"The Transposed Man."
By Dwight V. Swain (1915-92).
First appearance: Thrilling Wonder Stories, November 1953.
Reprinted in Thrilling Wonder Stories (New Zealand) #102, 1954; Thrilling Wonder Stories (UK), January 1954; and Strange Adventures, January 2006.
Collected in One in Three Hundred/The Transposed Man (1955).
Novelette (45 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE.
(Note: Some text clipped off on page 26 but still legible.)
(Parental caution: Some strong language.)
"No matter whose body he inhabited, the traitor in his heart stayed right with him. . . ."
The year 1953 saw the publication of two classic science fiction-mystery hybrids, Asimov's serialized THE CAVES OF STEEL (more HERE) and Bester's novelized THE DEMOLISHED MAN (article HERE—WARNING! NOTHING BUT SPOILERS!), which, in his comments on this story, the Thrilling Wonder editor (Samuel Mines) obviously views as the start of a publishing trend (that, unfortunately, never materialized):
~ SCIENCE AND MYSTERY ~
NOT too many good detective-type science fiction stories have been written and this is a curious thing because they seem to blend rather nicely. An author has to be consistent and logical to curb a standing temptation of solving his difficulties by pulling a scientific rabbit out of a hat whenever the going gets rough. This is unfair to the reader, since one of the precepts of the detective story is that presumably the author gives the reader all the clues he needs to decide whodunit. An author who keeps some magical science up his sleeve is cheating. THE TRANSPOSED MAN may keep you guessing, but plays fair in the main. It's a good sample of the fast moving, exciting type of science-mystery story which may become a staple in the next few years. — The Editor
To Alan, she is always the woman . . . It's been twelve years since Alan and Maurine have been an item, and a lot of fluid has flowed under the viaduct; neither one of them, however, could ever have anticipated the situation they're in now: Alan being an agent for Somex, a resistance group, at the same time Maurine is conducting experiments for FedGov that are meant to help them extirpate Somex once and for all. Rekindling an old flame has its risks, but for these two star-crossed lovers it could end on a funeral pyre . . .
Main characters:
~ Alan Lord, our first-person narrator:
"I looked up. Terra hung there . . . Terra, my homeland, the great green ball that forever wheeled slowly in Luna's sky.
"Maurine Dorsett's homeland, too. Terra and Maurine. They were linked together deep inside me, down where it hurt. Bleakly, I wondered if I'd ever see either of them again. I was glad when the buzzer rang."
~ John Raines:
"The man at the door looked as greasy as his voice—short, fat, with a sickly smile that was pasted on. 'I—I'm Raines. . . .' He kept dodging my eyes."
~ Raines's secretary:
"She clawed at me, smearing me with clammy, ill-aimed kisses. Her frizzed hair got in my eyes and nose, and I bumped my chin on her scrawny collarbone. 'I love you, John! I've given you everything! You can't expect me to just stand by quietly while you run after another woman—'"
~ Dr. Maurine Dorsett-Burton:
"The years had hardly touched her. Girl into woman, she still stood poised and slender. The gesture with which she smoothed and shaped the dark hair that swept down to the nape of her neck in a loose coil was familiar as yesterday.
"'Well?' Faint scorn tinged her tone, her glance. The cool, intelligent eyes measured me as if I were a laboratory specimen."
~ Mrs. Nordstrom:
"The sad-faced woman was ahead of me at the counter. A customs man had her stuff spread out all over the counter. An octagonal metal case about eight inches each way stood in the center of it. The inspector was tapping the case and shaking his head."
~ Zero, head of the Mechanists:
"The Society of Mechanists requires that its members accept strict discipline, Four-four—and for an agent on a mission as vital as Project X the standards are ten, a hundred, a thousand times as rigorous as they are for an ordinary worker. . . .
"You say a man's human, Four-four. But you're not a man. You're a Mechanist. The Society's works means more than you, more than your feelings. We can't afford to let this project fail. You'll have to go ahead according to plan."
~ Narla Cherritt:
"I stood there—fists clenched, breathing hard—while she dragged herself up, eyes fearful and uncertain. Her mouth opened as if to speak, then closed again. Without a word, she turned and limped off down the hall."
~ Heffner:
"Heffner closed the door after me. He was a little man, bent and spindle-thin. His features were pinched, his skull balding. His fingers trembled so much he had trouble with the bolt."
