"We're Friends, Now."
By Henry Hasse (1913-77).
First appearance: Amazing Stories, April 1960.
Novelette (70 pages).
Online at Project Gutenberg HERE and ManyBooks HERE.
(Parental caution: Strong language.)
"The little man stood in front of the monstrous machine as the synaptic drone heightened to a scream. No ... no, he whispered. Don't you understand...."
Amos Carmack, a very wealthy man indeed, is no more:
"'Now here,' he touched a spool labelled in red, 'is your Basic Invariant. Carmack—Amos T. Murdered man. Found bludgeoned in library of his home, night of April 4. Age 56, held all outstanding patents on ECAIAC, worth millions, and'—he looked up, beaming—'leaves beautiful wife'."
In the not too distant future, a supercomputer dubbed ECAIAC ("Ekky," for short) is assigned the task of "cybernetic detection," with the old methods of criminal investigation only dimly remembered from the faded pages of whodunits:
"Oh, I grant you it used to hold true—principle beneficiary was always prime suspect. Fiction especially was full of it. Queen, Dickson Carr, Boucher—you know the ilk. But with ECAIAC we've gotten away from all that, haven't we?"
So policemen like Raoul Beardsley, once an important man in law enforcement, have no choice but to adapt to this new normal:
. . . there was something about Raoul Beardsley that eternally evoked amusement—an air of vacuous innocence and a remote forlornness. He gave the appearance of a person who sold shoes during the day, washed his wife's dishes at night and then solved two or three galacti-gram puzzles before turning off the light precisely at ten. Few, if any, remembered that this nervous little man had once been top Inspector of New York City's Homicide Bureau ... but that was a dozen long years ago. Since then he had seen the antiquated detective methods of 1960 disappear, and he had died a little, too, seeing his Homicide Bureau relegated to a mere subsidiary with the growth of the Coördinate and Mechanical Divisions.
For Beardsley, working for Crime-Central has become about as interesting as selling insurance, and there's this feeling of nostalgia that he can't seem to shake:
Seven weeks! He clutched the bulging briefcase with a wearisome horror. Twenty-two persona-tapes from Central File, all neatly processed and ready for ECAIAC. End result of the endless chart sifts, emphasis (as always!) on parietosomatic recession, the slow emergence of minor constants, the inexorable trend toward Price Factor and then verification, verifica-tion, to each his own, with all the subtle and shaded values of the Augment Index brought finally to focus on the relevance-graph Carmack.
Sure, thought Beardsley. A thing of augment-indexing and psych-tapes, quite without possibility of error. Now in the old days of crime detection—it might have taken them seven months instead of weeks, not to mention frustration and leg-work and false-leads and sweat, but—
Beardsley finds that even working with ECAIAC, a massive electronic brain, can be an unsettling experience:
There was something about the sight and sound and feel of ECAIAC that got to him, that seeped beneath flesh and bone and into his brain and sent his senses singing. Beardsley managed to gulp, as he observed the shiny black colossus that filled the entire length of the ninety-foot room; a dozen techs scurried around it, taking notes, attentive to the flashing lights in red-and-green and the faint clicking of thousands of relays that rose in susurration.
But more than that arose. It was something that pervaded the room, not a pulsing but a presence, a sort of snapping intangible intelligence that reached beyond the audible and sheared at Beardsley's nerve-ends.
Finding who killed Amos Carmack should be easy for ECAIAC, with all the data that Beardsley and his division have amassed in the past two months; after all, they've finally managed to narrow down the suspects to . . .
"Fifteen possibles, four Logicals and three Primes—" Beardsley stopped abruptly. "Twenty-two who knew Carmack," he went on. "That includes associational as well as motive-oppor-tunity factors, with a probability sphere of .004...."
There's only one problem: As carefully compiled and scientific as that list is, the murderer isn't on it . . .
Random passages:
"And the penalty was in his eyes, if one cared to look beyond the thick-lensed glasses. No one ever did. They were remote eyes, a little bewildered, a little hurt ... a mirror gone dull from times remembered but irretrievably lost."
"'The idea appeals to me! Beardsley versus ECAIAC ... socio-archaism opposed to the machina-ratiocinatrix. Why, it's delicious!'"
