American Sherlocks Nick Rennison (best big ereader txt) 📖

There was no tourniquet that would confine the poison now in the scratch across his face. Back of those lack-lustre eyes he heard and knew, but could not move or speak. His voice was gone, his limbs, his face, his chest, and, last, his eyes. I wondered if it were possible to conceive a more dreadful torture than that endured by a mind which so witnessed the dying of one organ after another of its own body, shut up, as it were, in the fullness of life, within a corpse.

I looked in bewilderment at the scratch on his face. ‘How did he do it?’ I asked.

Carefully Craig drew off the azure ring and examined it. In that part which surrounded the blue lapis lazuli, he indicated a hollow point, concealed. It worked with a spring and communicated with a little receptacle behind, in such a way that the murderer could give the fatal scratch while shaking hands with his victim.

I shuddered, for my hand had once been clasped by the one wearing that poison ring, which had sent Templeton, and his fiancée and now Vanderdyke himself, to their deaths.

MADELYN MACK

Created by Hugh Cosgro Weir (1884-1934)

A fascinating female Sherlock, Madelyn Mack is a young and glamorous American woman with a genius for criminology who works as a private detective in New York. (Although the story below is set in Boston.) Like Conan Doyle’s character, she is possessed of startling deductive abilities. She has her own Watson in the journalist Nora Noraker, who narrates her adventures, and, also like Holmes, she has her eccentricities and foibles. She collects gramophone records, commissioning exclusive performances from famous musicians. During particularly difficult cases, she stores cola berries in a locket around her neck, using them to keep herself awake for days on end. Her creator was Hugh Cosgro Weir, born in Illinois, who had a varied career as a writer, advertising guru, Hollywood screenwriter and magazine publisher. His stories about her first appeared in magazines and then were collected in the volume Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective in 1914. Weir may have based his character on a real-life woman detective named Mary E Holland who was a well-known figure in Chicago in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Madelyn Mack, now nearly forgotten, was popular enough in her day to be the heroine of several films starring Alice Joyce, an actress who appeared in more than 200 movies during the silent era.

CINDERELLA’S SLIPPER

I

Raymond Rennick might have been going to his wedding instead of to his – death. Spick and span in a new spring suit, he paused just outside the broad arched gates of the Duffield estate and drew his silver cigarette case from his pocket. A self-satisfied smile flashed across his face as he struck a match and inhaled the fragrant odour of the tobacco. It was good tobacco, very good tobacco – and Senator Duffield’s private secretary was something of a judge!

For a moment Rennick lingered. It was a day to banish uncomfortable thoughts, to smooth the rough edges of a man’s problems – and burdens. As the secretary glanced up at the soft blue sky, the reflection swept his mind that his own future was as free from clouds. It was a pleasing reflection. Perhaps the cigarette, perhaps the day helped to deepen it as he swung almost jauntily up the winding driveway toward the square white house commanding the terraced lawn beyond.

Just ahead of him a maple tree, standing alone, rustled gaily in its spring foliage like a woman calling attention to her new finery. It was all so fresh and beautiful and innocent! Rennick felt a tingling thrill in his blood. Unconsciously he tossed away his cigarette. He reached the rustling maple and passed it…

From behind the gnarled trunk, a shadow darted. A figure sprang at his shoulders, with the long blade of a dagger awkwardly poised. There was a flash of steel in the sunlight…

It was perhaps ten minutes later that they found him. He had fallen face downward at the edge of the driveway, with his body half across the velvet green of the grass. A thin thread of red, creeping from the wound in his breast, was losing itself in the sod.

One hand was doubled, as in a desperate effort at defence. His glasses were twisted under his shoulders. Death must have been nearly instantaneous. The dagger had reached his heart at the first thrust. One might have fancied an expression of overpowering amazement in the staring eyes. That was all. The weapon had caught him squarely on the left side. He had evidently whirled toward the assassin almost at the instant of the blow.

Whether in the second left him of life he had recognized his assailant, and the recognition had made the death-blow the quicker and the surer, were questions that only deepened the horror of the noon-day.

As though to emphasize the hour, the mahogany clock in Senator Duffield’s library rang out its twelve monotonous chimes as John Dorrence, his valet, beat sharply on the door. The echo of the nervous tattoo was lost in an unanswering silence. Dorrence repeated his knock before he brought an impatient response from beyond the panels.

‘Can you come, sir?’ the valet burst out. ‘Something awful has happened, sir. It’s, it’s –’

The door was flung open. A ruddy-faced man with thick white hair and grizzled moustache, and the hints of a nervous temperament showing in his eyes and voice, sprang into the hall. Somebody once remarked that Senator Duffield was Mark Twain’s double. The Senator took the comparison as a compliment, perhaps because it was a woman who made it.

Dorrence seized his master by the sleeve, which loss of dignity did more to impress the Senator with the gravity of the situation than all of the servant’s excitable words.

‘Mr Rennick, sir, has been stabbed, sir, on the lawn, and Miss Beth, sir –’

Senator Duffield staggered against the wall. The valet’s alarm swerved to another channel.

‘Shall I get the brandy, sir?’

‘Brandy?’