~ General Karl Aneido, chief of the FedGov security system:
". . . a heavy-set, middle-aged man in formal FedGov uniform moved into the scope-screen's frame. He walked like a bear. His cuffs bore the triple planets of a general officer, while his shoulder-patch carried the silver shield and black dagger of the Security Service."
~ Fred Caudel:
"A man came out—the same tall, too-handsome man I'd met—unpleasantly—at Maurine's office. The one she'd called Fred."
~ "Red":
"A woman stood by the door. She had red hair and a mouth to match, and her short spangled jacket was too small across the chest."
~ Nine-seven:
"He bent to straighten out a cable. He did it with a neat precision that said order meant a lot to him. So did his appearance, for that matter—every hair in place, clothes that might as well have been a uniform, the bleak lack of color of his face and voice. There were a lot like him in the Society."
Whiz-bang science:
~ The neurotron/pulsator/com-set:
"I rubbed my elbow past the neurotron taped flat to my ribs; ran my hand over the spare strapped against my belly. A wonderful little invention, the neurotron. Given that, and my pulsator, and my com-set, I could go anywhere. Anywhere!"
~ The Schweidler bipolaroid selector:
"I clicked down the button without speaking, and got up and went over to the window. It was the usual plasticon, cheap and beginning to warp, but with a Schweidler bipolaroid selector so that you could cut off the outside light when you wanted to go to sleep—a handy thing on a satellite like Luna, where the days seem to last forever."
~ Moonbase:
"Below me, autotrans spun along the ramp-spanned streets that sliced between the build-ings' dull spun-doloid walls like lines in some complicated geometric problem. Beyond the buildings outside the transparent shell that held the artificial atmosphere, the port spread in a gray-brown desert plain spiked with ramped silver spaceships. Far off I could see the shim-mering green ripples that were the hydroponic tubes."
~ The "shorties":
"'Our laboratories have a shielding system. It's based on the fact that the human mind is actually an electrical device, a sort of organic computer and selector.'
"'Yes.'
"'Our shield is electrical, too. It's keyed to the same frequency as the human brain. When-ever anyone who's not insulated wanders into its field, it throws out tracer charges—not strong enough to kill, but so heavy that they short-circuit the brain synapses.'
"'Permanently—?'
"'Permanently.'"
~ Lunar cuisine:
"They called the place the Moon-Room. A replica of Luna, as seen from Earth, hung like a dim gold crescent against the deep blue of the artificial sky. Stars twinkled, and an aromador brought subtle fragrances of forests and streams and wind-swept hills. A thread of faint, languorous melody sighed and rippled on the climatizer's gentle breeze.
"I gulped a vidal, then ordered spiked loin of rossa, seared in lorsch, with doralines from Mars and a salad of Ionian tabbat stalks.
"It was good food. The rossa measured a full two inches thick, deep pink straight through, the fibers so tender from the infradation that my fork sliced them like a knife. The quince-tinted tabbat stalks—not one longer than a tarosette—had been gathered at the peak of their delicate flavor.
"I ate slowly, savoring every mouthful. Afterwards, there was thick Venusian ronhnei coffee, then more vidal. This time I didn't gulp it."
~ The perceptoscope:
"Slowly, as the tubes warmed, the scope's screen began to glow. A dim image took form. Humming, I adjusted the focusing dials. The image sharpened, till it was as if I were looking through a window into the adjoining room."
~ Lunar diversions:
"I wandered among cases and cages where eye-stalks waved and mandibles bumped plasticon as they reached for me. Pseudopodal horrors from the cave-swamps of Mercury's Twilight Zone oozed in and out of crevices. Voices went shrill, and men jumped back. There was even a monstrous, ten-tentacled poison zanat, swimming in a sealed tank of refrigerat-ed ammonia and methane."
~ The projectoscope:
"Then, in a flash, the scene changed. The same woman, younger this time, stood laughing by a table, holding a candle-sparkling birthday cake. The next instant she lay in bed—old again, eyes and cheeks sunken. . . .
"Again, Aneido brought up his hand. 'The technical details mean nothing to me, Doctor Burton. As I told you last night, the practical applications are all I'm interested in. If this device will show men's thoughts so that I can uncover secret Meks, that's all I ask.'"
~ The hypnojector:
"'Such a deep sleep. . . .' Nine-seven whispered. 'So deep, so deep. Your muscles are like water. . . .'"
