Great American Detective Stories

A Passage to Benares by T. S. Stribling

T. S. Stribling is a man of unique distinctions. In addition to being the only Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote pulp scientifiction, he is the only detective story writer who ever succeeded in viewing his detective with complete objectivity. No sleuth has ever been limned with such merciless accuracy as HENRY POGGIOLI, nor so skilfully portrayed as that mixture of pettiness and sublimity which is Man. POGGIOLI has another distinction too; but you can discover that for yourself in “A passage to Benares,” the ending of which Charles Honce has justly called “positively thunderous.”

In port of Spain, Trinidad, at half past five in the morning, Mr. Henry Poggioli, the American psychologist, stirred uneasily, became conscious of a splitting headache, opened his eyes in bewilderment, and then slowly reconstructed his surroundings. He recognized the dome of the Hindu temple seen dimly above him, the jute rug on which he lay; the blur of the image of Krishna sitting cross-legged on the altar. The American had a dim impression that the figure had not sat thus on the altar all night long — a dream, no doubt; he had a faint memory of lurid nightmares. The psychologist allowed the thought to lose itself as he got up slowly from the sleeping rug which the cicerone had spread for him the preceding evening.

In the circular temple everything was still in deep shadow, but the gray light of dawn filled the arched entrance. The white man moved carefully to the door so as not to jar his aching head. A little distance from him he saw another sleeper, a coolie beggar stretched out on a rug, and he thought he saw still another farther away. As he passed out of the entrance the cool freshness of the tropical morning caressed his face like the cool fingers of a woman. Kiskadee birds were calling from palms and saman trees, and there was a wide sound of dripping dew. Not far from the temple a coolie woman stood on a seesaw with a great stone attached to the other end of the plank, and by stepping to and fro she swung the stone up and down and pounded some rice in a mortar.

Poggioli stood looking at her a moment, then felt in his pocket for the key to his friend Lowe’s garden gate. He found it and moved off up Tragarette Road to where the squalid East Indian village gave way to the high garden walls and ornamental shrubbery of the English suburb of Port of Spain. He walked on more briskly as the fresh air eased his head, and presently he stopped and unlocked a gate in one of the bordering walls. He began to smile as he let himself in; his good humor increased as he walked across a green lawn to a stone cottage which had a lower window still standing open. This was his own room. He reached up to the sill and drew himself inside, which gave his head one last pang. He shook this away, however, and began undressing for his morning shower.

Mr. Poggioli was rather pleased with his exploit, although he had not forwarded the experiment which had induced him to sleep in the temple. It had come about in this way: On the foregoing evening the American and his host in Port of Spain, a Mr. Lowe, a bank clerk, had watched a Hindu wedding procession enter the same temple in which Poggioli had just spent the night. They had watched the dark-skinned white-robed musicians smiting their drums and skirling their pipes with bouffant cheeks. Behind them marched a procession of coolies. The bride was a little cream-colored girl who wore a breast-plate of linked gold coins over her childish bosom, while anklets and bracelets almost covered her arms and legs. The groom, a tall, dark coolie, was the only man in the procession who wore European clothes, and he, oddly enough, was attired in a full evening dress suit. At the incongruous sight Poggioli burst out laughing, but Lowe touched his arm and said in an undertone:

“Don’t take offense, old man, but if you didn’t laugh it might help me somewhat.”

Poggioli straightened his face.

“Certainly, but how’s that?”

“The groom, Boodman Lal, owns one of the best curio shops in town and carries an account at my bank. That fifth man in the procession, the skeleton wearing the yellow kapra, is old Hira Dass. He is worth something near a million in pounds sterling.”

The psychologist became sober enough, out of his American respect for money.

“Hira Dass,” went on Lowe, “built this temple and rest house. He gives rice and tea to any traveler who comes in for the night. It’s an Indian custom to help mendicant pilgrims to the different shrines. A rich Indian will build a temple and a rest house just as your American millionaires erect libraries.”

The American nodded again, watching now the old man with the length of yellow silk wrapped around him. And just at this point Poggioli received the very queer impression which led to his night’s adventure.

When the wedding procession entered the temple the harsh music stopped abruptly. Then, as the line of robed coolies disappeared into the dark interior the psychologist had a strange feeling that the procession had been swallowed up and had ceased to exist. The bizarre red-and-gold building stood in the glare of sunshine, a solid reality, while its devotees had been dissipated into nothingness.

So peculiar, so startling was the impression, that Poggioli blinked and wondered how he ever came by it. The temple had somehow suggested the Hindu theory of Nirvana. Was it possible that the Hindu architect had caught some association of ideas between the doctrine of obliteration and these curves and planes and colors glowing before him? Had he done it by contrast or simile? The fact that Poggioli was a psychologist made the problem all the more intriguing to him — the psychologic influence of architecture. There must be some rationale behind it. An idea how he might pursue this problem came into his head. He turned to his friend and exclaimed:

“Lowe, how about staying all night in old Hira Dass’s temple?”

“Doing what?” with a stare of amazement.

“Staying a night in the temple. I had an impression just then, a—”

“Why, my dear fellow!” ejaculated Lowe, “no white man ever stayed all night in a coolie temple. It simply isn’t done!”

The American argued his case a moment:

“You and I had a wonderful night aboard the Trevemore when we became acquainted.”

“That was a matter of necessity,” said the bank clerk. “There were no first-class cabin accommodations left on the Trevemore, so we had to make the voyage on deck.”

Here the psychologist gave up his bid for companionship. Late that night he slipped out of Lowe’s cottage, walked back to the grotesque temple, was given a cup of tea, a plate of rice, and a sleeping rug. The only further impression the investigator obtained was a series of fantastic and highly colored dreams, of which he could not recall a detail. Then he waked with a miserable headache and came home.

Mr. Poggioli finished his dressing and in a few minutes the breakfast bell rang. He went to the dining room to find the bank clerk unfolding the damp pages of the Port of Spain Inquirer. This was a typical English sheet using small, solidly set columns without flaming headlines. Poggioli glanced at it and wondered mildly if nothing worth featuring ever happened in Trinidad.

Ram Jon, Lowe’s Hindu servant, slipped in and out of the breakfast room with peeled oranges, tea, toast, and a custard fruit flanked by a half lemon to squeeze over it.

“Pound sterling advanced a point,” droned Lowe from his paper.

“It’ll reach par,” said the American, smiling faintly and wondering what Lowe would say if he knew of his escapade.

“Our new governor general will arrive in Trinidad on the twelfth.”

