The Mystery of the Clasped Hands by Guy Boothby

Jacob Burrell sat in his comfortable armchair and took counsel with himself. He was a bachelor, and like many other bachelors was wedded to a hobby, which in some respects was more to him than any wife could possibly have been. In other words he was an enthusiastic philatelist, and his collection of the world's stamps was the envy of every enthusiast who came in contact with them. For Jacob Burrell they possessed another interest that was quite apart from their mere intrinsic value. A very large number of the stamps so carefully pasted in the book had been collected, or had come into his possession, in the performance of his professional duties.

A very rare 1-1/4 schilling blue Hamburg was picked up by the merest chance on the same day that he ran a notorious bank swindler to earth in Berlin; while a certain blue and brown United States, worth upward of thirty pounds, became his property during a memorable trip to America in search of a fraudulent trustee, whose whereabouts the officials of Scotland Yard had not been able to discover. Well-nigh every page had a story of its own to tell, and when Burrell was in the humour, he could, with the book before him, reel off tale after tale, of a description that would be calculated to make the listener's hair stand on end with astonishment. At the present moment he was occupied, as he very well knew, with one of the most knotty problems he had ever tackled in his life. His face wore a puzzled expression. In his right hand he held a large magnifying glass and in his left a Canadian stamp of the year 1852.