~ Project Q ("a sort of electro-biochemical pantograph"):
"'The only part important to us is Kronkite's idea that the weights were subject to change, through metabolism. Complex cellements break down into simple by Katabolism, liberating energy. Simple cellements build up to complex by anabolism, using the energy supplied by catabolism or drawn from such outside sources as sunlight.' . . .
"'Kronkite's theory is the key,' Nine-seven explained. 'Once you isolate your basic celle-ments, you can metabolize them according to any predetermined pattern by electrosynthe-sis.'"
Typos: "Maurine looked at the case, then at Aneida"; "somewhere near, an autoran droned"; "I grouped for words"; (missing quotation marks in many places).
Resources:
- For more on our author Dwight V. Swain see Wikipedia (HERE), the SFE (HERE), and the ISFDb (HERE).
- While the results are still far from conclusive, technology is now being applied to reading people's thoughts; see Wikipedia (HERE) and (HERE).
The bottom line: "The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."
— Robert Frost
"Poor Economy."
By Ray Cummings (1887-1957).
First appearance: Munsey's Magazine, January 1923.
Reprinted in Thrilling Detective, June 1947.
Short short story (5 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE.
"The story of an amateur in burglary and a novice in detective work"
Here we have a kinder, gentler Ray Cummings crime story from the twenties, this one concerning Jimmy Martin, an ambitious young man looking for the increased income he needs to get married, with only a slippery sneak thief, the self-titled Lead Pencil Willy, standing in the way. In his first case as an insurance investigator, Jimmy must solve what comes to be known as the affair on Queen Anne Hill, a case with Willy's trademark touches all over it—except, that is, for one little detail . . .
Principal characters:
~ Mr. Gregg:
". . . the local manager of the Globe Protective Association, specialists in burglary insurance . . ."
~ Lead Pencil Willy:
"At the moment, Lead Pencil Willy was the most noted and most elusive criminal on the Pacific Coast. From San Diego to Sitka he was wanted on a hundred different charges. His exploits varied as to time and place, but were almost identical in method. He was one of those freak criminals who become prominent every decade or so—the aristocrats of crime, who originate and perfect their own unique methods, who take an inordinate pride in every successful job accomplished, and who gloat loudly and sardonically at their bewildered pursuers after each successive escape.
"Lead Pencil Willy's methods were daring but simple. He got into the homes of the wealthy, the merely comfortable, and the poor—how, nobody ever found out, for he never left any evidence of his entrance or his exit—and abstracted whatever valuables happened to be there. His affairs were never marked by violence to human life—possibly not because of any restraint on the burglar's part, but because he was sufficiently clever to avoid being seen or heard at his work.
"And in order that he might receive proper credit for his skill, in each case he left a sarcas-tic but illiterate note, with a lead pencil stuck through the paper, as a sort of trademark, so that no one might remain in doubt as to his handiwork."
~ Jimmy Martin:
"The Lead Pencil Willy mystery had fascinated Jimmy. One evening, while he was talking to Alice most despondently about his lack of business prospects, which promised to delay their wedding indefinitely, he suddenly hit upon an idea that seemed like a possible explana-tion of these burglaries about which the whole Pacific Coast was speculating.
"Jimmy told his theory to Alice. The next morning he told it to the Globe's manager. On the following Monday he went on the company's pay roll, praying in his heart that Lead Pencil Willy would come to Seattle soon."
~ Jonathan Parsons:
"Skinflint Parsons, as he was frequently called, was an aged bachelor, popularly supposed to be inordinately wealthy, who lived in a comparatively modest home on Queen Anne Hill. He was credited with being the meanest and most parsimonious man on the Pacific Coast. He was not a miser, but merely a maniac on economy. He would buy an automobile in the morning, and in the afternoon he would deplore the fact that he could not sell his newspaper back to a newsboy after he had read it. He would spend a dollar in gasoline driving about town in search of a cigar store, in order that he might save ten cents on a box of cigars.
"His fetish, in short, was the greatness of little things. He worshiped, not the almighty dollar, but the almighty penny."
Resources:
- If it seems like we were communing with Ray Cummings just the other day (HERE), that's because we were.
The bottom line: "The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company."
— Shakespeare
"Static."
By "Eando Binder" (Otto Binder, 1911-74).
First appearance: Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1936.
