The Private Detective

I MAY as well say, at once, that this statement never could have been made had I not been, as I remain, an admirer of Edgar Allan Poe; and if ever I have time, I hope to show that his acts were the result, not so much of a bad, as a diseased mind. For one thing, I believe his eyes were affected with an inequality of sight, which, in itself, was enough to overbalance a very exciteable brain. But Poe has nothing to do with my statement, except as its prompter. My name is John Pendrath (Cornish man, as I dare say you see in a moment), my age. is twenty-eight, and I live with my sister Annie. We are all that are left of our family, which you must see by the name was equally good and old. I need not say what I am; because, though I feel no shame for my work, I do not care about it, and hope, some day, when the Lord Chancellor wakes up, to be able to go back to Cornwall. However, it seems I am writing about myself, and that is not my intention; which, indeed, is to show how much individual good such a writer as even the condemned Edgar Poe can do, and even on this side of the Atlantic. So begins “Arrested on Suspicion” a tale of false arrest as Pendrath tries to prove that his sister has been falsely arrested on suspicion of shoplifting. Using his knowledge of Poe, he first discovers the hiding place of a fragment of paper, then uses his skills at solving a doubly-encrypted cipher — an early use of cryptography in British fiction. Revelations of a Private Detective contains 13 tales of mystery and crime, ranging from the fleecing of a dying man of his savings, the stealing of precious jewellery during a railway journey, and a scam to defraud a life insurance policy, to stories of reluctant divorcees and witnesses, forgery, conmen, and kleptomania.