American Sherlocks Nick Rennison (best big ereader txt) 📖

The stock-keeper was the first to speak.

‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Somebody broke that window!’ And it was true. Somebody had not only broken the window, but had broken every pane and the sash itself. But Mr Gubb was not interested in this. He was gazing at the electric bulb and thinking of Part Two, Lesson Six of the Course of Twelve Lessons – ‘How to Identify by Finger-Prints, with General Remarks on the Bertillon System.’ He looked about for some means of reaching the bulb above his head. His eye lit on the fallen chair. By placing the chair upright and placing one foot on the frame of Henry Smitz’s machine and the other on the chair-back, he could reach the bulb. He righted the chair and stepped onto its seat. He put one foot on the frame of Henry Smitz’s machine; very carefully he put the other foot on the top of the chair-back. He reached upward and unscrewed the bulb.

The stock-keeper saw the chair totter. He sprang forward to steady it, but he was too late. Philo Gubb, grasping the air, fell on the broad, level board that formed the middle part of Henry Smitz’s machine.

The effect was instantaneous. The cogs and wheels of the machine began to revolve rapidly. Two strong, steel arms flopped down and held Detective Gubb to the table, clamping his arms to his side. The roll of burlap unrolled, and as it unrolled, the loose end was seized and slipped under Mr Gubb and wrapped around him and drawn taut, bundling him as a sheep’s carcass is bundled. An arm reached down and back and forth, with a sewing motion, and passed from Mr Gubb’s head to his feet. As it reached his feet a knife sliced the burlap in which he was wrapped from the burlap on the roll.

And then a most surprising thing happened. As if the board on which he lay had been a catapult, it suddenly and unexpectedly raised Philo Gubb and tossed him through the open window. The stock-keeper heard a muffled scream and then a great splash, but when he ran to the window, the great paper-hanger detective had disappeared in the bosom of the Mississippi.

Like Henry Smitz he had tried to reach the ceiling by standing on the chair-back; like Henry Smitz he had fallen upon the newly invented burlaping and loading machine; like Henry Smitz he had been wrapped and thrown through the window into the river; but, unlike Henry Smitz, he had not been sewn into the burlap, because Philo Gubb had the double-pointed shuttle-action needle in his pocket.

Page Seventeen of Lesson Eleven of the Rising Sun Detective Agency’s Correspondence School of Detecting’s Course of Twelve Lessons, says: –

In cases of extreme difficulty of solution it is well for the detective to re-enact as nearly as possible the probable action of the crime.

Mr Philo Gubb had done so. He had also proved that a man may be sewn in a sack and drowned in a river without committing wilful suicide or being the victim of foul play.

CLARE KENDALL

Created by Arthur B Reeve (1880-1936)

Arthur B Reeve was one of the most popular and widely read writers of crime fiction in early twentieth-century America. His most famous character was Craig Kennedy, ‘The Scientific Detective’, one of whose adventures is recorded in the next story in this anthology. Reeve was a prolific author and also created a number of other detectives, including two female sleuths. The better known of these is Constance Dunlap who appeared in a 1913 collection of interlinked short stories. In that same year, Reeve also published a series of magazine stories about Clare Kendall, who works as a private investigator. He returned to the character occasionally in later work and she even plays a role in a Craig Kennedy tale, ‘The Woman Detective’, where she is described as ‘a tall, striking, self-reliant young woman with an engaging smile’. ‘The Mystery of the Stolen Da Vinci’ is an intriguing and entertaining period piece. Describing the theft of a Da Vinci portrait, it was written at a time when the artist’s most famous work had indeed been stolen. The Mona Lisa went missing from the Louvre in 1911 and was only recovered in November 1913. The story also shows that Clare Kendall had the same interest in cutting-edge technology as Reeve’s more famous detective, Craig Kennedy. She solves the mystery using a telegraphone, a device for recording sound which had, as she remarks in the narrative, been recently patented by Valdemar Poulsen, ‘The Danish Edison’.

THE MYSTERY OF THE STOLEN DA VINCI

‘Cut from the frame, the most precious treasure of my whole collection – da Vinci’s lost Ginevra Benci.’

Lawrence Osgood, the American Medici, as the press called him, was standing with Clare Kendall in his private gallery, ruefully regarding a heavy gilt frame which now enclosed nothing but jagged ends of canvas fringing the careful backing on which had hung the famous portrait.

‘And today I received this letter,’ he added, spreading out on a sixteenth-century table a note in a cramped foreign script. ‘What do you make of it?’

It bore neither date nor heading, but as Clare read the signature, she exclaimed, ‘La Mano Nera – the Black Hand!’ Hastily she ran through it:

‘We have heard,’ it read, ‘that you have lost a famous painting. It can be restored to you if you will see Pierre Jacot of Jacot & Cie, the Fifth Avenue dealers. Jacot knows nothing of it yet but this afternoon a woman will let him know how the picture can be secured. It will be returned on payment of $50,000 as we direct. It is useless to try to trace this letter, the messengers we employ or any other means we take to communicate. Such an effort or any dealings with the police will provoke a tragedy and the picture will be lost to