Summary
A silhouetted city exhales coal-smoke as David Hume—part-time sybarite, full-time provocateur—snatches a set of cyan-blueprints for a submersible war-engine meant for the U.S. Navy yard. His theft is no smash-and-grab but a ritual of shadows: he leaves behind a monogrammed glove, a whiff of Turkish tobacco, and the echo of a laugh that refuses to die. Enter Allen Morris, heir to the Morris Shipbuilding fortune, whose nights are stalked by the hallucination of propellers chewing through saltwater; his fiancée Edith Vale, equal parts Gibson-girl and Cassandra, watches her lover’s pupils dilate into periscopes. In desperation she dispatches Pendleton—bon-vivant, raconteur, wearer of dove-grey spats—to enlist Ashton-Kirk, the philatelist-savant of crime, whose mind is an attic crammed with obsolete timetables, tide charts, and the chemical formulae for ices. Kirk’s only clue: a crescent-shaped conductor’s punch glinting like a copper moon on the lapel of a murdered trolley man. The trail slithers through oyster-cellars, Turkish baths, and a shuttered phonograph parlor until it converges on a mute with ink-stained fingers who communicates via a chalk-slate that smells of lilacs and gunpowder. In the climactic danse macabre inside Hume’s gas-lit brownstone, Kirk crouches behind a Japanese screen while the mute and the serpentine Sagon pry up floorboards to reclaim the plans; the detective’s shutter-bulb freezes their guilt in a burst of magnesium light, the blueprints flutter back into Morris’s trembling custody, and Edith’s kiss tastes of cordite and deliverance.
Synopsis
The story deals with the murder of one David Hume, a mysterious individual, who has stolen the plans of a new submarine belonging to the father of Allen Morris. Edith Vale, sweetheart of Morris, notes that her fiancé is the victim of some obsession and through Pendleton, his close friend, enlists the aid of the great detective. Ashton-Kirk takes up the case with a vim, matching his wits against the craft and cunning of the criminal being his hobby. Through a simple little piece of paper made by a conductor's punch, the detective is able to get on the proper scent. This enables him to find his man, who proves to be a mute, and through a note dropped by the latter while in conversation in writing with a friend he learns the perpetrator of the crime. Then, back in the home of Hume, he is secreted when the mute and Sagon enter to recover the plans which Hume had in his possession, and for which the murder was committed. They are returned to Morris, and he and Edith are able to enjoy the bliss for which they had longed.
