The young doctor stamped vehemently up the marble steps, to warm his feet, and once in the warm, flower-scented halls, let a little shiver escape him. The butler was new--he was always new, the doctor thought--and actually didn't know him. "Mrs. Allen is at bridge, sir, with a party: she asks to be excused," he began mechanically. (_"That's good!" Stanchon felt tempted to say, "and I hope the girls are out, too!"_) As if in answer to this indiscretion, the new butler droned on: "Miss Alida is at her riding-lesson and Miss Suzanne is--is engaged----" (_"Now, what particular infernal idiocy…
New York City Police Department
"It has always seemed strange to me that no one has ever endowed a professorship in criminal science in any of our large universities." Craig Kennedy laid down his evening paper and filled his pipe with my tobacco. In college we had roomed together, had shared everything, even poverty, and now that Craig was a professor of chemistry and I was on the staff of the Star, we had continued the arrangement. Prosperity found us in a rather neat bachelor apartment on the Heights, not far from the University. "Why should there be a chair in criminal science?" I remarked…
CHAPTER ONE | TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my…
THE MALTESE FALCON 1. Spade & Archer Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down–from high flat temples–in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. He said to Effie Ferine: “Yes, sweetheart?” She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of…