“Surely that deserved a headline,” said the psychologist.

“Don’t try to debauch me with your American yellow journalism,” smiled the bank clerk.

“Go your own way if you prefer doing research work every morning for breakfast.”

The bank clerk laughed again at this, continued his perusal, then said:

“Hello, another coolie kills his wife. Tell me, Poggioli, as a psychologist, why do coolies kill their wives?”

“For various reasons, I fancy, or perhaps this one didn’t kill her at all. Surely now and then some other person—”

“Positively no! It’s always the husband, and instead of having various reasons, they have none at all. They say their heads are hot, and so to cool their own they cut off their wives’!”

The psychologist was amused in a dull sort of way.

“Lowe, you Englishmen are a nation with fixed ideas. You genuinely believe that every coolie woman who is murdered is killed by her husband without any motive whatever.”

“Sure, that’s right,” nodded Lowe, looking up from his paper.

“That simply shows me you English have no actual sympathy with your subordinate races. And that may be the reason your empire is great. Your aloofness, your unsympathy — by becoming automatic you become absolutely dependable. The idea, that every coolie woman is murdered by her husband without a motive!”

“That’s correct,” repeated Lowe with English imperturbability.

The conversation was interrupted by a ring at the garden-gate bell. A few moments later the two men saw through the shadow Ram Jon unlock the wall door, open it a few inches, parley a moment, and receive a letter. Then he came back with his limber, gliding gait.

Lowe received the note through the open window, broke the envelope, and fished out two notes instead of one. The clerk looked at the inclosures and began to read with a growing bewilderment in his face.

“What is it?” asked Poggioli at last.

“This is from Hira Dass to Jeffries, the vice-president of our bank. He says his nephew Boodman Lal has been arrested and he wants Jeffries to help get him out.”

“What’s he arrested for?”

“Er — for murdering his wife,” said Lowe with a long face.

Poggioli stared.

“Wasn’t he the man we saw in the procession yesterday?”

“Damn it, yes!” cried Lowe in sudden disturbance, “and he’s a sensible fellow, too, one of our best patrons.” He sat staring at the American over the letter, and then suddenly recalling a point, drove it home English fashion.

“That proves my contention, Poggioli — a groom of only six or eight hours’ standing killing his wife. They simply commit uxoricide without any reason at all, the damned irrational rotters!”

“What’s the other letter?” probed the American, leaning across the table.

“It’s from Jeffries. He says he wants me to take this case and get the best talent in Trinidad to clear Mr. Hira Dass’s house and consult with him.” The clerk replaced the letters in the envelope. “Say, you’ve had some experience in this sort of thing. Won’t you come with me?”

“Glad to.”

The two men arose promptly from the table, got their hats, and went out into Tragarette Road once more. As they stood in the increasing heat waiting for a car, it occurred to Poggioli that the details of the murder ought to be in the morning’s paper. He took the Inquirer from his friend and began a search through its closely printed columns. Presently he found a paragraph without any heading at all:

The paragraph following this contained a notice of a tea given at Queen’s Park Hotel by Lady Henley-Hoads, and the names of her guests.

The psychologist spent a painful moment pondering the kind of editor who would run a millionaire murder mystery, without any caption whatever, in between a legal notice and a society note. Then he turned his attention to the gruesome and mysterious details the paragraph contained.

“Lowe, what do you make out of those beggars, each with a coin and a piece of jewelry?”

“Simple enough. The rotters laid in wait in the temple till the husband went out and left his wife, then they murdered her and divided the spoil.”

“But that child had enough bangles to give a dozen to each man.”

“Ye-es, that’s a fact,” admitted Lowe.

“And why should they continue sleeping in the temple?”

“Why shouldn’t they? They knew they would be suspected, and they couldn’t get off the island without capture, so they thought they might as well lie back down and go to sleep.”

Here the street car approached and Mr. Poggioli nodded, apparently in agreement.

“Yes, I am satisfied that is how it occurred.”

“You mean the beggars killed her?”

“No, I fancy the actual murderer took the girl’s jewelry and went about the temple thrusting a bangle and a coin in the pockets of each of the sleeping beggars to lay a false scent.”

“Aw, come now!” cried the bank clerk, “that’s laying it on a bit too thick, Poggioli!”

“My dear fellow, that’s the only possible explanation for the coins in the beggars’ pockets.”

By this time the men were on the tramcar and were clattering off down Tragarette Road. As they dashed along toward the Hindu village Poggioli remembered suddenly that he had walked this same distance the preceding night and had slept in this same temple. A certain sharp impulse caused the American to run a hand swiftly into his own pockets. In one side he felt the keys of his trunk and of Lowe’s cottage; in the other he touched several coins and a round hard ring. With a little thrill he drew these to the edge of his pocket and took a covert glance at them. One showed the curve of a gold bangle; the other the face of an old English gold coin which evidently had been soldered to something.

With a little sinking sensation Poggioli eased them back into his pocket and stared ahead at the coolie village which they were approaching. He moistened his lips and thought what he would better do. The only notion that came into his head was to pack his trunk and take passage on the first steamer out of Trinidad, no matter to what port it was bound.

In his flurry of uneasiness the psychologist was tempted to drop the gold pieces then and there, but as the street car rattled into Peru he reflected that no other person in Trinidad knew that he had these things, except indeed the person who slipped them into his pocket, but that person was not likely to mention the matter. Then, too, it was such an odd occurrence, so piquing to his analytic instinct, that he decided he would go on with the inquiry.

Two minutes later Lowe rang down the motorman and the two companions got off in the Hindu settlement. By this time the street was full of coolies, greasy men and women gliding about with bundles on their heads or coiled down in the sunshine in pairs where they took turns in examining each other’s head for vermin. Lowe glanced about, oriented himself, then started walking briskly past the temple, when Poggioli stopped him and asked him where he was going.

“To report to old Hira Dass, according to my instructions from Jeffries,” said the Englishman.

“Suppose we stop in the temple a moment. We ought not to go to the old fellow without at least a working knowledge of the scene of the murder.”

The clerk slowed up uncertainly, but at that moment they glanced through the temple door and saw five coolies sitting inside. A policeman at the entrance was evidently guarding these men as prisoners. Lowe approached the guard, made his mission known, and a little later he and his guest were admitted into the temple.

