American Sherlocks by Nick Rennison (reading like a writer .TXT) 📕

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can explain to me what you did when you got back here.’ And I pointed to the prostrate figure beside us.

‘Killed him,’ rejoined Masters. ‘I came up just in time to see him creeping up on you with a golf club. I reached him first; that’s all.

‘You have the chain pretty well in hand now,’ he went on, changing his tone. ‘That golf ball goes out to Steffen Shoals lighthouse. What becomes of the message then?’

‘I – I suppose they send it to Germany by wireless,’ I returned doubtfully.

‘No. That wouldn’t work long. How would you like to see the dénouement and the answer to it all at the same time?’

‘Lead on!’

‘Well, no hurry,’ he answered, smiling. ‘There’s nothing doing till evening. I thought, as soon as I saw the way the golf ball was being passed around, that I had come to the last snarl of the chain. We’ll go down now and get a boat for Block Island.’

‘Won’t he – the chap in the boat, I mean – find out that the message has been extracted from the ball and come back for it?’ I asked as we gained the clubhouse.

Masters nodded sharply. ‘Correct, Bert!’ he said. ‘I’ll get a posse to wait down there for him.’

****

At seven that evening we boarded a United States torpedo-boat destroyer at Block Island. The speedy vessel moved quietly out into the ocean and was joined by two more of the rakish gray craft. Though dusk was settling on the water, the destroyers showed no lights. At a speed which could not have been more than seven or eight knots an hour the three silent defenders crept toward Steffen Shoals. As they approached, their speed slackened still more, until it seemed that they were scarcely moving. As the tower of the lighthouse became dimly perceptible in the distance. Masters clutched my arm. ‘We may have to wait awhile,’ he said in a low tone, ‘but the show is due to start at any minute!’

Fifteen minutes later it did start. On the side of the lighthouse tower a steady light flashed out. This burned for perhaps ten minutes. Then it began certain gyrations that were both unaccountable and unintelligible to me, whirling about in a semicircle to the right, going back to the horizontal, going to the left twice and then continuing the dizzy whirl until I lost count entirely.

‘Semaphore signals!’ whispered Masters. The second he spoke three immense searchlights flared from the decks of the destroyers, throwing the ocean at the foot of the lighthouse into a light far brighter than day. Motionless, perhaps six hundred yards in front of us, I saw a grayish shape lying on the water, like an immense elongated whale come to the surface.

‘A U-boat!’ I cried, as Masters pushed his hand over my mouth. As it proved, there was no necessity for silence. Fifteen three-inch semi-automatic cannon, trained on the marauder, spoke almost in unison. Every second thereafter one or more of the pieces sent a shell into the splendid target.

It lasted only a minute or so, but during that time the gray back of the U-boat was kept well illuminated by the fires of bursting shells as well as by the searchlights. Huge fragments were knocked off before the commander could even think of submerging, and as I watched, deafened but thrilled to the depth of my soul, the sea monster turned on one side and sank.

Masters left me at that moment, and while the vessels were patrolling the circle he was in conference with the captain. The two joined me a half-hour later, and Masters’s face was glowing. ‘It’s really a big success, Bert!’ he exclaimed. ‘We got one U-boat, and the captain thinks that more will call around here each day or so. They will trap every one of them!’

‘But how about Mr Mesnil Phillips and the rest of his chain of spies?’ I asked.

Masters frowned. ‘Nobody will ever hear of them again!’ he answered shortly.

QUINCY ADAMS SAWYER

Created by Charles Felton Pidgin (1844-1923)

In the course of a varied career, Charles Felton Pidgin worked as a statistician for the state of Massachusetts, wrote musical comedies for the stage and patented a number of inventions. (His most successful was a machine for tabulating statistics; his silliest, a never-used method of displaying dialogue in silent films which involved inflated text balloons emerging from the actors’ mouths.) In his fifties, he turned to fiction and wrote more than a dozen novels, including an interesting work of ‘alternate history’ in which the politician Aaron Burr, disgraced and exiled after a fatal duel in reality, becomes President of the USA and abolishes slavery half-a-century before Lincoln. Pidgin’s most famous creation was Quincy Adams Sawyer, a young attorney and the title character in his first and bestselling novel, published in 1900. The tale was twice adapted by Hollywood in the silent era and Pidgin returned several times to Sawyer in later books. By the time of the short stories collected in The Chronicles of Quincy Adams Sawyer, Detective, the character had become a professional private investigator, clearly influenced by Sherlock Holmes. The stories, as the example below shows, are all engaging and well written.

THE AFFAIR OF LAMSON’S COOK

Quincy sauntered slowly along the street, enjoying the sunny warmth of an early June morning. Few cases had been presented to him of late, and the resulting inactivity had served to stock him, both mentally and physically, with unusual energy. His keen eyes, restless with inaction, flashed hither and thither over the small throng of hurrying pedestrians, as though in search of something on which to exercise his peculiar talents. But the people surrounding him seemed productive of anything other than mysteries. They comprised mainly the usual throng of hurrying clerks, stenographers and other employees, all rushing toward their individual desks or stations, and whatever