Captain Shannon

by Coulson Kernahan

As one walks down the High Street from the station, the pier lies directly in front, running out a mile and a quarter to sea on its myriad slender feet like a giant centipede. To the right are the shady shrubberies and sunny grass-crowned cliffs of New Southend, and to the left, with lips stooped to the water’s edge, the Old Town straggles away seaward, a long line of picturesque irregular buildings—some cheerful red, others warm yellow, and a few cool gray—reminding one not a little of some quaint French or Belgian port blinking in the morning sunshine.

And oh! such skies! such cloud-pomp and pageantry, and, above all, such sunrises and sunsets! Such dance and sparkle of moving water when the tide is in, and, more beautiful still, when the tide is out, such play of light and shadow, such wonderful wealth of colour on the marshy flats—here a patch of royal purple or opalescent green, there a rose-gray or pearly-pink, with little shining pools changing from blue to silver and silver to blue with the passing of every cloud.

Southend is a pretty spot at any time, but after a month spent on a sick bed in a stuffy London side-street, the view from the pier-hill seemed to me exceptionally beautiful.

As I stood there drinking my fill of the sweet, strong, brackish air, and basking in the sunshine, I was conscious of being scrutinised quietly but very keenly by a man who was lounging near the Royal Hotel.

There was nothing in his appearance or dress—white flannel trousers and shirt, cricketing blazer and straw hat—to distinguish him from the hundreds of holiday makers in like attire who are to be seen in and about Southend during the season, but I recognised him at once, and with some alarm, as one of the cleverest officers of the detective force, and one, moreover, who had been specially told off to effect the capture of Mullen.

In detective stories, as in pantomimes—no doubt for the same reason—the policeman is too often held up to scorn and ridicule as an incompetent bungler who is more dangerous to the hearts of susceptible servant girls than to law-breakers, and more given to deeds of prowess in connection with the contents of the pantry than in protecting the lives or properties of her Majesty’s subjects. The hero of the detective story is very often a brilliant amateur, of whom the police are secretly jealous, notwithstanding the fact that whenever they have a difficult case they come, hat in hand, to seek his assistance. This, after a little light banter for the benefit of the Boswell who is to chronicle his marvellous doings—and in the course of which, by-the-bye, the fact that the police are about to arrest the wrong man is not unfrequently elicited—he condescends to give, the understanding between him and them being that he shall do the work and they take the credit.

Why the amateur detective should be the victim of a modesty which is not always characteristic of the amateur in other professions does not transpire, but the arrangement is extremely convenient to the policeman and to the author, the latter probably adopting it lest inquisitive readers should ask why, if there are such brilliant amateur detectives as authors would have us to believe, we never hear of them in real life.

Now I should be the last man in the world to cheapen the work of my fellow-craftsmen. I hold that there is no more unmistakable mark of a mean mind than is evinced in the desire to extol oneself at the expense of others, but none the less I must enter my protest against what I cannot but consider an unwarrantable imputation upon a very deserving body of men.

Detectives and policemen, taken as a whole, are by no means the bunglers and boobies that they are made out to be in the pantomimes and in the pages of detective stories. I do not say that they are all born geniuses in the detection of crime, for genius is no commoner among detectives than it is among bakers, bankers, clergymen, novelists, barristers, or cooks. But what I do say is that the rank and file of them are painstaking and intelligent men, who do their duty to the public conscientiously and efficiently; and to dub them all duffers, because now and then a detective is caught napping, is as unjust as to pronounce all clergymen fools because a silly sermon is sometimes preached from a pulpit.

I had managed to get ahead of the police in the investigation I was conducting, not because of the shining abilities with which I was endowed, for as the reader knows I had bungled matters sadly on more than one occasion, but because Fate had thrown a clue in my way at the start. But I have never underrated the acuteness and astuteness of the representatives of the Criminal Department from New Scotland Yard, and it did not greatly surprise me to find, when I commenced operations again at Southend, that though the little brown cutter was still lying off the same spot, she was being closely watched by men whom I knew to be detectives.