Delphi complete works of.., p.241
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 241
“I could not help marveling again how this strange being could have acquired his minute and varied knowledge.”
The Great Detective’s personality having been thus arranged, he is brought along with the Poor Nut and Inspector Higginbottom to Althorpe Chase and it is now up to him to start to “solve” the mystery. Till a little while ago, the favorite way of having him do this was by means of tracks, footprints, and other traces. This method, which has now worn threadbare, had a tremendous vogue. According to it, the Great Detective never questioned anybody.
But his real work was done right at the scene of the crime, crawling round on the carpet of the library, and wriggling about on the grass outside. After he has got up after two days of crawling, with a broken blade of grass, he would sit down on a stone and play the saxophone and then announce that the mystery is solved and tell Inspector Higginbottom whom to arrest. That was all. He would not explain anything but what the Poor Nut, half crazy with mystification, begged him to do.
“ ’The case,’ he at last explained very airily, ‘has been a simple one, but not without its features of interest.’
“ ’Simple!’ I exclaimed.
“ ’Precisely,’ said he; ‘you see this blade of grass. You tell me that you see nothing. Look at it again under this lense. What do you see? The letters ACK clearly stamped, but in reverse, on the soft green of the grass. What do they mean?”
“ ’Nothing,’ I groaned.
“ ’You are wrong,’ he said, ‘they are the last three letters of the word DACK, the name of a well-known shoemaker in Market Croydon four miles west of the Chase.’
“ ’Good Heavens,’ I said.
“ ’Now look at this soft piece of mud which I have baked and which carries a similar stamp, — ILTON.’
“ ’Ilton, Ilton,’ I repeated, ‘I fear it means less than ever.’
“ ’To you,’ he said. ‘Because you do not observe. Did you never note that makers of trousers nowadays stamp their trouser buttons with their names. These letters are the concluding part of the name BILTON, one of the best-known tailors of Kings Croft, four miles east of the Chase.’
“ ’Good Heavens!’ I cried, ‘I begin to see.’
“ ’Do you?’ he said drily. ‘Then no doubt you can piece together the analysis. Our criminal is wearing a pair of trousers, bought in King’s Croft, and a shoe bought in Market Croydon. What do you infer as to where he lives?’
“ ’Good Heavens,’ I said, ‘I begin to see it!’
“ ’Exactly,’ said the Great Detective. ‘He lives halfway between the two!’
“ ’At the Chase itself!’ I cried. ‘What a fool I have been.’
“ ’You have,’ he answered quietly.”
But unfortunately the public has begun to find this method of traces and tracks a “bit thick.” All these fond old literary fictions are crumbling away.
THE METHOD OF RECONDITE KNOWLEDGE
In fact, they are being very largely replaced by the newer and much more showy expedient that can be called the Method of Recondite Knowledge. The Great Detective is equipped with a sort of super-scientific knowledge of things, materials, substances, chemistry, actions, and reactions that would give him a Ph.D. degree in any school of applied science.
Some of the best detectives of the higher fiction of to-day even maintain a laboratory and a couple of assistants. When they have this, all they need is a little piece of dust or a couple of micrometer sections and the criminal is as good as caught.
Thus, let us suppose that in the present instance Sir Charles Althorpe has been done to death — as so many “elderly gentlemen” were in the fiction of twenty years ago — by the intrusion into his library of a sailor with a wooden leg newly landed from Java. Formerly the crime would have been traced by the top heaviness of his wooden leg — when the man drank beer at the Althorpe Arms, his elbow on the side away from his leg would have left an impression on the bar, similar to the one left where he climbed the window sill.
But in the newer type of story the few grains of dust found near the Body would turn out to be specks from the fiber of Java cocoanut, such as is seen only on the decks of ships newly arrived from Java, and on the clothes of the sailors.
But, by the one method or the other method, the “inexorable chain of logic” can be completed to the last link. The writer can’t go on forever; sooner or later he must own up and say who did it. After two hundred pages, he finds himself up against the brutal necessity of selecting his actual murderer.
