"Well, Gentlemen, Are We Still Under Arrest—or Are You Going To Commend Me for the Chief's Job in Your Bureau?"

LET'S take a break from matters of life and death and, like today's sleuth, focus our

attention on . . .

"The Letters Marked XX."

By Edgar Franklin (Edgar Franklin Stearns, 1879-1958; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; and the IMDb HERE).

First appearance: Argosy, January 1907.

Short story (9 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).

(Note: Text very faded but still legible.)

   "But just after Fennell had started to work the unexpected hitch came—all unknown to him."

A casual request to clear up what seems to be a minor, if baffling, mystery escalates into the exposure of a criminal conspiracy: "Tom, you've been mistaken for a United States post-office . . ."

Main characters:

~ Dr. Jordan ("But you told me once upon a time that all mysteries were capable of being figured out, my boy"), Bridger ("For six or seven minutes the clock ticked loudly. Then Bridger suddenly sat up"), Candee ("His package was about the same in every particular, and he carried it tightly under one arm, but his eyes were very furtive"), the maid ("He was at this house every day for four years, at every delivery"), and the secret service man ("I have a warrant for your arrest"). 

Curious prose:

  "Jordan smiled at his cigar."

Reference:

- "more than three weeks, with typhoid fever" (HERE).

Resources:

- Edgar Franklin's career as a short fiction writer started as a humorist in the May 1903 The Argosy, with the madcap misadventures of Mr. Hawkins, a classic scatter-brained inventor, running through at least 38 stories (1903-04, 1908, 1909-12, and two more in 1915, a list being HERE). The first 12 seem to have been collected into a fix-up novel in 1904 as Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures, available on Project Gutenberg (HERE) and Archive.org (HERE). (FictionMags data.)

- Besides Mr. Hawkins, Franklin had several other series characters: Captain Velvet (4 adventures in Cavalier, 1914-15), George Batey (9 stories in Detective Fiction Weekly, 1931, 1936-38), and Johnny Dolan (19 adventures in DFW, 1936-38). (FictionMags data.)

  Here are the two George Batey adventures that we could find online (from The Luminist Archives):

  - "Two-Thirty for Batey" (HERE; go to text page 86)

  - "Speed! Speed!" (HERE; go to text page 90).

  And here are the four Johnny Dolan stories that we could locate (from The Luminist Archives):

  - "Done by Dolan" (HERE; go to text page 78) (the first Dolan)

  - "From Ten to Three" (HERE; go to text page 41)

  - "The Smartest Doll on Earth" (HERE; go to text page 80)

  - "Like a Soldier" (HERE; go to text page 109).

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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