The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  “By Jove!” cried Fred, “that’s it, Elinor; and the canny fellow had wit enough to push the catch back in place after he was outside again.”

  I said nothing, for a moment. My thoughts were adjusting themselves quickly to the new situation from which I must make my deductions. I realized at once that I must give up my theory of the tutor, of course, and anyway I hadn’t had a scrap of evidence against him except his fitness for the position. But, given the surety of burglars from outside, I knew just what to do: look for footprints, to be sure.

  I glanced around for the light snow that always falls in detective stories just before the crime is committed, and is testified, usually by the village folk, to have stopped just at the crucial moment. But there wasn’t a sign of snow or rain or even dew. The veranda showed no footprints, nor could the smooth lawn or flagged walks be expected to. I leaned against the veranda railing in despair, wondering what Sherlock Holmes would do in a provoking absence of footprints, when I saw in the flower-bed beneath several well-defined marks of a man’s shoes.

  “There you are, Fred!” I cried, and rushed excitedly down the steps.

  They all followed, and, sure enough, in the soft earth of the wide flower-bed that surrounded the veranda were strong, clear prints of large masculine footgear.

  “That clears us, girls,” cried Janet gleefully, as she measured her daintily shod foot against the depressions.

  “Don’t touch them!” I cried. “Call Mr. Prout the detective.”

  Mr. Prout appeared, and politely hiding his chagrin at not having discovered these marks before I did, proceeded to examine them closely.

  “You see,” he said in a pompous and dictatorial way, “there are four prints pointing toward the house, and four pointing toward the street. Those pointing to the street are superimposed upon those leading to the house, hence we deduce that they were made by a burglar who crossed the flower-bed, climbed the veranda, stepped over the rail, and entered at the window. He then returned the same way, leaving these last footprints above the others.”

  As all this was so palpably evident from the facts of the case, I was not impressed much by the subtlety of his deductions and asked him what he gathered from the shape of the prints.

  He looked at the well-defined prints intently. “They are of a medium size,” he announced at last, “and I should say that they were made by a man of average height and weight, who had a normal-sized foot.”

  Well, if that wasn’t disappointing! I thought of course that he would tell the man’s occupation and social status, even if he didn’t say that he was left-handed or that he stuttered, which is the kind of thing detectives in fiction always discover.

  So I lost all interest in that Prout man, and began to do a little deducing on my own account. Although I felt sure, as we all did, that the thief was a burglar from outside, yet I couldn’t measure the shoes of an absent and unidentified burglar, and somehow I felt an uncontrollable impulse to measure shoes.

  Without consulting anybody, I found a tape-measure and carefully measured the footprints. Then I went through the house and measured all the men’s shoes I could find, from the stable-boy’s up to Fred’s.

  It’s an astonishing fact, but nearly all of them fitted the measurements of the prints on the flower-bed. Men’s feet are so nearly universal in size, or rather their shoes are, and too, what with extension soles and queer-shaped lasts, you can’t tell anything about the size or style of a man from his footprints.

  So I gave up deducing and went to talk to Fred Farland.

  “Fred,” I said simply, “did you take Christabel’s crystal?”

  “No,” he answered with equal simplicity, and he looked me in the eyes so squarely and honestly that I knew he spoke the truth.

  “Who did?” I next inquired.

  “It was a professional burglar,” said Fred, “and a mighty cute one; but I’m going to track him and get that crystal back before Christabel comes home.”

  “Let me help!” I cried eagerly. “I’ve got the true detective instinct, and I know I can do something.”

  “You?” said Fred incredulously. “No, you can’t help; but I don’t mind telling you my plan. You see I expect Lord Hammerton down to make me a visit. He’s a jolly young English chap that I chummed with in London. Now, he’s a first-rate amateur detective, and though I didn’t expect him till next month, he’s in New York, and I’ve no doubt that he’d be willing to come right off. No one will know he’s doing any detecting; and I’ll wager he’ll lay his hands on that ball in less than a week.”

  “Lovely!” I exclaimed. “And I’ll be here to see him do it!”

  “Yes, the mater says you’re to stay a fortnight or more; but mind, this is our secret.”

  “Trust me,” I said earnestly; “but let me help if I can, won’t you?”

  “You’ll help most by not interfering,” declared Fred, and though it didn’t altogether suit me, I resolved to help that way rather than not at all.

  A few days later Lord Hammerton came. He was not in any way an imposing-looking man. Indeed, he was a typical Englishman of the Lord Cholmondeley type, and drawled and used a monocle most effectively. The afternoon he came we told him all about the crystal. The talk turned to detective work and detective instinct. Lord Hammerton opined in his slow languid drawl that the true detective mind was not dependent upon instinct, but was a nicely adjusted mentality that was quick to see the cause back of an effect.

  Herbert Gay said that while this doubtless was so, yet it was an even chance whether the cause so skilfully deduced was the true one.

  “Quite so,” agreed Lord Hammerton amiably, “and that is why the detective in real life fails so often. He deduces properly the logical facts from the evidence before him; but real life and real events are so illogical that his deductions, though true theoretically, are false from mere force of circumstances.”

