F. T. Carrington, who calls himself not a detective but an “inquiry agent,” was introduced the year before this collection in Clouston’s novel Simon. The short stories, but not the novel, make it on to Queen’s Quorum of the 125 most important detective and crime fiction books.
Carrington is young, with an “ingenuous” (the word gets repeated in several stories) and “agreeable face,” has a moustache, and wears a monocle—this description comes from Simon. The eleven stories include a long three-parter called “Coincidence,” an unlikely tale of two neighbors, each of whom is convinced that the other has been murdered until they encounter each other sometime later in a hotel lobby. The murdered man was real enough, but it was the lover of the wife of one of the neighbors.
In another story, “The Millionth Chance,” Carrington, trying to flush a German spy from his hiding place in his wife’s house, ends up luring out her English lover instead. In another he goes undercover to catch the revengeful crook who calls himself “Mr. Snakes.”
“A Medical Crime,” the first story and like many of these, less than ten pages long, has Carrington catching the provost of a town in Scotland who has called Carrington in to help solve robberies that the provost himself is committing. The provost says he suspects the culprit is one of the two town doctors. Carrington tells the provost he has interviewed the men (he hasn’t) and told one about how there is an infallible method of identifying footprints that can only be foiled with rubber-soled shoes. The other one, he says, he told about a foolproof smell test for identifying burglars that can only be foiled by burning feathers at the scene. So all the provost has to do is look for one or another at the next crime scene. The provost falls for it, reports to Carrington he found burnt feathers at the next robbery scene, and is himself arrested for the crimes.
Carrington works briefly with a lady detective who investigates “The Haunted House” and then marries the ghost—the “long-lost” eldest son who has returned. An amnesiac hires Carrington, who has only “A Photograph” to work with, but who finds the amnesiac’s wife. He also discovers, but does not disclose, that the amnesiac is wanted for murder. In “Duplicates,” Carrington’s media fame in averting an attempted jewel robbery leads to his battle with a duplicate Carrington. And when Dr. Watson consults Carrington, the doctor proves even stupider than he depicts himself in the Holmes stories. Watson allows “The Truthful Lady” to convince him to consume, in the form of digestive bonbons, the will that would have enriched his client. “The Missing Husband” turns out to be holed up in the disused wing of the house with his wife’s pretty maid.
Carrington intercedes on behalf of an old friend whose husband has become dangerously insane in “The Price,” and in the final story, Carrington is not named, but there is a detective who manages to identify three spies on a Highland line train headed ultimately toward the naval bases at Cromarty and Scapa. “The Envelope,” with a German address and left on the floor of the carriage, is what alerts everyone that there might be a spy, and the detective is the one who manufactures it.
The coincidences and unlikely story lines make Carrington’s stories entertaining and unusual, and since the beginning setup is often an after-hours gathering with Carrington’s telling his friends a story about something odd happening to him in the course of his work, we are prepared for something not only worth telling, but perhaps too unusual to be strictly true. We will never know, of course, and it does not matter.
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