Something New

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There’s a divinity that shapes our ends. Consider the case of Henry Pifield Rice, detective. I must explain Henry early, to avoid disappointment. If I simply said he was a detective, and let it go at that, I should be obtaining the reader’s interest under false pretences. He was really only a sort of detective, a species of sleuth. At Stafford’s International Investigation Bureau, in the Strand, where he was employed, they did not require him to solve mysteries which had baffled the police. He had never measured a footprint in his life, and what he did not know about bloodstains would have filled a library. The sort of job they gave Henry was to stand outside a restaurant in the rain, and note what time someone inside left it. In short, it is not ‘Pifield Rice, Investigator. No. 1.-The Adventure of the Maharajah’s Ruby’ that I submit to your notice, but the unsensational doings of a quite commonplace young man, variously known to his comrades at the Bureau as ‘Fathead’, ‘That blighter what’s-his-name’, and ‘Here, you!