The coolie prisoners were as repulsive as are all of their kind. Four were as thin as cadavers, the fifth one greasily fat. All five wore cheesecloth around their bodies, which left them as exposed as if they had worn nothing at all. One of the emaciated men held his mouth open all the time with an expression of suffering caused by a chronic lack of food. The five squatted on their rugs and looked at the white men with their beadlike eyes. The fat one said in a low tone to his companions:

“The sahib.”

This whispered ejaculation disquieted Poggioli somewhat, and he reflected again that it would have been discretion to withdraw from the murder of little Maila Ran as quietly as possible. Still he could explain his presence in the temple simply enough. And besides, the veiled face of the mystery seduced him. He stood studying the five beggars: the greasy one, the lean ones, the one with the suffering face.

“Boys,” he said to the group, for all coolies are boys, “did any of you hear any noises in this temple last night?”

“Much sleep, sahib, no noise. Police-y-man punch us ’wake this morning make sit still here.”

“What’s your name?” asked the American of the loquacious fat mendicant.

“Chuder Chand, sahib.”

“When did you go to sleep last night?”

“When I ate rice and tea, sahib.”

“Do you remember seeing Boodman Lal and his wife enter this building last night?”

Here their evidence became divided. The fat man remembered; two of the cadavers remembered only the wife, one only Boodman Lal, and one nothing at all.

Poggioli confined himself to the fat man.

“Did you see them go out?”

All five shook their heads.

“You were all asleep then?”

A general nodding.

“Did you have any impressions during your sleep, any disturbance, any half rousing, any noises?”

The horror-struck man said in a ghastly tone:

“I dream bad dream, sahib. When police-y-man punch me awake this morning I think my dream is come to me.”

“And me, sahib.”

“Me, sahib.”

“Me.”

“Did you all have bad dreams?”

A general nodding.

“What did you dream, Chuder Chand?” inquired the psychologist with a certain growth of interest.

“Dream me a big fat pig, but still I starved, sahib.”

“And you?” at a lean man.

“That I be mashed under a great bowl of rice, sahib, but hungry.”

“And you?” asked Poggioli of the horror-struck coolie.

The coolie wet his dry lips and whispered in his ghastly tones:

“Sahib, I dreamed I was Siva, and I held the world in my hands and bit it and it tasted bitter, like the rind of a mammy apple. And I said to Vishnu, ‘Let me be a dog in the streets, rather than taste the bitterness of this world,’ and then the policeman punched me, sahib, and asked if I had murdered Maila Ran.”

The psychologist stood staring at the sunken temples and withered chaps of the beggar, amazed at the enormous vision of godhood which had visited the old mendicant’s head. No doubt this grandiloquent dream was a sort of compensation for the starved and wretched existence the beggar led.

Here the bank clerk intervened to say that they would better go on around to old Hira Dass’s house according to instructions.

Poggioli turned and followed his friend out of the temple.

“Lowe, I think we can now entirely discard the theory that the beggars murdered the girl.”

“On what grounds?” asked the clerk in surprise. “They told you nothing but their dreams.”

“That is the reason. All five had wild, fantastic dreams. That suggests they were given some sort of opiate in their rice or tea last night. It is very improbable that five ignorant coolies would have wit enough to concoct such a piece of evidence as that.”

“That’s a fact,” admitted the Englishman, a trifle surprised, “but I don’t believe a Trinidad court would admit such evidence.”

“We are not looking for legal evidence; we are after some indication of the real criminal.”

By this time the two men were walking down a hot, malodorous alley which emptied into the square a little east of the temple. Lowe jerked a bell-pull in a high adobe wall, and Poggioli was surprised that this could be the home of a millionaire Hindu. Presently the shutter opened and Mr. Hira Dass himself stood in the opening. The old Hindu was still draped in yellow silk which revealed his emaciated form almost as completely as if he had been naked. But his face was alert with hooked nose and brilliant black eyes, and his wrinkles did not so much suggest great age as they did shrewdness and acumen.

The old coolie immediately led his callers into an open court surrounded by marble columns with a fountain in its center and white doves fluttering up to the frieze or floating back down again.

The Hindu began talking immediately of the murder and his anxiety to clear his unhappy nephew. The old man’s English was very good, no doubt owing to the business association of his latter years.

“A most mysterious murder,” he deplored, shaking his head, “and the life of my poor nephew will depend upon your exertions, gentlemen. What do you think of those beggars that were found in the temple with the bangles and coins?”

Mr. Hira Dass seated his guests on a white marble bench, and now walked nervously in front of them, like some fantastic old scarecrow draped in yellow silk.

“I am afraid my judgment of the beggars will disappoint you, Mr. Hira Dass,” answered Poggioli. “My theory is they are innocent of the crime.”

“Why do you say that?” queried Hira Dass, looking sharply at the American.

The psychologist explained his deduction from their dreams.

“You are not English, sir,” exclaimed the old man. “No Englishman would have thought of that.”

“No, I’m half Italian and half American.”

The old Indian nodded.

“Your Latin blood has subtlety, Mr. Poggioli, but you base your proof on the mechanical cause of the dreams, not upon the dreams themselves.”

The psychologist looked at the old man’s cunning face and gnomelike figure and smiled.

“I could hardly use the dreams themselves, although they were fantastic enough.”

“Oh, you did inquire into the actual dreams?”

“Yes, by the way of professional interest.”

“What is your profession? Aren’t you a detective?”

“No, I’m a psychologist.”

Old Hira Dass paused in his rickety walking up and down the marble pavement to stare at the American and then burst into the most wrinkled cachinnation Poggioli had ever seen.

“A psychologist, and inquired into a suspected criminal’s dreams out of mere curiosity!” the old gnome cackled again, then became serious. He held up a thin finger at the American. “I must not laugh. Your oversoul, your atman, is at least groping after knowledge as the blindworm gropes. But enough of that, Mr. Poggioli. Our problem is to find the criminal who committed this crime and restore my nephew Boodman Lal to liberty. You can imagine what a blow this is to me. I arranged this marriage for my nephew.”

The American looked at the old man with new ground for deduction.

“You did — arranged a marriage for a nephew who is in the thirties?”

“Yes, I wanted him to avoid the pitfalls into which I fell,” replied old Hira Dass seriously. “He was unmarried, and had already begun to add dollars to dollars. I did the same thing, Mr. Poggioli, and now look at me — an empty old man in a foreign land. What good is this marble court where men of my own kind cannot come and sit with me, and when I have no grandchildren to feed the doves? No, I have piled up dollars and pounds. I have eaten the world, Mr. Poggioli, and found it bitter; now here I am, an outcast.”

