His career was a record of events outrivaling the detective tales of fiction; for fact, in its fullest scope, is stranger far than fiction. He followed men over two continents, he pursued them over land and sea, from country to country, from hemisphere to hemisphere, from new world to old world and back again. He traveled over thirty thousand miles in the chase of a single man. He shot and was shot. He was worsted in desperate struggles when help came in the nick of time, and he fought grim battles single handed when defeat would have meant death. His prisoners ranged from men of high estate to creatures of the lowest depths. The cases he solved ranged through every variety of crime known to the police records of the world.
He ran down counterfeiters of one million dollars and more; he unraveled the mysteries of murder where life was taken for eighty cents. He had the counterfeiting plates, valued at forty thousand dollars, as a trophy of the one chase, and he had a rusty iron pipe as a souvenir of the other.
Before his death he lived in Toronto, in a comfortable brick house in Brunswick Avenue. A stranger seeing him would have regarded him as a prosperous business man, of placid life and uneventful career. His home life was the antithesis of his official life. He lived alone, with a trusted housekeeper and discreet servants. His pleasure, apart from his work, was in outdoor life, with his dogs and gun, his fishing tackle, or, above all, a boat on the open sea. Beside his desk in the library of his house, were his favorite books on a separate shelf — the poems of Robert Burns, the works of Scott, the essays of Emerson, the Count of Monte Cristo, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Bible. He was an omnivorous reader, but these were his favorites. On the wall, side by side, were pictures of Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln. His den was filled with reminders of his life’s work. There were rusty bullets that came from the brains of murdered men; there were bludgeons, knives, revolvers, and sandbags, pieces of pipe, jimmies, kits of burglars, outfits of counterfeiters, symbols of the crucial clews that fastened on criminals the guilt of their crimes. Each had its history, and in the story of his life all have their place.
And in a gold frame on the top of his desk, in old English lettering on heavy paper, was the following:
Murray used to smile when a visitor read it.
Chapter II
What Makes a Detective
“My experience in the United States Secret Service some thirty years ago,” Murray said, “settled my determination to make the detective business my life work. I realized that to make a success of it I would have to go to work to perfect myself in it, just as does a man fitting himself for any other business and advancing himself after he engages in it.
“The detective business is the higher branch of the police business. A man may be an excellent policeman, and yet be an utter failure as a detective; and I have seen many a clever detective who was out of his element in the simpler lines of police duty. There is no magic about the detective business. A detective walking along the street does not suddenly hear a mysterious voice whisper: ‘Banker John Jones has just been robbed of one million dollars.’ He does not turn the corner and come upon a perfect stranger, and then because the stranger has a twisted cigar in his mouth, suddenly pounce upon him and exclaim, ‘Aha, villain, that you are, give back to Banker Jones the one million dollars you stole ten minutes ago!’ The detective business is of no such foolish and impossible character. Detectives are not clairvoyants, or infallible prophets, or supernatural seers. They possess no uncanny powers and no mantle of mysterious wonder-working. I remember a few years ago I was subpoenaed before a grand jury in the city of New York to testify on a matter pertaining to a prisoner whose record I knew here in Canada. The foreman of that jury was a man prominent in New York’s business life. When I was called he looked at me and suddenly said:
“ ‘Inspector Murray, what crimes have been committed within the past hour in New York, and who committed them?’ ”
“ ‘I have not the slightest idea,’ I replied.
“ ‘Oho! So you cannot go out and put your hands on every man who has committed a crime? You are a detective, yet cannot do that?’ he said.
“ ‘I am not that kind of a detective,’ I replied. ‘When I get a guilty man it usually is by hard work or good luck, and often by both.’
“ ‘Thank the Lord we’ve found a detective who is not greater than God,’ he said.
“As a matter of fact, the detective business is a plain, ordinary business, just like a lawyer’s business, a doctor’s business, a railway manager’s business. It has its own peculiarities because it deals with crime, with the distorted, imperfect, diseased members of the social body, just as a surgeon’s business deals with the distorted, imperfect, diseased members of the physical body. But it is not an abnormal or phenomenal or incomprehensible business. There is nothing done in it, nothing accomplished by any detective that is not the result of conscientious work, the exercise of human intelligence, an efficient system of organization and intercommunication and good luck. A good detective must be quick to think, keen to analyze, persistent, resourceful, and courageous. But the best detective in the world is a human being, neither half devil nor half god, but just a man with the attributes or associaties that make him successful in his occupation.
“A wide acquaintance is one of the most valuable assets of a detective. The more crooks he knows the better. I have seen detectives visit a prison and walk through it, recognizing man after man — hundreds of them. I have seen detectives stand before photograph cases and name and describe criminal after criminal, even to the minute eccentricities of each one. A good memory is a great help; in fact, it is essential to the equipment of a clever detective.
“A wide acquaintance of the proper sort is invaluable. Personal friendship, among detectives and police departments of different cities and different countries, is one of the greatest aids to efficient detective work. Detectives and police departments can help one another, for by their cooperation they create a detective system that covers the world. If a criminal escapes in one city he is apt to be captured in another, and times without number the perpetrators of crime in one community are arrested by the police of another, and held until called for by the police of the place where they are wanted.
“From the outset of my career I have made it a point to increase steadily and systematically my acquaintance among detectives, among criminals, among bankers, lawyers, business men, professional men, people of all sorts and conditions. Hundreds of times I have had occasion to be glad I did this. By knowing a man in the right way personally, you will find he will do things for you in a pinch that he never would do for you otherwise, under any circumstances.
“Personal knowledge of crooks is valuable for many reasons. Often you may recognize the perpetrator of a crime from a witness’s description of a person seen in the vicinity. You may recognize a certain kind of burglary as the work of a certain gang. In an emergency you may gather information from crooks that will enable you to lay your hands on the very man you are after.