Cleek of Scotland Yard: Detective Stories

Colliver, who had now sunk into a state of babbling incoherence, lay on his face in the wreck of the tableau, rolling his head from side to side and clasping and unclasping his...

Cleek found young Trent an extremely handsome man of about three-and-thirty; of a highly strung, nervous temperament, and with an irritating habit of running his fingers through...

"I don't know whether you are a wizard or not, Mr. Cleek," he said, after a moment; "but you have certainly hit upon the facts of the matter. It is for that very reason that I h...

"Five men, eh?" said Cleek, glancing up at Mr. Narkom, who for two or three minutes past had been giving him a sketchy outline of the case in hand. "A goodish many that. And all...

Thrice the voice of the page--moving and droning out his words in that perfunctory manner peculiar unto the breed of hotel pages the world over--sounded its dreary monotone thro...

Cleek's equanimity did not desert him, however. It was one of his strong points that he always kept his mental balance even when his most promising theories were deracinated. He...

The shock, the shame, of such a confession, telling, as it did, why he had attempted to destroy himself, had crumpled the man up, taken all the vitality out of him. He faced rou...

May had smiled itself out and June had blushed itself in--the most wondrous June, in Cleek's eyes, the world had ever seen. For the long waiting was over, the old order of thing...

Twenty minutes later his desires in that respect were granted; and, having been introduced by Mr. Nippers to the little gathering in the sitting-room of the house of disaster as...

It had gone two o'clock. The morning's work was done, a hasty luncheon disposed of, and the investigators were back in the dockmaster's house discussing the curious features of...

By this time the major, his daughter, and young Curzon Leake, full of deep and earnest solicitude for the long-erring Henry, and fairly bristling with questions and entreaties,...

It had gone nine by all the reliable clocks in town when the wild race to the coast came to an end, and after darting swallowlike through the wind-swept streets of Portsmouth, t...

"You mind your P's and Q's! I warn you that anything you say will be used against you!" interjected sharply and authoritatively the voice of the constable. "Hawkins, you and Mar...

It was precisely ten minutes past five o'clock and the long-lingering May twilight was but just beginning to gather when the spring cart of the Rose and Thistle arrived at the A...

"Cinnamon! what a corroboration--what a horrible corroboration! Cleek, you knock the last prop from under me; you make certain a thing that I thought was only a woman's wild ima...

The suggestion was acted upon immediately--even Mrs. Armroyd joining in the descent upon the portable lamps and filing out with the rest into the gloom and loneliness of the gro...

Screened by that darkness, and close sheltered by the matted gorse which fringed and dotted the expanse of the nearby heath, he had been an interested witness to the entire proc...

Mr. Narkom knowing him so well, knowing how, in the final moments of his _coups_, he was apt to become somewhat spectacular and theatrical, looked for him to return with a flour...

It is a recognized fact in police circles that crime has a curious propensity for indulging in periodical outbursts of great energy, great fecundity, and then lapsing into a mor...

The sky was all aflame with the glory of one of late June's gorgeous sunsets when he came up over the long sweep of meadowland and saw her straying about and gathering wild flow...

"Good morning, my friend. I hope I haven't taken you too much by surprise," he said, as the limousine sprang into activity the instant he closed the door, and settled himself do...

It was a full half hour later, and Sir Mawson and Lady Leake and Mr. Maverick Narkom were in the throes of the most maddening suspense, when the door of the music room flashed o...

"What's that?" rapped out Cleek, sitting up sharply. His interest had been trapped, just as Mr. Narkom knew that it would. "Vanished from a glass-room into which people were loo...

"I'm bothered if I know," returned Narkom helplessly. "Gad! I'm at my wits' end. We seem to be as far as ever from any clue to that devilish pair and unless you can suggest some...

By the side of the little chattering stream that flowed through the bit of woodland where Mr. Nippers and his associates had come upon them, they found Dollops, with his legs dr...

The queer little one-sided smile cocked up the corner of Cleek's mouth. "Sure of that, Sir Charles?" he inquired placidly. "Sure that she was not? I am told, it is true, that sh...

"This will be it, I think, sir," said Lennard, bringing the limousine to a halt at the head of a branching lane, thick set with lime and chestnut trees between whose double wall...

"Yes, a very, very clever scheme indeed, Miss Renfrew," agreed Cleek. "Laid with great cunning and carried out with extreme carefulness--as witness the man's coming here and get...

"Suppose, now, that you have succeeded in putting the cart before the horse, Mr. Narkom," Cleek said suddenly, "you proceed to give me, not the ramifications of the case, but th...

It was five and after when the superintendent, pale and shaking with excitement, came up the long drive from the Hall gates and found Cleek lounging in the doorway of the house,...

The "frying" of them took the shape of first going outside and walking round the Stone Drum, and then of stepping back to the door and beckoning Narkom and Lord Fallowfield and...

It was somewhere in the neighbourhood of half-past three when the opportunity to interview those three persons was finally vouchsafed him; and it may be recorded at once that th...

It was an hour later, and Cleek's voice broke the silence abruptly. He had taken out his notebook and had been scribbling in it for some little time, but now, as he spoke, he to...

Thus matters stood when on Thursday night at half-past seven o'clock--exactly one week after the discovery of that packet on the body of the drowned man--an amazing thing happen...

"How did I come to suspect the girl?" said Cleek, answering Narkom's query, as they swung off through the darkness in the red limousine, leaving Edgburn and his confederates in...

"No, Mr. Narkom, no. As an instrument of death the icicle is _not_ new," said Cleek, answering the superintendent's question as the limousine swung out through the gates of Heat...

At ten to the tick on the following night, he had said, and at ten to the tick he was there--the old red limousine whirling him up to the door in company with Mr. Narkom, there...

It was after five o'clock when the limousine arrived at the premises of Trent & Son, and Cleek, guided by the junior member of the firm and accompanied by Superintendent Narkom,...