After the Gold Rush Book

Young journalist Polly Burton gets into the habit of having her lunch at the ABC cafe after her first encounter with a disreputable old man who, all the while obsessively making knots in a grimy piece of string he carries, bends her ear, Ancient Mariner-style, with his tales. In his instance the tales aren't of sea voyages and the supernatural but of unsolved murders. At the end of each of the dozen stories here he explains to Polly his own solution of the case -- one that he hasn't bothered conveying to the cops, because for the old man the whole joy is an intellectual one: he has no particular interest in seeing justice done.

I found this tremendous fun. Of the eleven stories, the only one that I felt fell a bit flat was the final one -- and, even then, I imagine I'd have found it pretty sterling too had I been reading in 1908, the year this book was published. One puzzle that remains is why Polly, a supposedly ambitious young journalist, didn't take the information given her by the old man and use it to mount some investigative exposés.

It's possible that I read The Scarlet Pimpernel in my youth, but otherwise this is my first encounter with Orczy's work. I'm now planning a raid on Project Gutenberg for more . . .