In Vino Veritas
A. A. Milne
I am in a terrible predicament, as you will see directly. I don’t know what to do. . .
“One of the maxims which I have found most helpful in my career,” the superintendent was saying, “apart, of course, from employing a good press agent, has been the simple one that appearances are not always deceptive. A crime may be committed exactly as it seems to have been committed, and exactly as it was intended to be committed.” He helped himself and passed the bottle.
“I don’t think I follow you,” I said, hoping thus to lead him on.
I am a writer of detective stories. If you have never heard of me, it can only be because you don’t read detective stories. I wrote
Murder on the Back Stairs and
The Mystery of the Twisted Eglantine, to mention only two of my successes. It was this fact, I think, which first interested Superintendent Frederick Mortimer in me, and, of course, me in him. He is a big fellow with the face of a Roman emperor; I am rather the small neat type. We gradually became friends, and so got into the habit of dining together once a month, each in turn being host in his own flat. He liked talking about his cases and naturally I liked listening. I may say now that
Blood on the Eiderdown was suggested to me by an experience of his at Crouch End. He also liked putting me right when I made mistakes, as so many of us do, over such technical matters as fingerprints and Scotland Yard procedure. I had always supposed, for instance, that you could get good fingerprints from butter. This, apparently, is not the case. From buttery fingers on other objects, yes, but not from the pat of butter itself, or, anyhow, not in hot weather. This, of course, was a foolish mistake of mine, as in any case Lady Sybil would not have handled the butter directly in this way, as my detective should have seen. My detective, by the way, is called Sherman Flagg, and is pretty well known by now. Not that this is germane to my present story.
. . .