Short short story (5 pages).
Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE). Go down to text page 37.
"They Thought They Could Conquer Civilization with Professor Hobson's Invention—but One Unexpected Spark Upset Their Cunning Plans!"
So you really want to take over the world, do you? Kill millions with the flick of a switch? That's basically what two men brandishing guns aim to do when they surprise Professor Hobson:
"I represent a foreign power. To be melodramatic, I am a spy. In the traditional spy manner, I came in through an open window."
One thing's for sure, though, he won't be leaving that way . . .
Resources:
- Read about "static" (HERE) on Wikipedia. Like Professor Hobson in our story, many scien-tists, including the controversial Nikola Tesla (HERE), dreamed of creating a system to broad-cast electrical energy through the air ("wireless power transfer"), discussed in detail on Wiki-pedia (HERE).
The bottom line: "Electricity is really just organized lightning."
— George Carlin
We've already spent some time with a few of Ray Cummings's memorable characters, Dr. Feather (HERE), an overconfident artist (HERE), and a very nervous fisherman (HERE), but our author also produced other non-series pulp crime fiction, a lot of it. Here we have three such from the pages of Argosy, two of them of the inverted variety sharing a theme that Cummings would return to often: the perfect crime and how, no matter how carefully planned, it never achieves perfection.
"Death by the Clock."
By Ray Cummings (1887-1957).
First appearance: Argosy Weekly, August 6, 1932.
Short story (12 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE.
"'You're my friend, not my servant,' said the aged millionaire; but he was unaware that Franz Karlin had planned his death for ten o'clock sharp, that night"
Eight hundred thousand reasons spur Karlin on to murder, but the one thing he doesn't allow for is an incriminating clock without hands . . .
Apposite passages:
"Amazing death-strength to this frail, pink-white thing."
"Who would think that a murderer would dare have a policeman on the scene of the crime?"
"A big, red-faced, sandy-haired fellow, this Cafferty. Just smart enough to make a good witness."
"It seemed to Karlin, as he sat among them now in the library, that this captain of the police was an unpleasantly suspicious fellow."
"And there was a man named Franklyn—a tall, thin fellow in plain clothes. He was not under Gregg, quite evidently. All the policemen seemed to have a great respect for this Franklyn, and Karlin learned that he was a private consulting detective—a fellow with a flair for science. He had solved several notorious crimes by finding some hidden, scientific clue. Karlin chuckled to himself. He could poke around here all he liked."
~ ~ ~
"Hot Goods."
By Ray Cummings (1887-1957).
First appearance: Argosy Weekly, September 9, 1933.
Short short story (8 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE.
"It was crook against crook when Pete Leroy met Basker—with the devil after both of them"
There's an old Polish proverb that says, "Where two are fighting, a third one wins." In the instance of Leroy vs. Basker, if it had been obvious from the outset who "the third one" was going to be, they almost certainly would have cut their losses and done a bunk a lot sooner.
~ ~ ~
"The Dead Man Types."
By Ray Cummings (1887-1957).
First appearance: Argosy Weekly, April 20, 1935.
Short short story (8 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE.
"Even in death, old Professor Wiggans was able to use a typewriter"
Think about it: If the Professor had been using a laptop, the oh-so-careful killer would have gotten away scot-free. (Note: Cummings takes the same basic situation in "Death by the Clock" and gives it a different spin, not murder made to look like an accident but murder made to look like suicide.)
Typo: "The big police captain sood up."
The bottom line: "Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."
— W. H. Auden
"Racketeers in the Sky."
By Jack Williamson (1908-2006).
First appearance: Argosy Weekly, October 12, 1940.
Reprinted in A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950.
Collected in Gateway to Paradise: The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Six (2008).
Short story (19 pages).
Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE). Go down to text page 6.
"His name, appropriately enough, was Bull. Pompous and round and rosy-faced, he was the King of Quacks—a chiseling faker who had built a patent-medicine racket into a cosmic swindle. Then came the moment when death tapped him on the shoulder, and he knew he had a whole life to pay for. An unforgettably powerful novelet"
"A disreputable little quack doctor" accurately describes Doctor Bull who, luxuriating in la dolce vita on his own personal asteroid bought with the ill-gotten gains of a lifetime of deceiving people, unexpectedly finds himself in a desperate life-and-death struggle with a space pirate with grandiose ambitions: nothing less than a takeover of Terra and the Moon. But ironically enough, for Doctor Bull a lifetime of bamboozling suckers just might be the skill set he needs to save not only his own life but also the lives of everyone on Earth—if only he can get somebody to believe him . . .