So, now then, who did it? Which brings us to the final phase of the Detective Story. Who really killed Sir Charles?
III
THE TRAMP SOLUTION
According to one very simple expedient, the murder was not committed by any of the principal characters at all. It was committed by a tramp. It transpires that the tramp was passing the Chase late that night and was attracted by the light behind the curtain (as tramps are apt to be), and came and peered through the window (as tramps love to do), and when he saw Sir Charles asleep in his chair with the gold watch on the table beside him, he got one of those sudden impulses (such as tramps get when they see a gold watch), and, before he knew what he had done, he had lifted the window and slipped into the room.
Sir Charles woke — and there you are. All quite simple. Indeed, but for the telltale marks on the grass, or the telltale fiber on the carpet, or the telltale something, the murderer would never have been known.
And yet the solution seems paltry. It seems a shame to drag in the poor tattered creature at the very end and introduce and hang him all in one page.
So we have to look round for some other plan.
THE MURDER WAS COMMITTED BY SOMEBODY ELSE
ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT
A solution, which is a prime favorite with at least one very distinguished contemporary author, is to have it turn out that the murderer has been committed by somebody else altogether different. In other words, it was committed by some casual person who just came into the story for about half a second.
Let us make up a simple example. At the Althorpe Arms Inn where the Great Detective and the Poor Nut are staying while they investigate the death of Sir Charles, we bring in, just for one minute, “a burly-looking man in a check suit drinking a glass of ale in the bar.” We ask him quite casually, if he can tell us anything about the state of the road to Farringham. He answers in a surly way that he’s a stranger to these parts and knows nothing of it. That’s all. He doesn’t come in any more till the very end.
But a really experienced reader ought to guess at once that he committed the murder. Look at it: he’s burly; and he’s surly; and he has a check suit; and he drinks ale; and he’s a stranger; that’s enough. Any good law court could hang him for that — in a detective story, anyway.
When at last the truth dawns on the Poor Nut.
“ ’Great Heavens,’ I exclaimed, ‘the man in the check suit?’
“The Great Detective nodded.
“ ’But how on earth!’ I exclaimed, more mystified than ever, ‘were you ever led to suspect it?’
“ ’From the very first,’ said my friend, turning to Inspector Higginbottom, who nodded in confirmation, ‘we had a strong clew.’
“ ’A clew!’ I exclaimed.
“ ’Yes, one of the checks on his coat had been cached.’
“ ’Cashed,’ I cried.
“ ’You misunderstand me; not “cashed,” CACHED. He had cut it out and hidden it. A man who cuts out part of his coat and hides it on the day after a crime is probably concealing something.’
“ ’Great Heavens!’ I exclaimed, ‘how obvious it sounds when you put it that way. To think that I never thought of it!’”
THE SOLUTION OF THE THOROUGHLY DANGEROUS WOMAN
According to this method, the crime was committed by a thoroughly bad, thoroughly dangerous woman, generally half foreign — which is supposed to account for a lot. She has just come into the story casually — as a nurse, or as an assistant book-keeper, or, more usual and much better, as a “discarded flame” of somebody or other.
These discarded flames flicker all through detective literature as a terrible warning to persons of a fickle disposition. In any case, great reliance is placed on foreign blood as accounting for her. For Anglo-Saxon readers, if you put a proper quantity of foreign blood into a nurse and then discard her, that will do the trick every time.
To show how thoroughly bad she is, the Dangerous Woman used to be introduced by the writers of the Victorian age as smoking a cigarette. She also wore “high-heeled shoes and a skirt that reached barely to her ankles.” In our time, she would have to do a little better than that. In short, as the key to a murder, we must pass her by. She would get acquitted every time.
Let us try something else.
THE SOLUTION THAT THE MURDER WAS COMMITTED BY BLUE EDWARD
According to this explanation of the mysterious crime, it turns out, right at the end of the story, that the murder was not done by any of the people suspected — neither by the Butler, nor the Half Hero, nor the Tramp, nor the Dangerous Woman. Not at all. It was the work of one of the most audacious criminals ever heard of (except that the reader never heard of him till this second), the head and brain of a whole gang of criminals, ramifying all over Hades.
