Chapter 1 - Insidious Marybelle

Different men are of different opinions,

Some like apples, some like inions.

That, I hold, is incontrovertible philosophy. How much truer it is, than, for instance, Emerson’s dazzling generality, “All the world loves a lover.”

But then, what generality is true? Yet, far truer than the latter epigram is this simple statement: All the world loves a mystery. And on this rock I build my tale.

I am a living man, and he is a Fictional Detective, but that is the only way in which I radically differ from Sherlock Holmes. We are both wonderful detectives, and I know of no other in our class. We can pluck out the heart of a mystery, unerringly, and with the least possible waste motion. I say this for myself without vanity or conceit. I have no patience with the modesty that deprecates skilled achievement. Even Holmes’s “Elementary, really, my dear Watson,” is distasteful to me. But the poor man couldn’t help it. His author wrote it about him. Now, I rate my work at its true value, and never underestimate it. Elementary, indeed! As well call the architecture of the Parthenon elementary.

A detective is merely a man who discerns the true and the relevant from a mass of false and unimportant evidence. That is all.

And I always do it. My confidence is founded on never failing experience in the past and no fear of failure in the future. It has always been so. As a child, picture puzzles flew together under my fingers, and little fiddly steel-ring puzzles fell apart in my hands. Charades, riddles, abstruse mathematical problems or tricky fallacies presented to me no difficulties of solution; and now I trust you realize my status as a detective.

My name is Owen Prall, and though that doesn’t sound like a detective’s name at first, it does, the more you come to think of it. My personal appearance is a little better than average, and though I am not handsome, I like to think I have an air of distinguishment; but this varies, after a chameleonic fashion, with my surroundings. I have a thick mane of hair about the color of apple-sauce. This proves the theory, a true one, that abundance of hair denotes unusual intuitive powers.

Now, as every man has his own pet unfulfilled desire, as some dream of perpetual motion and others of a way to make an omelette without breaking eggs, so I have always longed with the keenest intensity for a certain kind of a case.

To me, cases are cases. While my heart is shocked and sorrowed by a murder, my brain becomes at once awake, with its loin