"ECAIAC was in finest fettle again as the tapes sped through. Circuits were activated. Codes gave meaning. Synaptic cells summed and integrated, cancelled and compared and with saucy assurance sent the findings on toward Cumulative. The murmur was soft and sustained and somehow apologetic, as if ECAIAC were quite aware that she had failed in her duty but would be just pleased to make amends this time."
"'Ah, yes. The obvious,' Beardsley said with a grimace. 'But you know, I learned a long time ago that the obvious can be a mighty tricky thing. A dangerous thing. The forceps of the mind are greedy, and inclined to crush a little in the seizing....'"
Typo: "the black metal sheathe of the monster"
Resources:
- You'll find entries for Henry Hasse at the SFE HERE and the ISFDb HERE.
- Hardly a day goes by when Hollywood and science fiction writers don't use computers and artificial intelligence as plot devices; here's a micro-list dealing with those particular tropes:
~ Wikipedia HERE
~ "Computers in Fiction" by H. Bruce Franklin HERE
~ and TV Tropes HERE.
The bottom line: "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."
— Steve Wozniak
"The Affair of the Corridor Express."
By Victor L. Whitechurch (1868-1933).
First appearance: Pearson’s Weekly, April 22, 1899.
Collected in Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912).
Short story (27 pages).
Online at Project Gutenberg Australia HERE.
"Thorpe Hazell stood in his study in his London flat. On the opposite wall he had pinned a bit of paper, about an inch square, at the height of his eye, and was now going through the most extraordinary contortions."
Eccentric he may be, but when it comes to mysterious problems relating to the railways, Thorpe Hazell's experience and reasoning ability make him the one to consult in this case of a little boy, a millionaire's son, who has disappeared from a moving train without a trace.
Main characters:
~ Mr. F. W. Wingrave, M.A., B.Sc.:
"I have just been through a very trying experience. A boy I was in charge of has just mysteriously disappeared, and I want you to find him for me . . ."
~ Horace Carr-Mathers, the missing item:
"I tried to kick and shout, but it was no go. They got me into the compartment, stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth, and tied it in. It was just beastly."
~ Thorpe Hazell:
"You will understand that I am going to work upon the theory that the boy has been kidnapped and that the original intention has been carried out, in spite of the accident of your presence in the train. How the boy was disposed of meanwhile is what baffles me; but that is a detail—though it will be interesting to know how it was done. Now, I don't want to raise any false hopes, because I may very likely be wrong, but we are going to take action upon a very feasible assumption, and if I am at all correct, I hope to put you definitely on the track. Mind, I don't promise to do so, and, at best, I don't promise to do more than put you on a track."
~ Mr. Mills:
"It's your duty to warn off strangers. How long have you been stationed here?"
~ A "big, strong-looking man":
"I ain't so much to blame as them as employed me."
~ Mr. Carr-Mathers:
"I understand you are not an ordinary detective."
Typo: "my eard".
Resources:
- Victor L. Whitechurch is mostly known for his railway mysteries featuring Thorpe Hazell; for more about those stories, the author, and his principal character, go HERE (Mike Grost), HERE (the GAD Wiki), HERE (Pretty Sinister Books), HERE (Wikipedia), and HERE (ONTOS).
- For a true life railway crime, go to the Journal of Victorian Culture Online article HERE; apropos of our story, the article informs us:
Compartment style carriages had been employed in Britain since the beginning of passenger railways in the 1830s, being a natural development of the horse-drawn carriage. Following the Briggs murder [in 1865], ‘Muller Lights’, a small glazed porthole between adjoining compartments, were installed by some rail companies, but this ‘safety’ feature was double edged as passengers complained that they allowed prying eyes into private compartments. The American preference for open plan carriages, with transverse seats set either side of a central passageway, only spread to Europe in the 1870s, although British passengers still valued their privacy, leading to the retention of compartments, but with a corridor along one side of the carriage. Flexible gangways linked individual carriages, allowing free movement to lavatories and dining cars. Compartment carriages were still being commissioned into the 1960s and only fell out of favour with British Rail in the 1980s when crime levels, particularly in the South East, rose sharply. Nevertheless, the affection of the British public for the private compartment, more likely the scene of a romantic interlude than a brutal crime, remained and they are now a staple feature of preserved railway travel.