Major characters:
~ Doctor Bull:
"He was thinking back to the very beginning of his career—when he was just a six-dollar-a-week soda jerker, in a dusty small-town drug store, back on Earth, studying a mail-order course in dramatics, propped out of the view of his patrons behind the counter. Dramatics, he had decided, was more important than pharmaceutics."
~ Vera Frame:
"Doctor, what is your plan?"
~ General Berg:
"The men in the forts are uneasy. And panic is spreading in the hotels and hospitals—some rumor has got out. The telephones are swamped with questions."
~ Iron Scarr:
"Your lies, Bull, probably killed more men than my ion-gun ever did. I still kill men honestly, for what I want. But now, I'm looting planets."
~ Lieutenant Carstairs:
"That was lean young Lieutenant Carstairs, commanding the retreat, taking skilful advantage of clumps of vegetation, the hazards of the golf course, and the very curve of Taurus."
Super-duper science:
~ The geodesic drive:
". . . that was used to steer this tiny planet toward Earth from its former orbit."
~ The graviscreen:
"A graviscreen under the pool halved the force of the gravity generators at the tiny moon's core, so that one swam with an exhilarating and luxurious ease."
~ The Mercurian lightning death:
"The lightning death was the frightful disease that had denied the mineral riches of the hot planet to all save the one man in thousands who possessed a natural immunity to the virus—the fortunate few who showed a negative reaction to killed cultures could demand fabulous wages from Mercury Mines, Inc."
~ One consequence of an asteroid's low gravity:
"Stunned, Dr. Bull peered stupidly after the diminishing hum—probably the bullet still exceeded the planetoid's velocity of escape; it would fly on, forever, across the black gulf of space."
~ Futuristic weapons:
"There was an instant of breathless silence, then every battle-sound seemed amplified. Somewhere a man burned with an ion-beam was screaming with a thin and frightful monotony."
Typos: "General Berg burst furiusly through the crystal door"; "the intense blue needle of an iron-beam"; "crimes against the etchics of the IMA."
Resources:
- Our author refers several times to "ikes," which is short for "iconoscope": "the first practical video camera tube to be used in early television cameras"; see Wikipedia (HERE).
- Our last contact with Jack Williamson (HERE) wasn't that long ago.
The bottom line: "A successful swindler has to be a great salesman even more than a great actor."
— David Suchet
Last month the most popular posts featured some of the oldest but also some of the newest stories (relatively speaking, of course) available online. To all of you Faithful Readers out there in cyberspace our sincere thanks for tuning into ONTOS, the weblog engaged in a never-ending search for interesting works of detective and science fiction and, best of all, stories that combine the two genres. As usual, we've also included the most visited postings from the two previous Junes.
June 2016
(1) "Deliberately, Cleverly, and Diabolically Murdered" - (HERE)
(2) "In a Flash of Realization, the Whole Puzzle Clicked into Place!" - (HERE)
(3) "It Was Only a Matter of Time Until a Criminal, a Really Clever One, Saw Through the System—and Reverted" - (HERE)
(4) "If One of You Moves Toward the Medicine Cabinet, As God Is in Heaven, I'll Ray You Down" - (HERE)
(5) "I Shot Her First and Then, As He Woke and Sprang Up, I Got Him Too" - (HERE)
June 2014
(1) "A Well-paced Story That's Loaded with Action, Suspense, a Great Puzzle, and a Lot of Humor" - (HERE)
(2) "Both Literal Masterpieces of Sensational Fiction" - (HERE)
(3) Ten by Gladys (and We Don't Mean Mitchell) - (HERE)
(4) Four-in-One - (HERE)
(5) True Crime Roundup II - (HERE)
June 2015
(1) "Reprogrammed to Be a Killing Machine" - (HERE)
(2) Eight Tales of Terror You Might Enjoy - (HERE)
(3) European Pulp Science Fiction - (HERE)
(4) "You Must Conform!" - From "The Beautiful People" to "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" - (HERE)
(5) Was Agatha Christie Unconsciously Using Freud's Theories in Her Mysteries? - (HERE)
These entertaining and well-written short accounts, the Collier's editor assures us, are "taken from life"; since it's likely the names have been changed to protect . . . somebody, we'll just have to take his word for it.