There was a passion in this outburst which moved the American, and at the same time the old Hindu’s phraseology was sharply reminiscent of the dreams told him by the beggars in the temple. The psychologist noted the point hurriedly and curiously in the flow of the conversation, and at the same moment some other part of his brain was inquiring tritely:

“Then why don’t you go back to India, Mr. Hira Dass?”

“With this worn-out body,” the old Hindu made a contemptuous gesture toward himself, “and with this face, wrinkled with pence! Why, Mr. Poggioli, my mind is half English. If I should return to Benares I would walk about thinking what the temples cost, what was the value of the stones set in the eyes of Krishna’s image. That is why we Hindus lose our caste if we travel abroad and settle in a foreign land, because we do indeed lose caste. We become neither Hindus nor English. Our minds are divided, so if I would ever be one with my own people again, Mr. Poggioli, I must leave this Western mind and body here in Trinidad.”

Old Hira Dass’s speech brought to the American that fleeting credulity in transmigration of the soul which an ardent believer always inspires. The old Hindu made the theory of palingenesis appear almost matter-of-fact. A man died here and reappeared as a babe in India. There was nothing so unbelievable in that. A man’s basic energy, which has loved, hated, aspired, and grieved here, must go somewhere, while matter itself was a mere dance of atoms. Which was the most permanent, Hira Dass’s passion or his marble court? Both were mere forms of force. The psychologist drew himself out of his reverie.

“That is very interesting, or I should say moving, Hira Dass. You have strange griefs. But we were discussing your nephew, Boodman Lal. I think I have a theory which may liberate him.”

“And what is that?”

“As I have explained to you, I believe the beggars in the temple were given a sleeping potion. I suspect the temple attendant doped the rice and later murdered your nephew’s wife.”

The millionaire became thoughtful.

“That is good Gooka. I employ him. He is a miserably poor man, Mr. Poggioli, so I cannot believe he committed this murder.”

“Pardon me, but I don’t follow your reasoning. If he is poor he would have a strong motive for the robbery.”

“That’s true, but a very poor man would never have dropped the ten pieces of gold into the pockets of the beggars to lay a false scent. The man who did this deed must have been a well-to-do person accustomed to using money to forward his purposes. Therefore, in searching for the criminal I would look for a moneyed man.”

“But, Mr. Hira Dass,” protested the psychologist, “that swings suspicion back to your nephew.”

“My nephew!” cried the old man, growing excited again. “What motive would my nephew have to slay his bride of a few hours!”

“But what motive,” retorted Poggioli with academic curtness, “would a well-to-do man have to murder a child? And what chance would he have to place an opiate in the rice?”

The old Hindu lifted a finger and came closer.

“I’ll tell you my suspicions,” he said in a lowered voice, “and you can work out the details.”

“Yes, what are they?” asked Poggioli, becoming attentive again. “I went down to the temple this morning to have the body of my poor murdered niece brought here to my villa for burial. I talked to the five beggars and they told me that there was a sixth sleeper in the temple last night.” The old coolie shook his finger, lifted his eyebrows, and assumed a very gnomish appearance indeed.

A certain trickle of dismay went through the American. He tried to keep from moistening his lips and perhaps he did, but all he could think to do was to lift his eyebrows and say:

“Was there, indeed?”

“Yes — and a white man!”

Lowe, the bank clerk, who had been sitting silent through all this, interrupted. “Surely not, Mr. Hira Dass, not a white man!”

“All five of the coolies and my man Gooka told me it was true,” reiterated the old man, “and I have always found Gooka a truthful man. And besides, such a man would fill the rôle of assailant exactly. He would be well-to-do, accustomed to using money to forward his purposes.”

The psychologist made a sort of mental lunge to refute this rapid array of evidence old Hira Dass was piling up against him.

“But, Mr. Hira Dass, decapitation is not an American mode of murder.”

“American!”

“I... I was speaking generally,” stammered the psychologist, “I mean a white man’s method of murder.”

“That is indicative in itself,” returned the Hindu promptly. “I meant to call your attention to that point. It shows the white man was a highly educated man, who had studied the mental habit of other peoples than his own, so he was enabled to give the crime an extraordinary resemblance to a Hindu crime. I would suggest, gentlemen, that you begin your search for an intellectual white man.”

“What motive could such a man have?” cried the American.

“Robbery, possibly, or if he were a very intellectual man indeed he might have murdered the poor child by way of experiment. I read not long ago in an American paper of two youths who committed such a crime.”

“A murder for experiment!” cried Lowe, aghast.

“Yes, to record the psychological reaction.”

Poggioli suddenly got to his feet.

“I can’t agree with such a theory as that, Mr. Hira Dass,” he said in a shaken voice.

“No, it’s too far-fetched,” declared the clerk at once.

“However, it is worth while investigating,” persisted the Hindu.

“Yes, yes,” agreed the American, evidently about to depart, “but I shall begin my investigations, gentlemen, with the man Gooka.”

“As you will,” agreed Hira Dass, “and in your investigations, gentlemen, hire any assistants you need, draw on me for any amount. I want my nephew exonerated, and above all things, I want the real criminal apprehended and brought to the gallows.”

Lowe nodded.

“We’ll do our best, sir,” he answered in his thorough-going English manner.

The old man followed his guests to the gate and bowed them out into the malodorous alleyway again.

As the two friends set off through the hot sunshine once more the bank clerk laughed.

“A white man in that temple! That sounds like pure fiction to me to shield Boodman Lal. You know these coolies hang together like thieves.”

He walked on a little way pondering, then added, “Jolly good thing we didn’t decide to sleep in the temple last night, isn’t it, Poggioli?”

A sickish feeling went over the American. For a moment he was tempted to tell his host frankly what he had done and ask his advice in the matter, but finally he said:

“In my opinion the actual criminal is Boodman Lal.”

Lowe glanced around sidewise at his guest and nodded faintly.

“Same here. I thought it ever since I first saw the account in the Inquirer. Somehow these coolies will chop their wives to pieces for no reason at all.”

“I know a very good reason in this instance,” retorted the American warmly, taking out his uneasiness in this manner. “It’s these damned child marriages! When a man marries some child he doesn’t care a tuppence for— What do you know about Boodman Lal anyway?”

“All there is to know. He was born here and has always been a figure here in Port of Spain because of his rich uncle.”

“Lived here all his life?”

“Except when he was in Oxford for six years.”

“Oh, he’s an Oxford man!”

“Yes.”

