Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 187, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1911 — A Detective Story. [ARTICLE]

A Detective Story.

I like detective stories; I read them, I write them, but I do not believe them. The bones and structure of a good detective story are so old and well known that It may seem banal to state them even in outline. A policeman, stupid, but- sweet tempered, and always weakly erring on the side of mercy, walks along the street, and In the course of his ordinary business finds a man in Bulgarian uniform killed with an Australian boomerang in a Brompton milk shop. Having set free all tbe most suspicious persons in the story, he then appeals to the bulldog professional detective, who appeals to the hawklike amateur detective. The latter finds near the corpse a boot lace, a button boot, a French newspaper and a return ticket from the Hebrides, and so relentlessly, link by link, brings tbe crime home to the archbishop of Canterbury.—T. K. Chesterton In Illustrated London News.