This head criminal generally goes under some such terrible name as Black Pete, or Yellow Charlie, or Blue Edward. As soon as his name is mentioned, then at once not only the Great Detective but everybody else knows all about him — except only the reader and the Nut, who is always used as a proxy for the reader in matters of astonishment or simplicity of mind.
At the very height of the chase, a new murder, that of a deputy police inspector (they come cheap; it’s not like killing one of the regular characters), is added to the main crime of killing Sir Charles. The manner of the murder — by means of a dropping bullet fired three miles away with its trajectory computed by algebra — has led to the arrest. The Great Detective, calculating back the path of the bullet, has ordered by telephone the arrest of a man three miles away. As the Detective, the Nut, and the police stand looking at the body of the murdered policeman, word comes from Scotland Yard that the arrest is made:
“The Great Detective stood looking about him, quietly shaking his head. His eye rested a moment on the prostrate body of Sub-Inspector Bradshaw, then turned to scrutinize the neat hole drilled in the glass of the window.
“ ’I see it all now,’ he murmured. ‘I should have guessed it sooner. There is no doubt whose work this is.’
“ ’Who is it?’ I asked.
“ ’Blue Edward,’ he announced quietly.
“ ’Blue Edward!’ I exclaimed.
“ ’Blue Edward,’ he repeated.
“ ’Blue Edward!’ I reiterated, ‘but who then is Blue Edward?’ ”
This, of course, is the very question that the reader is wanting to ask. Who on earth is Blue Edward? The question is answered at once by the Great Detective himself.
“ ’The fact that you have never heard of Blue Edward merely shows the world that you have lived in. As a matter of fact, Blue Edward is the terror of four continents. We have traced him to Shanghai, only to find him in Madagascar. It was he who organized the terrible robbery at Irkutsk in which ten mujiks were blown up with a bottle of Epsom salts.
“ ’It was Blue Edward who for years held the whole of Philadelphia in abject terror, and kept Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on the jump for even longer. At the head of a gang of criminals that ramifies all over the known globe, equipped with a scientific education that enables him to read and write and use a typewriter with the greatest ease, Blue Edward has practically held the police of the world at bay for years.
“ ’I suspected his hand in this from the start. From the very outset, certain evidences pointed to the work of Blue Edward.’ ”
After which all the police inspectors and spectators keep shaking their heads and murmuring, “Blue Edward, Blue Edward,” until the reader is sufficiently impressed.
IV
The writing of a detective story, without a doubt, gets harder and harder toward the end. It is not merely the difficulty of finding a suitable criminal; there is added the difficulty of knowing what to do with him. It is a tradition of three centuries of novel writing that a story ought to end happily. But in this case, how end up happily?
For example, here we have Blue Edward, caught at last, with handcuffs on his wrists — Blue Edward, the most dangerous criminal that ever interwove the underworld into a solid mesh; Blue Edward, who — well, in fact, the whole aim of the writer only a little while before was to show what a heller Blue Edward was. True, we never heard of him until near the end of the book, but when he did get in we were told that his Gang had ramified all the way from Sicily to Oklahoma. Now, what are we to do?
If it is not Blue Edward, then we’ve got to hang the Tramp — the poor tattered creature who fried potatoes by the hedge. But we are called upon to notice that now he has “a singularly vacant eye.” You can hardly hang a man with a vacant eye. It doesn’t do.
What if we send him to prison for life? But that’s pretty cold stuff, too — sitting looking at four stone walls with a vacant eye for forty years. In fact, the more we think of it, the less satisfied we are with hanging the Tramp. Personally I’d rather hang Meadows the Butler, as we first set out to do, or I’d hang the Nut or the Thoroughly Bad Woman, or any of them.
