Summary
A celebrated sleuth, Tex, unfurls the scarlet thread that first stitched him to the vocation of crime-hunter: during a convivial reunion at the manorial estate of Jack Nelson, civility splinters when master and manservant clash beneath crystal chandeliers; midnight swallows the host forever, and at dawn a blood-slicked stiletto winks beside the corpse. Edna, the widowed chatelaine, lunges for the blade in a trance of grief; Tex, dreading suicide, flings it into the morning mist—an instinctive mercy that the constabulary read as guilt’s confession. Shackled, he is hurled into a stone womb of years until a furnace-bright inferno licks the penitentiary and his valor earns both pardon and vendetta. On release he stalks shadows for the vanished butler, only to unearth the man’s blamelessness; fate then ushers him to Edna’s death-throes, where she exhales a whispered culpability that detonates Tex’s lifelong crusade against the tyranny of half-truths and happenstance proof.
Synopsis
Tex, a famous detective, recounts the story of how he went into the crime business: While visiting his old friend, Jack Nelson, a dispute breaks out between Nelson and his butler. Later that night, Nelson is murdered, and the next morning the murder weapon, a knife, is discovered next to the body. Edna, the victim's wife, seizes the knife, and Tex, fearing that she is about to kill herself, throws the weapon out the window. Interpreting Tex's actions as incriminating, the police arrest him, and he is sentenced to prison. Two years later, a fire breaks out at the penitentiary, and Tex's bravery in saving the warden's wife and child wins him a pardon. Determining to solve Nelson's murder, Tex searches for the butler but discovers him to be innocent. Summoned to Edna's deathbed, Tex hears her confess to the crime, thus causing him to devote his life to solving crimes and saving innocents from being convicted on circumstantial evidence.
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