The bottom line: "I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid the best. He said, 'Ransom notes'."
— Harry Zimm
"Delayed Action."
By Charles V. de Vet (1911-97).
First appearance: Galaxy, September 1953.
Short story (19 pages).
Online at Project Gutenberg HERE, Archive.org HERE, and ManyBooks HERE.
"This planet gave him the perfect chance to commit the perfect crime — only he couldn't remember just what it was he had committed."
While it may take a thief to catch a thief, as the old saying has it, in this situation it'll take a man with a blue ribbon case of amnesia:
"You know that Interplanets has branches on more than a thousand worlds. Because of this widespread operation it's particularly vulnerable to robbery. But it would cost more than the Company's earnings to post adequate guards on every station. And it would be impractical to depend on the protection of the local governments, many of which are extremely primitive. On the other hand, allowing themselves to be robbed with impunity would be financial suicide. That is where the Company's Secret Service comes in. It never lets up on the effort it will make to solve a robbery and bring the perpetrators to justice. And it never quits, once it begins an investigation."
Principal characters:
~ Donald Johnson:
"Twenty minutes later Johnson took the job—and twenty years later he was still working for the Company. He worked for them until..."
~ The store manager of Interplanets Trade Company:
"The manager was an old man. Old and black, with the deep blackness only an Earth-born Negro possesses. But his eyes retained their youthful alertness."
~ The black-bearded stranger:
"The gun in his hand was aimed at Johnson."
~ Alton Hawkes:
"He held the pistol like a man who knew how to use it."
Resources:
- Info about Charles V. de Vet can be found HERE (the SFE) and HERE (the ISFDb).
- A Möbius strip plays an important part in our story; you may recall how another one, featured in a different story, did the same (HERE).
The bottom line: "A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory."
― Mark Twain
"Dilemma of the Dead Lady."
By Cornell Woolrich (1903-68).
First appearance: Detective Fiction Weekly, July 4, 1936.
Reprinted in Detective Fiction, February 1951 and The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2008); collected in Dilemma of the Dead Lady (1949) as by "William Irish."
Novelette (24 pages).
Online HERE.
(Parental caution: Strong language.)
"The Instant Babe Sherman Became Desperate, He Began to Make Mistakes—Just Two Mistakes, but Either Could Cost His Life!"
Chapter I: "He was a good-looking devil, if you cared for his type of good looks—and women usually did. Then later on, they always found out how wrong they'd been."
Chapter II: All Aboard!
Chapter III: Surprise
Chapter IV: Jockeying for Peace
Chapter V: Checkmate
Chapter VI: Hare-and-Hounds
Chapter VII: The Furies Laugh.
A running battle of wits develops between an unnerved jewel thief turned killer and the man who just won't leave him alone, with a violent, doubly ironic finish.
Main characters:
~ Babe Sherman, until now a lady-killer in name only:
"Get hep to yourself! I should marry you! Why, we don't even talk the same lingo!"
~ Manon, the girl from the jewelry shop:
"But you are going to New York! This ticket is for one!"
~ Jacques, the porter:
"M'sieu hasn't much time."
~ E. M. Fowler, the stranger on the train:
"Lone wolf, I notice, though. Matter, Sûreté get your shill?"
~ "A fresh little flapper":
"Oh, purrdon me! We've got the President with us!"
Nice phraseology:
"He had a good reason, $75,000 worth of pearls. When they said it in francs it sounded like a telephone number."
"She was staring, not at that, but at the lustrous string of pearls that spilled out of it like a tiny snake, their diamond catch twinkling like an eye."
"Suddenly she dropped vertically, like a plummet, between his fumbling hands, twitched spasmodically for an instant at his feet, then lay there still, face black now, eyes horrible protuberances. Dead. Strangled by a thing of beauty, a thing meant to give pleasure."
"Strangest of biers, for a little fool that hadn't known her men well enough!"
"The driver had made the Gare like only a Paris driver can make a destination, on two wheels . . ."
". . . the ashes of a cigarette were the only obsequies she was getting."
"He felt like someone who has just had a rattlesnake dropped down the back of his neck while he's tied hand and foot."
"Water scotches a trail in more ways than one."
