Some Less Known detective Portraits

Some Less Known detective Portraits

Gordon Holmes inclines to Wilkie Collins' plan of contrasting the appearance of the real detective and the fictional at once. In "A Mysterious Disappearance" he presents these opposite physical effects:

Inspector White, of Scotland Yard, was announced, and a short, thick-set man entered. He was absolutely round in every part. His sturdy, rotund frame was supported on stout, well-moulded legs. His bullet head, with closecropped hair, gave a suggestion of strength to his rounded face, and a pair of small bright eyes looked suspiciously on the world from beneath well-arched eyebrows.

Two personalities more dissimilar than those of Claude Bruce and Inspector White could hardly be brought together in the same room. People who are fond of tracing resemblances to animals in human beings would liken the one to a grey-hound, the other to a bull-dog.

Yet they were both masters in the art of detecting crime—the barrister subtle, analytic, introspective; the policeman direct, pertinacious, self-confident. Bruce lost all interest in a case when the hidden trail was laid bare. Mr. White regarded investigation as so many hours on duty until his man was transported or hanged.

In "The Whispering Man, " an astonishing detective story by Henry Kitchell Webster, we have this Description of the detective:

He was the sort of a man who never would be spoken of as old, if it were not for his attempts to look young. He was actually, I should judge, somewhere in the middle forties, a tall, graceful, and commanding figure, with a strikingly handsome face. There was

nothing weak about it. The features were big and boldly, though finely, modeled, and the deep-set eyes singularly expressive. The only fault one could find with him was that he carried everything just a little too far. He was too aggressively well dressed; too painfully clean-shaven; his manner a little too dignified; his voice and features a little too expressive. It came upon me all at once what he must be—an actor. That was it. Everything about him was heightened just enough to carry itself over the footlights. He was in evening dress, wore an overcoat and gloves, and carried a walking stick, as well as an irreproachable silk hat, in his hand.

In "The Scales of Justice, " an exceptionally clever surprise story by George L. Knapp, the Hero Detective is not a professional one, but a young newspaper reporter. He is therefore allowed the characteristics of our best newspaper men, but in all probability he inherits his sardonic humor from his predecessor Holmes.

Kern tossed the shears into a drawer, and stood up. He was as tall as the other man, and as straight; and both had that alert look of expectancy, quite unmixed with either wonder or nervousness, which marks our best newspaper men. There the resemblance ended. Jennings was about thirtyfive; smooth-shaven, smiling, brown of hair and blue of eye; with humorous little wrinkles around the eyes to testify of the many funny things he had seen. Kern was twenty-eight or twenty-nine; and his coal-black hair and bronzeblack Vandyke beard made him look more like an Austrian surgeon than an American reporter. His humor was apt to be sardonic; and a certain element of moodiness was seldom absent from his face. "Kern is really a secret sufferer from the artistic temperament, " said the managing editor once, "but so long as he's trying to live it down, I won't give him away. "

"Average Jones, " the creation of Samuel Hopkins Adams, achieves a distinction by being inconspicuous:

He was, so to speak, a composite photograph of any thousand wellconditioned, clean living Americans between the ages of twenty

,

five and thirty. Happily, his otherwise commonplace face was relieved by the one unfailing characteristic of composite photographs, large, deep-set and thoughtful eyes. Otherwise he would have passed in any crowd, and nobody would have noticed him pass. Now, at twenty-seven, he looked back over the five years since his graduation from college and wondered what he had done with them; and at the four previous years of undergraduate life and wondered how he had done so well with those, and why he had not in some manner justified the parting words of his favorite professor: "You have one rare faculty, Jones. You can, when you choose, sharpen the pencil of your mind to a very fine point. Specialize, my boy, specialize "

A little like "The Thinking Machine" is "The Man in the Corner, " described thus by the Baroness Orczy:

The appearance of the man was sufficient to tickle the most ultramorose fancy. Polly thought to herself that she had never seen anyone so pale, so thin, with such funny light-coloured hair, brushed very smoothly across the top of a very dubiously bald crown. He looked so timid and nervous as he fidgeted incessantly with a piece of string; his long, lean, and trembling fingers tying and untying it into knots of wonderful and complicated proportions.

Astro, the hero of Gelett Burgess's book of Mystery Stories, is perhaps the farthest possible remove from a conventional detective in appearance. Though not described categorically, we are given various word pictures of him in his "psychic studio. " There he lounges among oriental divans and draperies, wearing a jewelled turban, flowing silken robes, and other characteristic apparel, as he indulges in the enjoyment of his silver-mounted water-pipe or his pet white lizard. He has sufficiently unusual eccentricities to put him in the list of correctly made up fiction detectives, and though blase, he is original and interesting.