Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

Little Mrs. Mears sometimes felt that there was a great scarcity of really good murders on an isolated Florida island — until the letter that morning. She was engaged in making over her poky little historian husband into a world-famous detective. Naturally he did not know this.

She scowled up at him reproachfully, from the letter, over the mid-morning coffee in his study. “I didn’t know you knew the Riders, Hollis!”

His magnificent forehead (it was startlingly brown from the sun beneath the silver crest of hair, it dwarfed everything about him) lifted to her from the eternal book list from his bookseller. Hollis was fenced in by books so that you could scarcely get to him. He was writing a History of the American Civil War, and the current world war could have been fought and won by the sheer tonnage of the tomes they already owned — all their money went for reference books — but still he was never through buying. “Are you reading my letters again?” he asked, resigned. “I don’t. Who are the Riders?”

“Tobacco. Fifty million dollars. Kidnaping.”

She passed to him the incredible, inconsequential, alarming letter: