By Caroline (King) Duer (1865-1956).
First appearance: Pearson's Magazine (U.S.), August 1906.
Reprinted in Pearson's Magazine (U.S.), May 1915 and The Underworld, March 1928.
Short short short story (4 pages).
Online at Google Books (HERE).
"The longer I watched, the more convinced I became that this protection had in some way proved insufficient, and that something of a nefarious nature, some-thing, at least, that required looking into, was taking place within a compara-tively few feet of me."Once upon a muggy midnight dreary there's skulduggery afoot, or so our unnamed
narrator thinks. Thank goodness he has his roommate Thompkins to help clear things
up—Thompkins the sagacious, Thompkins the imperturbable, Thompkins the blithering
idiot . . .
Resources:
- To judge from the FictionMags list, Caroline Duer seldom wrote crime fiction—usually romantic stuff. For more background, see Wikipedia (HERE), the Social Archive (HERE),
and the IMDb (HERE), which has her sole film credit; we also encountered one of her
stories, "The Unconscious Detective" (1902), a couple of years ago (HERE).
The bottom line: "If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs, it's just possible that you haven't grasped the situation."
— Jean Kerr
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