  “And that is why,” I said, “detectives in story-books always deduce rightly, because the obliging author makes the literal facts coincide with the theoretical ones.”

  Lord Hammerton put up his monocle and favored me with a truly British stare. “It is unusual,” he remarked slowly, “to find such a clear comprehension of this subject in a feminine mind.”

  They all laughed at this; but I went on: “It is easy enough to make the spectacular detective of fiction show marvelous penetration and logical deduction when the antecedent circumstances are arranged carefully to prove it all; but place even Sherlock Holmes face to face with a total stranger, and I, for one, don’t believe that he could tell anything definite about him.”

  “Oh, come now! I can’t agree to that,” said Lord Hammerton, more interestedly than he had spoken before. “I believe there is much in the detective instinct besides the exotic and the artificial. There is a substantial basis of divination built on minute observation, and which I have picked up in some measure myself.”

  “Let us test that statement,” cried Herbert Gay. “Here comes Mr. Wayne, Harold’s tutor. Lord Hammerton never has seen him, and before Wayne even speaks let Lord Hammerton tell us some detail, which he divines by observation.”

  All agreed to this, and a few minutes later Mr. Wayne came up. We laughingly explained the situation to him and asked him to have himself deduced.

  Lord Hammerton looked at Arthur Wayne for a few minutes, and then said, still in his deliberate drawl: “You have lived in Japan for the past seven years, in Government service in the interior, and only recently have returned.”

  A sudden silence fell upon us all—not so much because Lord Hammerton made deductions from no apparent evidence, but because we all knew Mr. Wayne had told Detective Prout that he never had been in Japan.

  Fred Farland recovered himself first, and said: “Now that you’ve astonished us with your results, tell us how you attained them.”

  “It is simple enough,�
�� said Lord Hammerton, looking at young Wayne, who had turned deathly white. “It is simple enough, sir. The breast-pocket on the outside of your coat is on the right-hand side. Now it never is put there. Your coat is a good one—Poole, or some London tailor of that class. He never made a coat with an outer breast-pocket on the right side. You have had the coat turned—thus the original left-hand pocket appears now on the right side.

  “Looking at you, I see that you have not the constitution which could recover from an acute attack of poverty. If you had it turned from want, you would not have your present effect of comfortable circumstances. Now, you must have had it turned because you were in a country where tailoring is not frequent, but sewing and delicate manipulation easy to find. India? You are not bronzed. China? The same. Japan? Probable; but not treaty ports—there are plenty of tailors there. Hence, the interior of Japan.

  “Long residence, to make it incumbent on you to get the coat turned, means Government service, because unattached foreigners are allowed only as tourists. Then the cut of the coat is not so very old, and as contracts run seven or fourteen years with the Japanese, I repeat that you probably resided seven years in the interior of Japan, possibly as an irrigation engineer.”

  I felt sorry then for poor Mr. Wayne. Lord Hammerton’s deductions were absolutely true, and coming upon the young man so suddenly he made no attempt to refute them.

  And so as he had been so long in Japan, and must have been familiar with rock crystals for years, Fred questioned him sternly in reference to his false statements.

  Then he broke down completely and confessed that he had taken Christabel’s crystal because it had fascinated him.

  He declared that he had a morbid craving for crystals; that he had crept down to the present-room late that night, merely to look at the wonderful, beautiful ball; that it had so possessed him that he carried it to his room to gaze at for a while, intending to return with it after an hour or so. When he returned he saw Fred Farland, and dared not carry out his plan.

  “And the footprints?” I asked eagerly.

  “I made them myself,” he explained with a dogged shamefacedness. “I did have a moment of temptation to keep the crystal, and so tried to make you think that a burglar had taken it; but the purity and beauty of the ball itself so reproached me that I tried to return it. I didn’t do so then, and since—”

  “Since?” urged Fred, not unkindly.

  “Well, I’ve been torn between fear and the desire to keep the ball. You will find it in my trunk. Here is the key.”

  There was a certain dignity about the young man that made him seem unlike a criminal, or even a wrong-doer.

  As for me, I entirely appreciated the fact that he was hypnotized by the crystal and in a way was not responsible. I don’t believe that man would steal anything else in the world.

  Somehow the others agreed with me, and as they had recovered the ball, they took no steps to prosecute Mr. Wayne.

  He went away at once, still in that dazed, uncertain condition. We never saw him again; but I hope for his own sake that he never was subjected to such a temptation.

  Just before he left, I said to him out of sheer curiosity: “Please explain one point, Mr. Wayne. Since you opened and closed that window purposely to mislead us, since you made those footprints in the flower-bed for the same reason, and since to do it you must have gone out and then come back, why were the outgoing footprints made over the incoming ones?”

  “I walked backward on purpose,” said Mr. Wayne simply.

  DETECTIVE: MADELYN MACK

  THE BULLET FROM NOWHERE

  Hugh C. Weir

  READERS OF PURE DETECTIVE STORIES have a special fondness for impossible crimes, and Hugh Cosgro Weir (1884–1934), in Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective (1914), his only volume of mystery fiction, managed to produce two: “The Bullet from Nowhere” and “The Man with Nine Lives.”