"Something inside him curled up, but because there was no blade or voltage to follow the shock, he went ahead breathing and thinking."
"Then one of those hunches that at times visit the deserving and the undeserving alike, smote him from nowhere . . ."
"A minute later she was out there with him, and the end of his long, harrowing purgatory was in sight."
"His face was a piteous blur against the night that would have wrung tears from the Evil One himself."
"There was a rush of blood to his ears that drowned it out, and the laughter of the Furies seemed to shriek around him while they prodded him with white-hot irons."
Typos: "three time over"; "the coffe in Paris."
Resources:
- In The Black Lizard book, editor Otto Penzler characterizes the types of individuals who populate Cornell Woolrich's stories:
. . . so many of his characters are shades of gray. People with whom we empathize choose to murder someone, or are put in positions where there seems to be no choice. Policemen, the upholders of the law, are frequently fascistic thugs who enjoy torturing suspects. Pretty girls with faces of angels turn out to be liars and cheats, and often worse. His situations ended unjustly when other authors would have resolved them neatly, and a Woolrich character often still faces a future barren of love, joy, or hope at the end of a story.
The trick Woolrich plays on the reader in "Dilemma of the Dead Lady" is basically the one Alfred Hitchcock plays on the audience in some of his films—against his better judgment, the reader comes to identify with the villain.
- Woolrich's detective fiction has been previously featured on ONTOS several times: HERE, HERE, and HERE.
The bottom line: "I wear a necklace 'cause I wanna know when I'm upside down."
— Mitch Hedberg
"Schrödinger’s Gun."
By Ray Wood (born 1990).
First appearance: Tor.com, February 15, 2015.
Novelette (28 pages).
Online HERE.
(Parental caution: Strong language.)
"Of all the crime scenes in all the timelines in all the multiverse, Detective O’Harren walks into the basement on West 21st. In every possible universe, Johnny Rivers is dead. But the questions that need answering—who killed him and why—are still a matter of uncertainty."
You'd think that a device that lets you examine and evaluate an event from millions of dif-ferent angles would help you perfectly determine what's been happening, with practically no possibility of error; but using that device in her quest to determine who murdered a two-bit mobster, Detective O'Harren of the Chicago PD will discover the killer from the one perspec-tive, out of a near infinity of them, that according to both theory and practice shouldn't be possible.
Principal characters:
~ Detective O'Harren, the narrator, a female detective with a heisen implant and the determi-nation to see this case closed:
"I folded my arms across my chest and looked up at the light bulb. Why did I never get the universes where things were cut and dry?"
~ Johnny Rivers, an unmourned low-life bootlegger:
No matter where or when you find him, he's still decorating the scenery with his bullet-riddled body.
~ Detective Moore, O'Harren's partner:
"Nice little set-up he had here. You know half the joints in this neighborhood carry his booze and no one else’s? Not that he gave them much choice in the matter."
~ Kitty Rivers, the newly-minted widow:
"'It was my fault,' she said, and looked at me with wet, red eyes, like a child."
~ Vincent Quine, a no-good hood:
"His slick black hair was lovingly oiled. Chicago legend had it that he had a messy scar on his leg from a badly-healed bullet wound: he’d plugged it with a finger during a gunfight and had refused to go to a hospital."
Memorable lines:
"It was one of those drab Chicago winters, the kind where every sunrise brings fresh bodies on the sidewalks. At least this one was indoors."
"Snow scrunched beneath my boots as I made my way home that night. It was cold, and quiet: only the occasional hum of a car or smatter of distant voices on the wind disturbed the silence."
"It helps if your life’s already in pieces when you get the heisen implant. Less to adapt to, that way."
"For an awful moment I thought I was going to end up splattered across the wall, then someone laughed and the tension broke. Heads turned away; conversations resumed."
". . . he was a judge so crooked you could use him to uncork wine."
"'Why bother?' he had asked me once. 'Even if you bring this guy down now there’s gonna be about a million other universes where he gets away scot free, right?'"
"I’d become a ghost in my own family. I should have done something, but I couldn’t—somehow I couldn’t turn my back on all those possibilities."
Resources:
- Ray Wood is a relatively new author; see his bibliography at the ISFDb HERE.
- As far as we know, Schrödinger’s cat never owned a gun, but, dead and/or alive, he has still managed to permeate popular culture; go HERE for more.
