The Transcendent Detective

The Transcendent Detective

The status of the fiction detective is so well-defined that it is the habit of authors to scoff at it, and endeavor to convince us that their own detectives are true to life.

For instance, in a Detective Story of some merit, called "The House Opposite, " by Elizabeth Kent, the detective says:

"I am aware that the detective of fiction is always supposed to be omniscient, but my profession, Doctor, is just like any other. There is no hocus-pocus about it. To succeed in it requires, in the first place, accurate and most minute powers of observation, unlimited patience, the capacity of putting two and two together. Add to this an unprejudiced mind, and last, but not least, respect, amounting to reverence, for any established fact. "

Many authors of late think it argues themselves original to indulge in a fleer at the methods of Sherlock Holmes. A typical example of this often-used device is here quoted from "Midnight at Mears House, " by Harrison J. Holt:

As I smoked, my gaze travelled idly about the room till it rested upon the big brass candlestick smeared with melted tallow which we had found that morning on the dining table.

" If I were only another Sherlock Holmes now, " I thought, " I should be able to reconstruct the entire tragedy from that candlestick, supposing of course the murderer used it. An intelligent smell of the wick would tell me what particular brand of matches

he used to light it, and it would only be necessary to visit the one det}ler who kept them and get from him a photograph of the man, or a sufficiently accurate Description of him, to make his arrest a matter of only a trifling difficulty. " I chuckled at the absurdity of the notion. It seemed, however, hardly more far-fetched and ridiculous than some of the great detective's marvelous exploits, which millions of readers have found plausible enough, I daresay, though I was never one of them.

Yielding to a sudden whim, I took down the candlestick from the mantelpiece.

"I should at least be able to deduce a few simple facts from a really scientific examination of it, " I argued, facetiously—" whether the criminal was right or left-handed, for instance, or wore readymade clothes, or if he was suffering from rheumatism or the whooping cough. It must be all here somewhere. "

I proceeded gravely to smell of the wick. It had a decidedly burnt odour, due very likely, I imagined, to its having been lighted. It humiliated me, however, to be unable to decide how it had been lighted. I could not for the life of me make out whether the murderer had used wax vestas, safety matches, ordinary parlor matches, or those infernal things tipped with sulphur commonly known as "hell-sticks. "

He might even have lighted it with one of those self igniting platinum wire and alcohol devices, or with flint and steel, or by rubbing two sticks together, for all I could tell.

I began to feel discouraged. Doubtless there were imprints of his fingers as thick as flies and as plain as billboards all over the candlestick itself, if I could only find them. He would at any rate have left the damning mark of his thumb somewhere upon its shining surface: they were always considerate enough to do that— in the detective stories. It was part of the game. But again I was doomed to disappointment. We must have blurred the impressions through our inconceivable stupidity in touching the thing at all. We should have known enough, I reflected, to have left it alone till we had a chance to study it through a high-powered telescope.

This is good-natured satire, and the very fact that it contains the kernel of truth makes it effective.