"The Dallam Affair."
By Mark O'Neil (?-?).
First appearance: Collier’s Weekly, January 14, 1928.
Short short short story (2 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE.
"Here's an unusual detective story . . ."
"Sir Henry," we're told, "had always been reckless as to how and where he made his enemies"; so when he receives a death threat:
The warning was carefully dated—"London, noon, October 11th." Thin printed characters betrayed a Latin hand in the stiff hooks of the letters.
"Unless," it read, "you abandon trading with our enemies, you have only ten days from this hour to live. Consider."
Sir Henry laughed again as his wife muttered the words.
"Cheap melodrama," he chaffed. "I'm financing a cargo of arms for the Guatemalan government in the revolution there. Some schoolboy evidently thinks he can frighten me with a Deadwood Dick joke."
But it's no joke . . .
~ ~ ~
"The Red Room."
By Mark O'Neil (?-?).
First appearance: Collier's Weekly, March 3, 1928.
Short short short story (3 pages).
Online at UNZ beginning HERE and finishing HERE (scroll to page 48).
"An expert locksmith supplies the keys to some of the mysteries of Paris"
An American in Paris finds himself the prime suspect in a murder investigation, his only hope of being cleared reposing in a sharp French detective:
Objects glinted on a sideboard fringed with red tassels. Startled, he saw a black-handled revolver, with a blunt, blue-steeled snout, lying beside the cut stopper of a brandy decanter. He stiffened, glanced apprehensively about him, and wait-ed for a sound. Only the bark of a scurrying cab penetrated the windows. The atmosphere of the room oppressed him. He became aware of a tall mahogany table in a corner to his left. The thing seemed menacing.
"Look out," he warned himself, "this is a plant!"
Typo: ". . . the magistrate flecked his hand toward the clerk . . ."
~ ~ ~
"The Brantland Heir."
By Mark O'Neil (?-?).
First appearance: Collier’s Weekly, March 17, 1928.
Short short short story (2 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE and HERE (scroll to page 42).
"The true story of the kidnapping of a child and how an ice-cream cone led to the solution"
To a perceptive private detective, in this case all is not what it seems:
MRS. BRANTLAND, an aristocratic young woman, was roundly abusing the thick-set chief of detectives when Elbert Grantland, the husband's father, for whom the missing boy was named, motored from his law office. The old man, a wealthy and hard-headed citizen, assumed command the moment he appeared. He instantly ordered the police to confine their attentions to a physical search for his missing grandson, while to the press he announced a reward of $10,000 for the person who discovered the boy or for information leading to the arrest of whoever was responsible for his disappearance. Then he summoned from New York Thomas Coyle, the head of a private detective agency that had served him in many confidential investigations.
If you've read another story by Agatha Christie about a kidnapping (published five years before this one) then you probably won't be too surprised at the ending.
~ ~ ~
"Last Leg."
By Mark O'Neil (?-?).
First appearance: Collier’s Weekly, April 14, 1928.
Short short short story (2 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE and HERE (scroll to page 42).
"The true story of a young detective and a jewel smugger who had never been caught"
The Customs investigation squad in New York gets a warning cablegram from Scotland Yard that a "notorious jewel smuggler and fence, who had smilingly cheated the law and baffled its watchdogs for years" is on his way there with something not rightfully belonging to him:
They reported one of the boldest robberies ever accomplished in staid old London. Lady Waynecliff, wife of an English brewer recently elevated to the peerage, had gone into the London Mansion House for the lord mayor's ball. She had retired to divest herself of her cloak in one of a congeries of women's dressing-rooms, and as she entered was seized by a man, or men, and doused with chloroform. When she recovered to raise an alarm, she found her diamond necklace had been snapped off. Two hundred thousand dollars' worth of stones vanished, an excited old woman knowing no more about their loss than a grip at her throat.
Two hundred grand is certainly a lot, more than enough for our thief to brazenly attempt to fool the authorities; too bad for him, though, when in trying to pull off his deception he makes one small but crucial mistake . . .
Typo: "flecked ashes from his own into a tray"
Resources:
- Concerning our writer named Mark O'Neil, we only know that he had these four pieces published in Collier's in early 1928, and then he just disappeared.
Category: True crime (we think)
