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

Working on this theory, your Editor determined to unearth a sample of the detective story as it was written between 1845 and 1862 — and at long last we found one! Here, with an appropriate ta-ra, is a slightly condensed version of “The Garnet Ring,” by one M. Lindsay. It comes, foxed by the years, from Ballou’s “Dollar Monthly Magazine” (slogan: The Cheapest Magazine in the World), published in Boston, issue of May 1861.

Reader, peruse and compare. Compare this detective short story, vintage 1861, with the highly developed modern form which we take so much for granted these days that we are indifferent to its remarkable excellences. Only by going back into the past, into those vaunted “good old days,” can we realize fully how superb in technique, how rich in imagination, are the offerings of our Hammetts, our Carrs, our Chestertons, our Christies, our Sayerses, in these “the good new days.”

Poe, the Great Father of us all, died in 1849. He could not have read “The Garnet Ring.” Had he lived long enough to stumble on it, he would have wept melancholy tears. But if in some celestial cottage Poe has been following the careers of Uncle Abner, Father Brown, Sam Spade, Dr. Gideon Fell, and all the others we take too much for granted, he will not regret having invented what is now the most fabulous literary form in the history of man’s eternal search for les mots justes.

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During the first year of my practice as an attorney, clients and cases were so few with me, that I found it an agreeable change from the dullness of an almost unfurnished and unfrequented back office, to visit the court rooms, where I not only became familiar with the usages, arts and means of success employed by skilful lawyers, but where I could see human nature in its perplexities and struggles, its feebleness and power, exciting in me an interest and sympathy that the drama has never equalled.

One freezing morning during the first week of December, my office having been wholly innocent for the season of all artificial warmth, was too cold and cheerless to be endured any longer. It was enough to quench the light of hope and fire of courage in the most hot-headed and enthusiastic young man, so I determined to leave it for a while. I took down from its hook my old overcoat, the ever ready and unflinching friend of two or three winters, which, regardless of its dignity as an outsider, had never shrunk from the duties of frock-coat, dressing-gown, sick-gown and bedclothes. But alas! on this fireless cold morning, when it would have been so grateful to my poor heart and poorer purse to have found it transformed into one of the thickest beavers, fur-lined and fur trimmed, invincible to the fiercest northwester, it looked to me, spite of my old attachment to it, and my gratitude for its services, it looked quite used up, brown and rusty, thin and threadbare; its collar sadly soiled, its button-holes rent, its buttons lonesome, no two standing together.

I hurried away to the police courtroom, where the hopeless and frantic agony of crime makes us feel ourselves fortunate in innocence, however else unfortunate.