"You Done It"

"A Tooth for a Tooth."

By Peter Fraser (Alexander Peter Fordham Watt, 1915-65).

First appearance: The Evening Standard, October 13, 1953.

Reprinted in The Saint Detective Magazine, July 1956 (today's text).

Short short short story (4 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE; go to text page 68).

(Note: Text very faded but legible.)

   "He switched on the light to investigate the possibilities of a snack."

EVEN the best laid plans are likely to go astray when you're hungry enough . . .

Main characters:

~ Eliot, Macavity, Mr. Fry, Detective-Sergeant Broadwood, Morley, and the Inspector.

References:

- "Macavity":

  "T. S. Eliot was a big fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and the character of Macavity is a literary allusion to Professor Moriarty, the criminal mastermind in the Sherlock series. Evidence that Macavity was based on Moriarty was first presented by H. T. Webster and H. W. Starr in 1954 and later rediscovered by Katharine Loesch. In a letter to Frank Morley, Eliot wrote, 'I have done a new cat modeled on the late Professor Moriarty, but he doesn't seem very popular; too sophisticated perhaps.' The name 'Macavity' is thus a pun on 'Moriarty.' The word 'cavity' also implies a hole or void or absence of something, and Macavity is described in the poem as being 'not there' at the time or location of any crime." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- The field of forensics from which our story derives its solution is discussed in Wikipedia (HERE) and at the NIH (HERE).

Resource:

- FictionMags has a respectable list of short fiction by Peter Fraser running from 1948 to 1965, the majority of it appearing in The Evening Standard, with infrequent side trips to MacKill's Mystery Magazine.

The bottom line:

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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