviously embarrassed. He started a sentence and stopped it. Then he brought out in an embarrassed gulp, “We’ll all have to apologize to your husband.”

“It meant something?”

He was obviously making his mind up about something difficult and out of the way: he was not in the habit of confiding in members of the public. But she had ceased to be a member of the public.

“My dear Mrs. Bishop,” he said, “I’ve got to ask a great deal from you.”

“Of course. Anything.”

He seemed to reach a decision and stopped fiddling. “A neutral ship called the Pic was sunk this morning at 4 A.M., with a loss of two hundred lives. S.O.S. Pic. If we’d had your husband’s warning, we could have got destroyers to her in time. I’ve been speaking to the Admiralty.”

Mary Bishop said in a tone of fury, “The things they are writing about David. Is there one of them who’d have the courage...?”

“That’s the worst part of it, Mrs. Bishop. They must go on writing. Nobody must know, except my department and yourself.”

“His mother?”

“You mustn’t even tell her.”

“But can’t you make them just leave him alone?”

“This afternoon I shall ask them to intensify their campaign — in order to discourage others. An article on the legal aspect of treason.”

“And if I refuse to keep quiet?”

“Your husband’s life won’t be worth much, will it?”

“So he’s just got to go on?”

“Yes. Just go on.”

It seems that, at the time of this writings 75 copies of every issue of EQMM find their way to a bookstore in Mexico City which specializes in American books and magazines; and that one of these 75 copies is reserved in the name of Antonio Helú. But Antonio Helú is more than a South-of-the-Border fan: he is also a writer of detective stories. Result (of our Good Neighbor policy): Señor Helú selected some of his own stories and mailed them to your Editor. Further result: your Editor forwarded the stories, in their original Spanish, to Anthony Boucher (our favorite translator). Final result: we hereby inaugurate a series of Mexican detective-crime stories — the first series of its kind ever to appear in the English language.

Meet Máximo Roldán, Mexican manhunter. Roldán is that rare type of detective who in addition to being a fluent and ingenious sleuth is also a thief of extraordinary ability. Like Arsène Lupin, Máximo Roldán will solve the most intricate and baffling murder if by so doing he can pick up a pocketful of pesos. In fact, the more you read of Roldán’s audacious adventures, the more you’ll think of him as the Mexican Lupin — a bouquet, not a brickbat, since Roldán has executed some roguish-detectival coups brilliant enough to be ascribed to the immortal Arsène himself.

For one of the most interesting parallels in detective-story plot and counter-plot, compare Antonio Helú’s “The Stickpin” with Maurice Leblanc’s “The Red Silk Scarf.” The Lupin story first appeared in 1912, the Roldán story in 1928. Alike in basic Conception, they are continents apart in execution; alike in spirit, they are nevertheless wholly individual. As Sherlock Holmes drew on Dupin, so Roldán derives from Lupin; but like Holmes, Roldán (especially when you get to know him better) achieves a stature all his own.

And now, blaze a trail with the first great detective-thief out of Mexico.

It was, of course, those two details that gave Máximo Roldán the key to the whole affair: the garter that belonged to the nephew and the stickpin that didn’t belong to anyone. But, as he so often asked himself afterwards, if it hadn’t been for those 10,000 pesos in jewels, would he ever have paid any attention to either garter or stickpin?

If the reader has ever passed along the Calle de los Millones, the Street of Millions, in that district of Mexico City known as the Colonia Roma, he may have observed that it is composed of no less than twenty houses all nearly identical. He may have seen the gardens that surround each of them on all four sides. And he may have noticed that only one of these homes violates the uniformity of gardens and façades — one house which has, instead of the railings that surround the others, a very high and thick wall which hides it almost completely from the street. He may have been astonished, not so much because this house is protected by such a wall but because the others, all belonging to millionaires, are surrounded only by easily climbed railings. And most of all he may have been startled to learn that the house with the wall is perhaps the only one on the Calle de los Millones which is not inhabited by a millionaire.

But it is unlikely that the reader knows the street at all. It is reserved exclusively for millionaires (always excepting the house with the wall), and millionaires avoid social intercourse with anyone below their financial level. And the reader, so far as I know, has something less than a million on hand at the moment.

Thus when the crime in the Calle de los Millones became the talk of the town, there were few men who had a clear idea of the locale or of the circumstances in which it was committed. You had to be content with the details which the afternoon papers brought out on the very day of the crime. And these were hardly detailed enough.

This is roughly what the papers said:

That was all.