“There you are, there’s the trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

“No doubt he fell in love with some English girl. But when his wealthy uncle, Hira Dass, chose a Hindu child for his wife, Boodman could not refuse the marriage. No man is going to quarrel with a million-pound legacy, but he chose this ghastly method of getting rid of the child.”

“I venture you are right,” declared the bank clerk. “I felt sure Boodman Lal had killed the girl.”

“Likely as not he was engaged to some English girl and was waiting for his uncle’s death to make him wealthy.”

“Quite possible, in fact probable.”

Here a cab came angling across the square toward the two men as they stood in front of the grotesque temple. The Negro driver waved his whip interrogatively. The clerk beckoned him in. The cab drew up at the curb. Lowe climbed in but Poggioli remained on the pavement.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“You know, Lowe,” said Poggioli seriously, “I don’t feel that I can conscientiously continue this investigation, trying to clear a person whom I have every reason to believe guilty.”

The bank clerk was disturbed.

“But, man, don’t leave me like this! At least come on to the police headquarters and explain your theory about the temple keeper, Gooka, and the rice. That seems to hang together pretty well. It is possible Boodman Lal didn’t do this thing after all. We owe it to him to do all we can.”

As Poggioli still hung back on the curb, Lowe asked:

“What do you want to do?”

“Well, I... er... thought I would go back to the cottage and pack my things.”

The bank clerk was amazed.

“Pack your things — your boat doesn’t sail until Friday!”

“Yes, I know, but there is a daily service to Curagao. It struck me to go—”

“Aw, come!” cried Lowe in hospitable astonishment, “you can’t run off like that, just when I’ve stirred up an interesting murder mystery for you to unravel. You ought to appreciate my efforts as a host more than that.”

“Well, I do,” hesitated Poggioli seriously. At that moment his excess of caution took one of those odd, instantaneous shifts that come so unaccountably to men, and he thought to himself, “Well, damn it, this is an interesting situation. It’s a shame to leave it, and nothing will happen to me.”

So he swung into the cab with decision and ordered briskly: “All right, to the police station, Sambo!”

“Sounds more like it,” declared the clerk, as the cab horses set out a brisk trot through the sunshine.

Mr. Lowe, the bank clerk, was not without a certain flair for making the most of a house guest, and when he reached the police station he introduced his companion to the chief of police as “Mr. Poggioli a professor in an American university and a research student in criminal psychology.”

The chief of police, a Mr. Vickers, was a short, thick man with a tropic-browned face and eyes habitually squinted against the sun. He seemed not greatly impressed with the titles Lowe gave his friend but merely remarked that if Mr. Poggioli was hunting crimes, Trinidad was a good place to find them.

The bank clerk proceeded with a certain importance in his manner.

“I have asked his counsel in the Boodman Lal murder case. He has developed a theory, Mr. Vickers, as to who is the actual murderer of Mrs. Boodman Lal.”

“So have I,” replied Vickers with a dry smile.

“Of course you think Boodman Lal did it,” said Lowe in a more commonplace manner.

Vickers did not answer this but continued looking at the two taller men in a listening attitude which caused Lowe to go on.

“Now in this matter, Mr. Vickers, I want to be perfectly frank with you. I’ll admit we are in this case in the employ of Mr. Hira Dass, and are making an effort to clear Boodman Lal. We felt confident you would use the well-known skill of the police department of Port of Spain to work out a theory to clear Boodman Lal just as readily as you would to convict him.”

“Our department usually devotes its time to conviction and not to clearing criminals.”

“Yes, I know that, but if our theory will point out the actual murderer—”

“What is your theory?” inquired Vickers without enthusiasm.

The bank clerk began explaining the dream of the five beggars and the probability that they had been given sleeping potions.

The short man smiled faintly.

“So Mr. Poggioli’s theory is based on the dreams of these men?”

Poggioli had a pedagogue’s brevity of temper when his theories were questioned.

“It would be a remarkable coincidence, Mr. Vickers, if five men had lurid dreams simultaneously without some physical cause. It suggests strongly that their tea or rice was doped.”

As Vickers continued looking at Poggioli the American continued with less acerbity:

“I should say that Gooka, the temple keeper, either doped the rice himself or he knows who did it.”

“Possibly he does.”

“My idea is that you send a man for the ricepot and teapot, have their contents analyzed, find out what soporific was used, then have your men search the sales records of the drug stores in the city to see who has lately bought such a drug.”

Mr. Vickers grunted a noncommittal uh-huh, and then began in the livelier tones of a man who meets a stranger socially:

“How do you like Trinidad, Mr. Poggioli?”

“Remarkably luxuriant country — oranges and grapefruit growing wild.”

“You’ve just arrived?”

“Yes.”

“In what university do you teach?”

“Ohio State.”

Mr. Vickers’s eyes took on a humorous twinkle.

“A chair of criminal psychology in an ordinary state university — is that the result of your American prohibition laws, Professor?”

Poggioli smiled at this thrust.

“Mr. Lowe misstated my work a little. I am not a professor, I am simply a docent. And I have not specialized on criminal psychology. I quiz on general psychology.”

“You are not teaching now?”

“No; this is my sabbatical year.”

Mr. Vickers glanced up and down the American.

“You look young to have taught in a university six years.”

There was something not altogether agreeable in this observation, but the officer rectified it a moment later by saying, “But you Americans start young — land of specialists. Now you, Mr. Poggioli — I suppose you are wrapped up heart and soul in your psychology?”

“I am,” agreed the American positively.

“Do anything in the world to advance yourself in the science?”

“I rather think so,” asserted Poggioli, with his enthusiasm mounting in his voice.

“Especially keen on original research work—”

Lowe interrupted, laughing.

“That’s what he is, Chief. Do you know what he asked me to do yesterday afternoon?”

“No, what?”

The American turned abruptly on his friend.

“Now, Lowe, don’t let’s burden Mr. Vickers with household anecdotes.”

“But I am really curious,” declared the police chief. “Just what did Professor Poggioli ask you to do yesterday afternoon, Mr. Lowe?”

The bank clerk looked from one to the other, hardly knowing whether to go on or not. Mr. Vickers was smiling; Poggioli was very serious as he prohibited anecdotes about himself. The bank clerk thought: “This is real modesty.” He said aloud: “It was just a little psychological experiment he wanted to do.”

“Did he do it?” smiled the chief.

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t hear of it.”

“As unconventional as that!” cried Mr. Vickers, lifting sandy brows.

“It was really nothing,” said Lowe, looking at his guest’s rigid face and then at the police captain.

Suddenly Mr. Vickers dropped his quizzical attitude.