- The idea of parallel universes (the "multiverse") has proven irresistibly attractive to science fiction writers the world over; go HERE (TV Tropes), HERE (Wikipedia), and HERE (also Wikipedia) to see why.
- Similarly, the notion of a multiverse has been equally seductive to scientists, and this despite the lack of any empirical evidence for its existence; according to Wikipedia (HERE):
The physics community continues to debate the multiverse hypothesis. Prominent physicists disagree about whether the multiverse exists. Some physicists say the multiverse is not a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry. Concerns have been raised about whether attempts to exempt the multiverse from experimental verification could erode public confidence in science and ultimately damage the study of fundamental physics. Some have argued that the multiverse is a philosophical rather than a scientific hypothesis because it cannot be falsified. The ability to disprove a theory by means of scientific experiment has always been part of the accepted scientific method. Paul Steinhardt has famously argued that no experiment can rule out a theory if the theory provides for all possible outcomes.
The bottom line: "If I get a parking ticket, there is always a parallel universe where I didn't. On the other hand, there is yet another universe where my car was stolen."
— Max Tegmark
(GIVE ME THAT) OLD-TIME DETECTION.
Spring 2016. Issue #41.
Editor: Arthur Vidro.
Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd.
36 pages (including covers).
Cover image: E. C. Bentley's Elephant's Walk (1950).
It's simple enough to state: If you have even the slightest interest in detective fiction then you should get every available issue of Arthur Vidro's (Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION (OTD to its friends). This one, as with all of them, more than repays its cost.
CONTENTS:
(1) Essay: "The Classical Detective Novel in America" by Jon L. Breen (5 pages):
Breen's fine essay from 1984 highlights the current neglect of some really good American Golden Age proponents of the pure detective novel, a neglect which is only now in the early 2000s being corrected (including a surge in e-book reprints) that makes these "forgotten" authors widely accessible once more.
(2) Author Spotlight: "Edmund Clerihew Bentley" by Charles Shibuk (3 pages):
While Bentley's detective fiction output was never large, he proved to be quite influential in the field.
Stories discussed at some length: Trent's Last Case, the "Greedy Night" parody, Trent's Own Case, Trent Intervenes, and Elephant's Walk.
Resources: Wikipedia HERE and the GAD Wiki HERE.
(3) Review: The Decagon House Murders by Michael Dirda (2 pages):
". . . a terrific mystery, a classic of misdirection very much in the manner of Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr. . . . this book really is a pleasure for anyone who enjoys locked room mysteries, impossible crimes, or Golden Age 'Challenges to the Reader'."
Resources: Wikipedia HERE and HERE.
(4) Fiction: "The Adventure of the Haunted Cave" (1940) by Ellery Queen (7 pages):
"He had been strangled to death. And his footprints, which later measurements proved could only have been made by his bare feet, showed plainly that he was the only human being who had walked across the clearing."
For Ellery, Nikki, Inspector Queen, and Sergeant Velie, what should have been a relaxing weekend in the mountains turns first into a ghost hunt, then rapidly escalates into a full-fledged locked cave murder mystery. With a "Challenge to the Reader"!
Resources: Wikipedia HERE and the GAD Wiki HERE.
(5) Christie Corner by Dr. John Curran (1.5 pages):
"I had always assumed that no screen version of Christie could be as consistently bad as the Marple series. Little did I know . . ."
Resources: Wikipedia HERE and the GAD Wiki HERE.
(6) At the Cinema by William K. Everson (1.5 pages):
Reviews of two films: The Kennel Murder Case (1933), "which not only has an unusually intriguing mystery, but a logical and well-arrived-at solution too"; and Bulldog Jack (a.k.a. Alias Bulldog Drummond, 1935), "not only a pungent and subtle spoof of the genre, but also an excellent if tongue-in-cheek thriller in its own right."
Resources: The GAD Wiki HERE and the IMDb HERE; the GAD Wiki HERE and the IMDb HERE.
(7) "The Paperback Revolution" by Charles Shibuk (2 pages):
Books discussed: The Big Four, The Labors of Hercules, Third Girl, And Then Put Out the Light, Panic in Box C, The Venus Trap, A Taste for Violence, Blue City, Black Orchids, Love Lies Bleeding, and Buried for Pleasure.