In the older fiction, they used to face this problem fairly and squarely. They hanged them — and apparently they liked it. But nowadays we can’t do it. We have lost the old-fashioned solid satisfaction in it, so we have to look round for another solution. Here is one, a very favorite one with our sensitive generation. If I had to give it a name, I would call it ——
THE CRIMINAL WITH THE HACKING COUGH
The method of it is very simple. Blue Edward, or whoever is to be “it,” is duly caught. There’s no doubt of his guilt. But at the moment when the Great Detective and the Ignorant Police are examining him he develops a “hacking cough.” Indeed, as he starts to make his confession, he can hardly talk for hacks.
“ ’Well,’ says the criminal, looking round at the little group of police officers, ‘the game is up — hack! hack! — and I may as well make a clean breast of it — hack, hack, hack.’ ”
Any trained reader when he hears these hacks knows exactly what they are to lead up to. The criminal, robust though he seemed only a chapter ago when he jumped through a three-story window after throttling Sub-Inspector Juggins half to death, is a dying man. He has got one of those terrible diseases known to fiction as a “mortal complaint.” It wouldn’t do to give it an exact name, or somebody might get busy and cure it. The symptoms are a hacking cough and a great mildness of manner, an absence of all profanity, and a tendency to call everybody “you gentlemen.” Those things spell finis.
In fact, all that is needed now is for the Great Detective himself to say, “Gentlemen” (they are all gentlemen at this stage of the story), “a higher conviction than any earthly law has, et cetera, et cetera.” With that, the curtain is dropped, and it is understood that the criminal made his exit the same night.
That’s better, decidedly better. And yet, lacking in cheerfulness, somehow.
It is just about as difficult to deal with the Thoroughly Bad Woman. The general procedure is to make her raise a terrible scene. When she is at last rounded up and caught, she doesn’t “go quietly” like the criminal with the hacking cough or the repentant tramp. Not at all. She raises — in fact, she is made to raise so much that the reader will be content to waive any prejudice about the disposition of criminals, to get her out of the story.
“The woman’s face as Inspector Higginbottom snapped the handcuffs on her wrists was livid with fury.
“ ’Gur-r-r-r-r-r!’ she hissed.”
(This was her favorite exclamation and shows the high percentage of her foreign blood.)
“ ’Gu-r-r-r-r! I hate you all. Do what you like with me. I would kill him again a thousand times, the old fool.’
“She turned furiously towards my friend (the Great Detective).
“ ’As for you,’ she said, ‘I hate you. Gur-r-r! See, I spit at you. Gur-r-r-r!’ ”
In that way, the Great Detective gets his, though, of course, his impassive face never showed a sign. Spitting on him doesn’t faze him. Then she turns on the Heroine and gives her what’s coming to her.
“ ’And you! Gur-r-r! I despise you, with your baby face! Gur-r-r! And now you think you will marry him! I laugh at you! Ha! Ha! Hahula!’ ”
And after that she turns on the Nut and gives him some, and then some for Inspector Higginbottom, and thus with three “Gur-r-r’s” for everybody and a “Ha! ha!” as a tiger, off she goes.
But, take it which way you will, the ending is never satisfactory. Not even the glad news that the Heroine sank into the Poor Nut’s arms, never to leave them again, can relieve the situation. Not even the knowledge that they erected a handsome memorial to Sir Charles, or that the Great Detective played the saxophone for a week can quite compensate us.
The Epilogue of This Book: An Elegy Near a City Freight Yard
The Epilogue of This Book
IF THIS BOOK has in it any general theme, it is the contrast between yesterday and to-day, between to-day and to-morrow; the contrast between the life of the past and that of the future.
Nor is the contrast in the aspect of life alone. The circumstance and setting of even Death itself have altered. As witness, what here follows:
AN ELEGY NEAR A CITY FREIGHT YARD
The descendants of the people who were chronicled by the poet Gray, in his immortal Elegy, more than a century and a half ago, came out, many of them, to America. They left the country for the city. They became a part of the vast unnumbered working population of the industrial centers of the American continent. They knew no longer the drooping elms and the yew tree’s shade where the turf heaved in many a moldering heap. And in their new environment the aspect and complexion even of Death for them was altered.