“I think I could guess your anecdote if I tried, Lowe. About a half hour ago I received a telephone message from my man stationed at the Hindu temple to keep a lookout for you and Mr. Poggioli.”

The American felt a tautening of his muscles at this frontal attack. He had suspected something of the sort from the policeman’s manner. The bank clerk stared at the officer in amazement.

“What was your bobby telephoning about us for?”

“Because one of the coolies under arrest told him that Mr. Poggioli slept in the temple last night.”

“My word, that’s not true!” cried the bank clerk. “That is exactly what he did not do. He suggested it to me but I said No. You remember, Poggioli—”

Mr. Lowe turned for corroboration, but the look on his friend’s face amazed him.

“You didn’t do it, did you Poggioli?” he gasped.

“You see he did,” said Vickers dryly.

“But, Poggioli — in God’s name—”

The American braced himself for an attempt to explain. He lifted his hand with a certain pedagogic mannerism.

“Gentlemen, I... I had a perfectly valid, an important reason for sleeping in the temple last night.”

“I told you,” nodded Vickers.

“In coolie town, in a coolie temple!” ejaculated Lowe.

“Gentlemen, I — can only ask your... your sympathetic attention to what I am about to say.”

“Go on,” said Vickers.

“You remember, Lowe, you and I were down there watching a wedding procession. Well, just as the music stopped and the line of coolies entered the building, suddenly it seemed to me as if — as if — they had—” Poggioli swallowed at nothing and then added the odd word, “vanished.”

Vickers looked at him.

“Naturally, they had gone into the building.”

“I don’t mean that. I’m afraid you won’t understand what I do mean — that the whole procession had ceased to exist, melted into nothingness.”

Even Mr. Vickers blinked. Then he drew out a memorandum book and stolidly made a note.

“Is that all?”

“No, then I began speculating on what had given me such a strange impression. You see that is really the idea on which the Hindus base their notion of heaven — oblivion, nothingness.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that before.”

“Well, our medieval Gothic architecture was a conception of our Western heaven; and I thought perhaps the Indian architecture had somehow caught the motif of the Indian religion; you know, suggested Nirvana. That was what amazed and intrigued me. That was why I wanted to sleep in the place. I wanted to see if I could further my shred of impression. Does this make any sense to you, Mr. Vickers?”

“I dare say it will, sir, to the criminal judge,” opined the police chief cheerfully.

The psychologist felt a sinking of heart.

Mr. Vickers proceeded in the same matter-of-fact tone: “But no matter why you went in, what you did afterward is what counts. Here in Trinidad nobody is allowed to go around chopping off heads to see how it feels.”

Poggioli looked at the officer with a ghastly sensation in his midriff.

“You don’t think I did such a horrible thing as an experiment?”

Mr. Vickers drew out the makings of a cigarette.

“You Americans, especially you intellectual Americans, do some pretty stiff things, Mr. Poggioli. I was reading about two young intellectuals—”

“Good Lord!” quivered the psychologist with this particular reference beginning to grate on his nerves.

“These fellows I read about also tried to turn an honest penny by their murder — I don’t suppose you happened to notice yesterday that the little girl, Maila Ran, was almost covered over with gold bangles and coins?”

“Of course I noticed it!” cried the psychologist, growing white, “but I had nothing whatever to do with the child. Your insinuations are brutal and repulsive. I did sleep in the temple—”

“By the way,” interrupted Vickers suddenly, “you say you slept on a rug just as the coolies did?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You didn’t wake up either?”

“No.”

“Then did the murderer of the child happen to put a coin and a bangle in your pockets, just as he did the other sleepers in the temple?”

“That’s exactly what he did!” cried Poggioli, with the first ray of hope breaking upon him. “When I found them in my pocket on the tram this morning I came pretty near throwing them away, but fortunately I didn’t. Here they are.”

And gladly enough now he drew the trinkets out and showed them to the chief of police.

Mr. Vickers looked at the gold pieces, then at the psychologist.

“You don’t happen to have any more, do you?”

The American said No, but it was with a certain thrill of anxiety that he began turning out his other pockets. If the mysterious criminal had placed more than two gold pieces in his pockets he would be in a very difficult position. However, the remainder of his belongings were quite legitimate.

“Well, that’s something,” admitted Vickers slowly. “Of course, you might have expected just such a questioning as this and provided yourself with these two pieces of gold, but I doubt it. Somehow, I don’t believe you are a bright enough man to think of such a thing.” He paused, pondering, and finally said, “I suppose you have no objection to my sending a man to search your baggage in Mr. Lowe’s cottage?”

“Instead of objecting, I invite it, I request it.”

Mr. Vickers nodded agreeably.

“Who can I telegraph to in America to learn something about your standing as a university man?”

“Dean Ingram, Ohio State, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A.”

Vickers made this note, then turned to Lowe.

“I suppose you’ve known Mr. Poggioli for a long time, Mr. Lowe?”

“Why n-no, I haven’t,” admitted the clerk.

“Where did you meet him?”

“Sailing from Barbuda to Antigua. On the Trevemore.”

“Did he seem to have respectable American friends aboard?”

Lowe hesitated and flushed faintly.

“I — can hardly say.”

“Why?”

“If I tell you Mr. Poggioli’s mode of travel I am afraid you would hold it to his disadvantage.”

“How did he travel?” queried the officer in surprise.

“The fact is he traveled as a deck passenger.”

“You mean he had no cabin, shipped along on deck with the Negroes!”

“I did it myself!” cried Lowe, growing ruddy. “We couldn’t get a cabin — they were all occupied.”

The American reflected rapidly, and realized that Vickers could easily find out the real state of things from the ship’s agents up the islands.

“Chief,” said the psychologist with a tongue that felt thick, “I boarded the Trevemore at St. Kitts. There were cabins available. I chose deck passage deliberately. I wanted to study the natives.”

“Then you are broke, just as I thought,” ejaculated Mr. Vickers, “and I’ll bet pounds to pence we’ll find the jewelry around your place somewhere.”

The chief hailed a passing cab, called a plain-clothes man, put the three in the vehicle and started them briskly back up Prince Edward’s Street, toward Tragarette Road, and thence to Lowe’s cottage beyond the Indian village and its ill-starred temple.

The three men and the Negro driver trotted back up Tragarette, each lost in his own thoughts. The plain-clothes man rode on the front seat with the cabman, but occasionally he glanced back to look at his prisoner. Lowe evidently was reflecting how this contretemps would affect his social and business standing in the city. The Negro also kept peering back under the hood of his cab, and finally he ejaculated:

“Killum jess to see ’em die. I declah, dese ’Mericans—” and he shook his kinky head.