(8) The Readers Write (1 page):
"I was so pleased to see Cat of Many Tails emerged as the top choice in your survey of crime fiction experts . . ."
(9) Feature: "The Life and Times of Gideon Fell" by Marvin Lachman (7.25 pages):
Treating Carr's fictional characters as if they were real, Lachman offers a brief but excellent bibliographical biography (or biographical bibliography) of the great solver of seemingly impenetrable problems, Dr. Gideon Fell, book by book; there's also a fascinating addendum presenting Lachman's theory of what happened to Mrs. Fell.
Resources: Wikipedia HERE and the GAD Wiki HERE.
(10) Mini-Reviews (2 pages):
Short but smart reviews by Amnon Kabatchnik, Charles Shibuk, Bruce Dettman, Ruth Ordivar, and Arthur Vidro.
The books: Death to the Rescue (1931), The Needle's Kiss (1929), The Art of the English Murder (2014), Dangerous Landing (1975), and The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy (1975).
Resource: The GAD Wiki HERE.
(11) Puzzle (.25 page).
Subscription information:
- Published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn.
- Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else.
- One-year U.S.: $18.00 ($15.00 for Mensans).
- One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 20 pounds sterling or 25 euros).
- Payment: Checks or cash or U.S. postage stamps.
Mailing address:
Arthur Vidro, editor
Old-Time Detection
2 Ellery Street
Claremont, New Hampshire 03743
Web address:
oldtimedetection@netzero.net
Resource:
- Our review of the Autumn 2015 issue of OTD is HERE.
"The Banknote Forger."
By C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (1866-1944).
First appearance: The Harmsworth Monthly Pictorial Magazine, September 1899.
Short story (10 pages).
Online at SFFAudio HERE (PDF) and Vintage Short Mystery Classics HERE (PDF).
"Of course, it isn't often that he comes into use; but I'll give him credit for working up some cases into a win which would otherwise have turned out an absolute fizzle."
Master Willie Cope inherited quite a fortune in his youth and began squandering it almost immediately; even now, a little older but no wiser, he's still disposing of it at an amazing rate (his "domestic motto" being, according to his defence counsel, Grayson, QC, "Whilst we live, don't let's have any doubt about it").
Such a situation can go on only so long before the debt bubble bursts; in Willie Cope's case, the joyride has terminated not simply in incipient impoverishment but also in scandal and the threat of imprisonment:
". . . It was when, in his own particular line, Cope [relates Grayson] had created himself the biggest celebrity in the country, that his earthquake arrived. He was accused of systematically uttering forged Bank of England thousand-pound notes. It seemed that he had negotiated at least fifty-four of them, and there might be others which had not yet come in. . . . this is a crime which, in the British decalogue, comes very little short of brutal murder . . ."
Grayson and Barnes, Master Cope's counsellors, both agree that their client isn't smart enough to pull off these forgeries:
". . . it's too big an order for Cope. His inventive faculties are stimulated just now; he's got as good and solid a scare in him as a man can well carry amongst his ribs without tumbling down; but even that hasn't screwed him to the necessary pitch. He no more knows how those notes got into his pocket than Elk, your clerk, does."
But, while he may not know everything, Elk does know his onions, so to speak, with his personal hobby, an interest in photography, leading him to the very person who has been forging the bills, an individual with "small and nicely shaped" hands who makes one—just one—critical error with them.
Resources:
- C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne isn't as well known for his SF/Fantasy and crime fiction as he is for his mainstream novels: Wikipedia HERE, the GAD Wiki HERE, the SFE HERE, and the ISFDb HERE.
- Photography is essential to our story; a short history of the technique is on Wikipedia HERE, while Victorian Web has a timeline of 19th century photography HERE.
- Master Cope would have been prosecuted under the Forgery Act of 1870, which, if you're of a mind to, you can read HERE.
- Hyne's short story about an indefatigable ship's purser named Mr. Horrocks, "The Looting of the Specie Room" (1900), was adapted for the second season of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1973); go HERE and behold the IMDb title error.
The bottom line:
Hast thou betrai'd my credulous innocence
With visor'd falshood and base forgery?
— Milton