  Born in Illinois, he became a reporter in Ohio at the age of sixteen before becoming a prolific writer of short stories and magazine articles, with more than three hundred to his credit, as well as a fantastically tireless writer of stories for the screen as well as screenplays, having written at least three hundred, the first of which was for Universal Studios at the age of twenty. All were silent films and are largely unknown today.

  Although he wrote mystery stories for such top pulp magazines as Flynn’s Weekly, Weir is remembered today solely for Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective, which he dedicated to Mary Holland: “This is your book. It is you, woman detective of real life, who suggested Madelyn. It was the stories told me from your own note-book of men’s knavery that suggested these exploits of Miss Mack.”

  Miss Mack became a detective while still in college and was immediately successful, her recorded cases narrated in first person by her friend Nora. The young detective denied having any special talents, ascribing her ability to catch criminals to hard work and common sense, though she concludes that imagination is also important, stating that “a woman, I think, always has a more acute imagination than a man!”

  Later in life, Weir cofounded with Catherine McNelis an advertising agency and Tower Magazines, of which he was editorial director at the time of his death. Founded in 1929 during the Depression, its magazines (The New Movie Magazine, Detective, Home, and Love) became overnight smashes, with total circulation announced at 1.3 million. In 1935, the company abruptly went bankrupt when advertisers claimed they had been defrauded with inflated circulation numbers, and McNelis was found guilty and sentenced to a year and a day in jail.

  “The Bullet from Nowhere” was originally published in the October 1914 issue of MacLean’s Magazine; it was first collected in Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective (Boston, The Page Company, 1914).

  The Bullet from Nowhere

  HUGH C. WEIR

  I

  LOUDER AND LOUDER, as though the musician had abandoned himself to the wild spirit of his crashing climax, the pealing strains of the “storm scene” from “William Tell” rolled out from the keys of the mahogany piano, through the closed doors of Homer Hendricks’s music-room, and down the stairs to the waiting group below.

  The slender, white fingers of the musician quivered with feverish energy. Into his thin, pale face, white with the pallor of midnight studies, crept two dull spots of hectic color. His eyes glistened with the gleam of the inspired artist, who behind the printed music sees the soul of the composer.

  Save only for his short, pompadoured red hair, bristling above his forehead like a stiff, wiry brush, and his chin, too square and stubborn for a dreamer, Homer Hendricks, who made the law his profession and music his recreation, presented all of the characteristics of the picturesque genius.

  The group in the library had crowded close to the hall door, as though fearing to miss a note in the rolling climax from the piano above. Montague Weston, tossing his neglected cigarette aside, was the first to break the spell.

  “He’s a wonder!” he breathed.

  The girl in white at his elbow glanced toward him with swift enthusiasm.

  “Doubly so! To think that a man who can make music like that is also rated as the leading corporation lawyer in the State!”

  Weston shrugged. “Yes, he calls his piano only his plaything.”

  The girl lowered her voice. “Is it true—you know this is my first visit here—that he is as eccentric as we read in those sensational newspaper articles?”

  A slow smile broke over Weston’s face. “That depends on your idea of eccentricity, Miss Morrison. Some persons, for instance, might deem his present performance the height of oddity. Hendricks never plays except when he is alone in his own music-room with the door closed!”

  “Really!” The girl’s eyes were wide with her amazement.

  “And again”—Weston was evidently enjoying the other’s naive curiosity—“the fact that Mr. Hendricks has condescend
ed to join our theater party tonight suggests another of his peculiarities. I believe this is the first evening in ten years that he has left his piano before midnight! But then this is a special occasion.”

  “Hilda Wentworth’s birthday?” the girl interjected.

  Weston nodded.

  “All of the affection of a lonely bachelor without a domestic circle of his own is bound up in Homer Hendricks’s love for his niece. And I happen to know, Miss Morrison, how very much alone such a man can be!”

  At the wistful note in Weston’s voice, the vivacious Miss Morrison glanced away quickly.

  “I should not think that would apply to your case!” she said lightly. “If all reports are true, Monty Weston has won almost as great a reputation as a heart-breaker as he has as a trust-breaker!”

  “You flatter both my social and my legal ability!” Weston laughed. He glanced at his watch. “By Jove, it’s after eight! Where are Hilda and Bob Grayson?”

  He turned so suddenly as he put the question that his companion gazed at him in surprise. The second of the two women in the group, Muriel Thornton, smiled shrewdly.

  “Hilda went up-stairs a moment ago,” she volunteered. “As for Bob,” she paused significantly as the shadow deepened on Weston’s face. “Where is Bob?” she added artlessly.

  The rivalry of Weston and Grayson, the struggling young architect, for the favors of Hilda Wentworth had too long been a matter of gossip for the point of the question to pass unnoticed.

  Wilkins, the fourth member of the group, essayed an eager answer in the pause that followed.

  “Bob had a business engagement in his rooms, I believe, and left directly after dinner. He was to have been back by eight, though.”

  Up-stairs, the music still continued. Homer Hendricks had reached the finale of the overture, and Rossini’s majestic strains were rolling out with the sweep of a lashing surf.

  Weston strolled to the door.