A hot resentment rose up in the psychologist at this continued recurrence of that detestable crime. He realized with deep resentment that the crimes of particular Americans were held tentatively against all American citizens, while their great national charities and humanities were forgotten with the breath that told them. In the midst of these angry thoughts the cab drew up before the clerk’s garden gate.

All got out. Lowe let them in with a key and then the three walked in a kind of grave haste across the lawn. The door was opened by Ram Jon, who took their hats and then followed them into the room Lowe had set apart for his guest.

This room, like all Trinidad chambers, was furnished in the sparest and coolest manner possible; a table, three chairs, a bed with sheets, and Poggioli’s trunk. It was so open to inspection nothing could have been concealed in it. The plain-clothes man opened the table drawer.

“Would you mind opening your trunk, Mr. Poggioli?”

The American got out his keys, knelt and undid the hasp of his wardrobe trunk, then swung the two halves apart. One side held containers, the other suits. Poggioli opened the drawers casually; collar and handkerchief box at the top, hat box, shirt box. As he did this came a faint clinking sound. The detective stepped forward and lifted out the shirts. Beneath them lay a mass of coins and bangles flung into the tray helter-skelter.

The American stared with an open mouth, unable to say a word.

The plain-clothes man snapped with a certain indignant admiration in his voice: “Your nerve almost got you by!”

The thing seemed unreal to the American. He had the same uncanny feeling that he had experienced when the procession entered the temple. Materiality seemed to have slipped a cog. A wild thought came to him that somehow the Hindus had dematerialized the gold and caused it to reappear in his trunk. Then there came a terrifying fancy that he had committed the crime in his sleep. This last clung to his mind. After all, he had murdered the little girl bride, Maila Ran!

The plain-clothes man spoke to Lowe:

“Have your man bring me a sack to take this stuff back to headquarters.”

Ram Jon slithered from the room and presently returned with a sack. The inspector took his handkerchief, lifted the pieces out with it, one by one, and placed them in the sack.

“Lowe,” said Poggioli pitifully, “you don’t believe I did this, do you?”

The bank clerk wiped his face with his handkerchief.

“In your trunk, Poggioli—”

“If I did it I was sleepwalking!” cried the unhappy man. “My God, to think it is possible — but right here in my own trunk—” he stood staring at the bag, at the shirt box.

The plain-clothes man said dryly: “We might as well start back, I suppose. This is all.”

Lowe suddenly cast in his lot with his guest.

“I’ll go back with you, Poggioli. I’ll see you through this pinch. Somehow I can’t, I won’t believe you did it!”

“Thanks! Thanks!”

The bank clerk masked his emotion under a certain grim facetiousness.

“You know, Poggioli, you set out to clear Boodman Lal — it looks as if you’ve done it.”

“No, he didn’t,” denied the plain-clothes man. “Boodman Lal was out of jail at least an hour before you fellows drove up a while ago.”

“Out — had you turned him out?”

“Yes.”

“How was that?”

“Because he didn’t go to the temple at all last night with his wife. He went down to Queen’s Park Hotel and played billiards till one o’clock. He called up some friends and proved that easily enough.”

Lowe stared at his friend, aghast.

“My word, Poggioli, that leaves nobody but — you.” The psychologist lost all semblance of resistance.

“I don’t know anything about it. If I did it I was asleep. That’s all I can say. The coolies—” He had a dim notion of accusing them again, but he recalled that he had proved to himself clearly and logically that they were innocent. “I don’t know anything about it,” he repeated helplessly.

Half an hour later the three men were at police headquarters once more, and the plain-clothes man and the turnkey, a humble, gray sort of man, took the American back to a cell. The turnkey unlocked one in a long row of cells and swung it open for Poggioli.

The bank clerk gave him what encouragement he could.

“Don’t be too downhearted. I’ll do everything I can. Somehow I believe you are innocent. I’ll hire your lawyers, cable your friends—”

Poggioli was repeating a stunned “Thanks! Thanks!” as the cell door shut between them. The bolt clashed home and was locked. And the men were tramping down the iron corridor. Poggioli was alone.

There was a chair and a bunk in the cell. The psychologist looked at these with an irrational feeling that he would not stay in the prison long enough to warrant his sitting down. Presently he did sit down on the bunk.

He sat perfectly still and tried to assemble his thoughts against the mountain of adverse evidence which suddenly had been piled against him. His sleep in the temple, the murder, the coins in his shirt box-after all he must have committed the crime in his sleep.

As he sat with his head in his hands pondering this theory, it grew more and more incredible. To commit the murder in his sleep, to put the coins in the pockets of the beggars in a clever effort to divert suspicion, to bring the gold to Lowe’s cottage, and then to go back and lie down on the mat, all while he was asleep — that was impossible. He could not believe any human being could perform so fantastic, so complicated a feat.

On the other hand, no other criminal would place the whole booty in Poggioli’s trunk and so lose it. That too was irrational. He was forced back to his dream theory.

When he accepted this hypothesis he wondered just what he had dreamed. If he had really murdered the girl in a nightmare, then the murder was stamped somewhere in his subconscious, divided from his day memories by the nebulous associations of sleep. He wondered if he could reproduce them.

To recall a lost dream is perhaps one of the nicest tasks that ever a human brain was driven to. Poggioli, being a psychologist, had had a certain amount of experience with such attempts. Now he lay down on his bunk and began the effort in a mechanical way.

He recalled as vividly as possible his covert exit from Lowe’s cottage, his walk down Tragarette Road between perfumed gardens, the lights of Peru, and finally his entrance into the temple. He imagined again the temple attendant, Gooka, looking curiously at him, but giving him tea and rice and pointing out his rug. Poggioli remembered that he lay down on the rug on his back with his hands under his head exactly as he was now lying on his cell bunk. For a while he had stared at the illuminated image of Krishna, then at the dark spring of the dome over his head.

And as he lay there, gazing thus, his thoughts had begun to waver, to lose beat with his senses, to make misinterpretations. He had thought that the Krishna moved slightly, then settled back and became a statue again — here some tenuous connection in his thoughts snapped, and he lost his whole picture in the hard bars of his cell again.

Poggioli lay relaxed a while, then began once more. He reached the point where the Krishna moved, seemed about to speak, and then — there he was back in his cell.

