“But wait a moment!” says Inspector Ulton. “How do you know all this?”
“And one thing more. He knows something about geology.”
And all the time he was holding this bit of a sheet of paper in his hand and glancing now and then at the crossword puzzle. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, and I don’t think Inspector Ulton could either. And then Mr. Linley begins to explain. “You see, we begin with his seventy-five friends — because it isn’t a casual burglar trying to rob him. A man doesn’t go to meet a stranger like that with jewelry on him; or with money either, unless he is going to pay blackmail. And if he’s going to pay blackmail, there’s no need to murder him. No, it was one of your seventy-five. And you see the track of his pen?”
“Yes, I see that.”
“And you see where it began to give out at the third word and could hardly manage the fourth? So he gave it up and went on with a pencil.”
“Yes, I see that too.”
“Well,” says Mr. Linley, “there are words in a crossword puzzle that you get helped to by the letters of words you have done already, but the ones a man puts in first are the ones he knows. Now look at these, Inspector. The first two clues that he went for, which are not nearly the first in the crossword, are Four of thirty-two and A kind of duck. Those are the two that he picked to do first. And he puts in Rooks and Shoveller.”
“Two birds,” says the Inspector.
“No,” says Mr. Linley; “the second is a bird, and the kind of bird not likely to be much known except among shooting men, and not always by them unless they live by muddy places in which the shoveller feeds. But rooks are what chess players call what the rest of us call castles. But though he is familiar with the correct name for them he doesn’t play chess, for he has missed a very easy clue in five letters, Starts on her own colour. He would never hear chess players talking about that, because it is too elementary. But he can’t be a chess player himself if he doesn’t know that that refers to the Queen.
“And the third one he picks out,” Mr. Linley goes on, “is London’s clays and gravels. And he writes down Eocene. Which is quite right. But not everybody knows that, and it seems to make him a bit of a geologist. And then we come to his fourth effort, when his fountain pen gave its last gasp. The; clue to that is A classical splendor of the greenhouse. And he gets that one at once, or at any rate it’s his fourth choice, without any letters to help him. And that is why I say he is not without education, because he must have known something of Horace to get that word, and must know something about a glasshouse, and I should say a well-kept one, which makes him a bit of a gardener. Amaryllis is the word that he has written in.”
“Why, that narrows it down a lot.”
“Yes,” says Mr. Linley. “We have now got a sporting friend of Mr. Ebright — if one can use the word friend, and if one can use the word sporting — who has probably quite a nice garden, and either a knowledge of geology or else he lives on those very clays and gravels and so knows their correct name, and also he is an educated man. Now among Mr. Ebright’s educated friends several would have been at Eton, Winchester, or Harrow. But you can eliminate all of them because of a staring gap in this puzzle. Number 9 down, you see. It says Long, short, short (six letters). If he can’t get that he has certainly never been at Eton. The simple answer is Dactyl — simple to anyone who has ever had to do Latin verses. And, indeed, you would get that much at a private school.”
And I put in a suggestion then. “Mightn’t Mr. Ebright have come in,” I said, “and interrupted him?”
“He might have,” said Mr. Linley, “but he had done all except three or four, and that Number 9 is one of the very first you would expect him to pick, if he knew anything about it, because it is so easy.’
“Well, I think you have helped us wonderfully,” says the Inspector.
“And I think we might follow his preferences a little further,” goes on Mr. Linley, “though that will not be so easy. He was using a soft pencil and it was soon blunted, and I think we may allow him some knowledge of entomology, because he wrote this in while his pencil was still sharp, without the help of any letters from words that cross it, for they are more blurred and the pencil was pressed harder.”
And Mr. Linley showed us the word Vanessa, and the clue to it, which was The family of the peacock.
“With a magnifying glass,” went on Mr. Linley, “we might get some more. But perhaps you have enough when we have identified the murderer as a man acquainted with Mr. Ebright, who probably owns a garden, was educated, but not at Eton, knows geology, or lives on the London clays or gravels, is associated in some way with chess players and yet does not play, and has at one time or another collected butterflies. If you don’t actually place him from that, it will at any rate remove suspicion from most of your seventy-five suspects.”
“And sure enough it did. There weren’t as many as half of them who had gardens. Only twenty of these turned out to have had a classical education and of those twenty, five had been at Eton. Of the fifteen remaining, only half a dozen knew anything of geology, and only two of those had ever collected butterflies, and one of them was found to have two nephews who often stayed with him on their vacations from Cambridge and were good chess players. And he did not play.
“All that was found out by Inspector Ulton and Scotland Yard, and it was a lot to find out. And they even found out that he had sent his pen to be refilled about the time Mr. Linley said. And they arrested their man, and he was tried. But the jury didn’t feel that you could quite hang a man on the evidence of a crossword puzzle, and the verdict was ‘Not Guilty.’ ”
“Then he is still going about!” said the journalist.
“Yes, when last I heard of him,” said Smithers. “But I don’t think there’s any harm in him now. It was a near thing and it frightened him, and I don’t think he’ll try it again. You see, Mr. Linley nearly had him.”
The red silk scarf
by Maurice Leblanc[5]
It is curious how often history repeats itself almost exactly — yes, even literary history... You will recall the story we told you in Queen’s Quorum how Gaston Leroux first named his famous detective Joseph Boitabille: how the journalist-sleuth appeared under that name for two installments of LE MYSTÈRE DE LA CHAMBRE JAUNE (THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW ROOM) when that ’tec tour de force was first published as a serial in “L’Illustration”; how between the second and third installments a real-life journalist named Garmont threatened to sue Gaston Leroux because he, Garmont, claimed exclusive rights to the pseudonym of Boitabille, based on his use of that pen-name for fifteen years; and how, to avoid all controversy and confusion, Leroux began to designate his hero, starting in the third installment, by his other name — Rouletabille!
We have just learned that this entire incident is merely a classic example of “history repeating itself.” The Boitabille-Rouletabille contretemps occurred in Paris lute in 1907. In the previous year, also in Paris, the identical situation took place — also involving a detective’s name and also involving his first appearance in print. In 1906 Maurice Leblanc wrote the first Arsène Lupin story. It appeared in a then-new magazine called “Je Sais Tout.” The great Arsène’s name was originally Arsène Lopin. (It seems impossible to believe, doesn’t it? After nearly half a century of familiarity with the name Lupin, our minds cannot accept any other spelling — no more than we could suddenly accept such famous detectives as Sherlock Holmes, Father Brawn, or Dr. Thornpyke — no more than your Editors could ever get used to a character named Ellery Quinn.) But to set back to our story: it seems there was a man whose true name was Arsène Lopin, and this actual person threatened to sue Leblanc. So, to avoid all controversy and confusion — setting the precedent for Leroux’s action the following year — Leblanc simply designated his hero by his other name — Lupin!