The Legendary Detectives II: 8 Classic Novelettes Featuring the World

'And now, take it from the start. It lies between few people, but at least three. You want one person for suicide; two people for murder; but at least three people for blackmail.'

'Why?' asked the priest softly.

'Well, obviously,' cried his friend, 'there must be one to be exposed; one to threaten exposure; and one at least whom exposure would horrify.'

After a long ruminant pause, the priest said: 'You miss a logical step. Three persons are needed as ideas. Only two are needed as agents.'

'What can you mean?' asked the other.

'Why shouldn't a blackmailer,' asked Brown, in a low voice, 'threaten his victim with himself? Suppose a wife became a rigid teetotaler in order to frighten her husband into concealing his pub-frequenting, and then wrote him blackmailing letters in another hand, threatening to tell his wife! Why shouldn't it work? Suppose a father forbade a son to gamble and then, following him in a good disguise, threatened the boy with his own sham paternal strictness! Suppose – but, here we are, my friend.'

'My God!' cried Flambeau; 'you don't mean-'

An active figure ran down the steps of the house and showed under the golden lamplight the unmistakable head that resembled the Roman coin. 'Miss Carstairs,' said Hawker without ceremony, 'wouldn't go in till you came.'

'Well,' observed Brown confidently, 'don't you think it's the best thing she can do to stop outside – with you to look after her? You see, I rather guess you have guessed it all yourself.'

'Yes,' said the young man, in an undertone, 'I guessed on the sands and now I know; that was why I let him fall soft.'

Taking a latchkey from the girl and the coin from Hawker, Flambeau let himself and his friend into the empty house and passed into the outer parlor. It was empty of all occupants but one. The man whom Father Brown had seen pass the tavern was standing against the wall as if at bay; unchanged, save that he had taken off his black coat and was wearing a brown dressing-gown.

'We have come,' said Father Brown politely, 'to give back this coin to its owner.' And he handed it to the man with the nose.

Flambeau's eyes rolled. 'Is this man a coin-collector?' he asked.

'This man is Mr. Arthur Carstairs,' said the priest positively, 'and he is a coin-collector of a somewhat singular kind.'

The man changed color so horribly that the crooked nose stood out on his face like a separate and comic thing. He spoke, nevertheless, with a sort of despairing dignity. 'You shall see, then,' he said, 'that I have not lost all the family qualities.' And he turned suddenly and strode into an inner room, slamming the door.

'Stop him!' shouted Father Brown, bounding and half-falling over a chair; and, after a wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it was too late. In dead silence Flambeau strode across and telephoned for doctor and police.

An empty medicine bottle lay on the floor. Across the table the body of the man in the brown dressing-gown lay amid his burst and gaping brown-paper parcels; out of which poured and rolled, not Roman, but very modern English coins.

The priest held up the bronze head of Caesar. 'This,' he said, 'was all that was left of the Carstairs Collection.'

After a silence he went on, with more than common gentleness: 'It was a cruel will his wicked father made, and you see he did resent it a little. He hated the Roman money he had, and grew fonder of the real money denied him. He not only sold the Collection bit by bit, but sank bit by bit to the basest ways of making money – even to blackmailing his own family in a disguise. He blackmailed his brother from Australia for his little forgotten crime (that is why he took the cab to Wagga Wagga in Putney), he blackmailed his sister for the theft he alone could have noticed. And that, by the way, is why she had that supernatural guess when he was away on the sand-dunes. Mere figure and gait, however distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up face quite close.'

There was another silence. 'Well,' growled the detective, 'and so this great numismatist and coin-collector was nothing but a vulgar miser.'

'Is there so great a difference?' asked Father Brown, in the same strange, indulgent tone. 'What is there wrong about a miser that is not often as wrong about a collector? What is wrong, except… thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image; thou shalt not bow down to them nor serve them, for I… but we must go and see how the poor young people are getting on.'

'I think,' said Flambeau, 'that in spite of everything, they are probably getting on very well.'

THE SILENT BULLET

(Detective: Craig Kennedy)

Arthur B. Reeve

Arthur B. Reeve’s (1880-1936) Craig Kennedy, scientific detective, although almost unknown to mystery readers today, was so popular in his own era, that his adventures, beginning in 1912, ran to twenty-five volumes spanning as many years. He also inspired movies, serials and even an early 1950s television series, Crag Kennedy, Criminologist. Craig Kennedy was the most successful of a slew of scientific detectives crowding magazine pages in the early 1900s. With new scientific breakthroughs and inventions being announced every day – wireless telegraphy, the dictaphone, the x-ray, etc. – crime fighters who employed the latest technological marvels to track down evildoers held great appeal for readers. Craig Kennedy shared the pages with Luther Trent, Max Rittenberg, Dr. Thorndyke, Taine of San Francisco, and dozens of other high- powered scientific super-sleuths. Kennedy himself was the brainchild of a series of newspaper articles on scientific crime detection his creator had written, which gives his stories, an additional touch of authenticity.

I.

'Detectives in fiction nearly always make a great mistake,' said Kennedy one evening after our first conversation on crime and science. 'They almost invariably antagonize the regular detective force. Now in real life that's impossible – it's fatal.'

'Yes,' I agreed, looking up from reading an account of the failure of a large Wall Street brokerage house, Kerr Parker & Co., and the peculiar suicide of Kerr Parker. 'Yes, it's impossible, just as it is impossible for the regular detectives to antagonise the newspapers. Scotland Yard found that out in the Crippen case.'

'My idea of the thing, Jameson,' continued Kennedy, 'is that the professor of criminal science ought to work with, not against, the regular detectives. They're all right. They're indispensable, of course. Half the secret of success nowadays is organization. The professor of criminal science should be merely what the professor in a technical school often is – a sort of consulting engineer. For instance, I believe that organization plus science would go far to ward clearing up that Wall Street case I see you are reading.'

I expressed some doubt as to whether the regular police were enlightened enough to take that view of it.

'Some of them are,' he replied. 'Yesterday the chief of police in a Western city sent a man East to see me about the Price murder: you know the case?'

Indeed I did. A wealthy banker of the town had been murdered on the road to the golf club, no one knew why or by whom. Every clue had proved fruitless, and the list of suspects was itself so long and so impossible as to