It was nerve-racking, tantalizing, this fishing for the gossamers of a dream which continually broke; this pursuing the grotesqueries of a nightmare and trying to connect it with his solid everyday life of thought and action. What had he dreamed?

Minutes dragged out as Poggioli pursued the vanished visions of his head. Yes, it had seemed to him that the image of the Buddha moved, that it had even risen from its attitude of meditation, and suddenly, with a little thrill, Poggioli remembered that the dome of the Hindu temple was opened and this left him staring upward into a vast abyss. It seemed to the psychologist that he stared upward, and the Krishna stared upward, both gazing into an unending space, and presently he realized that he and the great upward-staring Krishna were one; that they had always been one; and that their oneness filled all space with enormous, with infinite power. But this oneness which was Poggioli was alone in an endless, featureless space. No other thing existed, because nothing had ever been created; there was only a creator. All the creatures and matter which had ever been or ever would be were wrapped up in him, Poggioli, or Buddha. And then Poggioli saw that space and time had ceased to be, for space and time are the offspring of division. And at last Krishna or Poggioli was losing all entity or being in this tranced immobility.

And Poggioli began struggling desperately against nothingness. He writhed at his deadened muscles, he willed in torture to retain some vestige of being, and at last after what seemed millenniums of effort he formed the thought:

“I would rather lose my oneness with Krishna and become the vilest and poorest of creatures — to mate, fight, love, lust, kill, and be killed than to be lost in this terrible trance of the universal!”

And when he had formed this tortured thought Poggioli remembered that he had awakened and it was five o’clock in the morning. He had arisen with a throbbing headache and had gone home.

That was his dream.

The American arose from his bunk filled with the deepest satisfaction from his accomplishment. Then he recalled with surprise that all five of the coolies had much the same dream; grandiloquence and power accompanied by great unhappiness.

“That was an odd thing,” thought the psychologist, “six men dreaming the same dream in different terms. There must have been some physical cause for such a phenomenon.”

Then he remembered that he had heard the same story from another source. Old Hira Dass in his marble court had expressed the same sentiment, complaining of the emptiness of his riches and power. However — and this was crucial — Hira Dass’s grief was not a mere passing nightmare, it was his settled condition.

With this a queer idea popped into Poggioli’s mind. Could not these six dreams have been a transference of an idea? While he and the coolies lay sleeping with passive minds, suppose old Hira Dass had entered the temple with his great unhappiness in his mind, and suppose he had committed some terrible deed which wrought his emotions to a monsoon of passion. Would not his horrid thoughts have registered themselves in different forms on the minds of the sleeping men!

Here Poggioli’s ideas danced about like the molecules of a crystal in solution, each one rushing of its own accord to take its appointed place in a complicated crystalline design. And so a complete understanding of the murder of little Maila Ran rushed in upon him.

Poggioli leaped to his feet and halloed his triumph.

“Here, Vickers! Lowe! Turnkey! I have it! I’ve solved it! Turn me out! I know who killed the girl!”

After he had shouted for several minutes Poggioli saw the form of a man coming up the dark aisle with a lamp. He was surprised at the lamp but passed over it.

“Turnkey!” he cried, “I know who murdered the child — old Hira Dass! Now listen—” He was about to relate his dream, but realized that would avail nothing in an English court, so he leaped to the physical end of the crime, matter with which the English juggle so expertly. His thoughts danced into shape.

“Listen, turnkey, go tell Vickers to take that gold and develop all the finger prints on it — he’ll find Hira Dass’s prints! Also, tell him to follow out that opiate clue I gave him — he’ll find Hira Dass’s servant bought the opiate. Also, Hira Dass sent a man to put the gold in my trunk. See if you can’t find brass or steel filings in my room where the scoundrel sat and filed a new key. Also, give Ram Jon the third degree; he knows who brought the gold.”

The one with the lamp made a gesture.

“They’ve done all that, sir, long ago.”

“They did!”

“Certainly, sir, and old Hira Dass confessed everything, though why a rich old man like him should have murdered a pretty child is more than I can, see. These Hindus are unaccountable, sir, even the millionaires.”

Poggioli passed over so simple a query.

“But why did the old devil pick on me for a scapegoat?” he cried, puzzled.

“Oh, he explained that to the police, sir. He said he picked on a white man so the police would make a thorough investigation and be sure to catch him. In fact, he said, sir, that he had willed that you should come and sleep in the temple that night.”

Poggioli stared with a little prickling sensation at this touch of the occult world.

“What I can’t see, sir,” went on the man with the lamp, “was why the old coolie wanted to be caught and hanged — why didn’t he commit suicide?”

“Because then his soul would have returned in the form of some beast. He wanted to be slain. He expects to be reborn instantly in Benares with little Maila Ran. He hopes to be a great man with wife and children.”

“Nutty idea!” cried the fellow.

But the psychologist sat staring at the lamp with a queer feeling that possibly such a fantastic idea might be true after all. For what goes with this passionate, uneasy force in man when he dies? May not the dead struggle to reanimate themselves as he had done in his dream? Perhaps the numberless dead still will to live and be divided; and perhaps living things are a result of the struggles of the dead, and not the dead of the living.

His thoughts suddenly shifted back to the present.

“Turnkey,” he snapped with academic sharpness, “why didn’t you come and tell me of old Hira Dass’s confession the moment it occurred? What did you mean, keeping me locked up here when you knew I was an innocent man?”

“Because I couldn’t,” said the form with the lamp sorrowfully, “Old Hira Dass didn’t confess until a month and ten days after you were hanged, sir.”

And the lamp went out.

EDITOR’S AFTERNOTE: You now perceive HENRY POGGIOLI’S other distinction. To put in the form of a Clerihew:

This death (Mr Stribling elsewere dates it exactly as January 20, 1929) makes the docent all but unique among detectives. We may be quite certain that UNCLE ABNER is dead by now, and we may feel sure that THE THINKING MACHINE is either dead or senile; but the fact of a detective’s death has almost never been recorded. SHERLOCK HOLMES, LORD PETER WIMSEY and HILDEGARDE WITHERS were each reported dead, but were resurrected. Freemans INSPECTOR BADGER was a subsidiary character, and Carr’s GAUDEN CROSS appeared in only one book. (Howard Haycraft’s statement that Ben Ray Redman’s DR HARRISON TREVOR is a detective-who-died is not supported by the one brilliant story in which DR TREVOR appears.) POGGIOLI’S definite death is, to my knowledge, the only one recorded among short-story detectives; and in the field of novels I can find a parallel only in the tragic demise of DRURY LANE.