The Lure

Summary

Charlotte Baker’s betrothal becomes a velvet-lined trap when Paul—her ostensibly respectable fiancé—slips a narcotic into her champagne and delivers her, limp as a marionette, to an east-side brothel whose crimson wallpaper seems to bleed by candlelight. While her kin summon the celebrated sleuth Bob Macauley—a hawk-eyed investigator whose reputation glimmers like a gas-lamp in fog—his beloved Sylvia, a shop-girl juggling unpaid rent and a tubercular mother, is promised a promotion that evaporates into thin, perfumed air. Desperation leads her to a maternal-seeming patron whose visiting card smells of lilacs and menace; one cab ride later Sylvia finds herself incarcerated in the same gilded bordello, her name chalked onto a mahogany door. Bob, adopting the soot-streaked guise of a meter reader, prowls the corridors, only to confront Sylvia beneath a chandelier of crystal teardrops. Misapprehension flares, collapses, and gives way to a rescue that detonates the house’s mirrored halls—Paul is dragged away in manacles, while Charlotte and Sylvia emerge blinking into daylight like prisoners unaccustomed to the sun.

Synopsis

Charlotte Baker is drugged and taken to a brothel by Paul, her fiance, who in reality is a pimp. To find her, Charlotte's family contacts the celebrated detective Bob Macauley whose sweetheart Sylvia is a struggling salesgirl and the sole support of her ailing mother. When she is turned down for promotion by her boss, Sylvia applies for a position with a kindly woman who has offered her help. To her horror, Sylvia soon discovers that the woman is a madame and has lured her to the same house of ill repute in which Charlotte is being held captive. Meanwhile, searching for Charlotte, Bob visits the brothel disguised as a gasman and discovers that Sylvia is a resident. Thinking that she is there willingly, Bob upbraids her, but upon discovering the truth he rescues her as well as Charlotte and delivers Paul to the authorities.