Detection by Gaslight by Douglas G. Greene Read Free Book Online

being a persevering man, as a good seaman should be, blockaded the house, and having met you succeeded by certain arguments, metallic or otherwise, in convincing you that your interests were the same as his.”
    â€œMr. Fowler was a very kind-spoken, free-handed gentleman,” said Mrs. Toller serenely.
    â€œAnd in this way he managed that your good man should have no want of drink, and that a ladder should be ready at the moment when your master had gone out.”
    â€œYou have it, sir, just as it happened.”
    â€œI am sure we owe you an apology, Mrs. Toller,” said Holmes, “for you have certainly cleared up everything which puzzled us. And here comes the country surgeon and Mrs. Rucastle, so I think, Watson, that we had best escort Miss Hunter back to Winchester, as it seems to me that our locus standi now is rather a questionable one.”
    And thus was-solved the mystery of the sinister house with the copper beeches in front of the door. Mr. Rucastle survived, but was always a broken man, kept alive solely through the care of his devoted wife. They still live with their old servants, who probably know so much of Rucastle’s past life that he finds it difficult to part from them. Mr. Fowler and Miss Rucastle were married, by special license, in Southampton the day after their flight, and he is now the holder of a government appointment in the island of Mauritius. As to Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested no further interest in her when once she had ceased to be the centre of one of his problems, and she is now the head of a private school at Walsall, where I believe that she has met with considerable success.

Arthur Morrison
(1863–1945)
    ARTHUR MORRISON created Martin Hewitt, the most important of Sherlock Holmes’s immediate successors, because of the Strand’s need to find a fictional detective to replace Doyle’s great character. (Doyle had tired of Holmes, and tried to end his cases by sending him and his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, to their deaths at Reichenbach Falls.) Arthur Morrison depicted Hewitt as a contrast to Holmes: Instead of being tall and thin, with a hawk-like face, Hewitt was “a stoutish, clean-shaven man, of middle height, and of a cheerful, round countenance.” Hewitt ascribed his success to the “judicious use of ordinary faculties,” though the admiring narrator, a journalist named Brett, in true Watsonian fashion thinks that the detective’s faculties are “very extraordinary indeed.”
    When the cases of Martin Hewitt began appearing, Morrison’s most important work, Tales of Mean Streets, had just been published. That book and the novel The Hole in the Wall made him one of the era’s most important chroniclers of slum life. He was also an expert on Chinese and Japanese art, writing several books on those subjects. Though he ceased writing detective fiction early in this century, he became a member of the Detection Club, made up of the most important writers of the 1930s, on its founding in 1930.
    Morrison wrote four volumes of stories about Martin Hewitt, as well as The Dorrington Deed-Box, an innovative, though flawed, book about a detective who takes on cases so that he may commit crimes himself. The following story, taken from the second Hewitt volume, Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (1895), shows Morrison’s understated approach to what turns out to be a sensational crime.
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    The Case of the Lost Foreigner
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    I HAVE ALREADY SAID in more than one place that Hewitt’s personal relations with the members of the London police force were of a cordial character. In the course of his work it has frequently been Hewitt’s hap to learn of matters on which the police were glad of information, and that information was always passed on at once; and so long as no infringement of regulations or damage to public service were involved, Hewitt could