The West Case

In the unsettling quiet of a metropolitan night, the distinguished inventor F. N. West shatters the calm with a desperate summons to the constabulary. His frantic, broken declaration—a shadowy incursion by ‘china-men’ into his sanctum—precedes a sudden, inexplicable collapse into a deep, narcoleptic stupor. The scene is one of profound disarray, both physical and psychological, leaving the arriving officers with a bewildering tableau of a genius rendered inert and a chilling, unsubstantiated claim. The immediate, gnawing question that hangs in the air, thick with the scent of mystery and xenophobic dread, is whether this bewildering incident is the latest, audacious maneuver by the nefarious Fu-Manchu, and if so, what invaluable intellectual property—perhaps the very blueprints of West’s next world-altering innovation—has vanished into the inscrutable labyrinth of his adversary’s design.