Explore "The Black" by Edgar Wallace on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Colonel Carter, of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, took his cigar from his mouth in order to smile the more comfortably.
"My dear Welling, you are romantic, and because you are romantic you ought to have been a failure. Instead of which, by some mysterious dispensation of providence, you are a very successful detective officer. Romance plays no part in our work; there is nothing romantic about crime. A is a thief, with peculiar but well-known methods; B is a stolid, unimaginative police officer who, called into a case of burglary, larceny, anything you like, finds that the crime has been committed by somebody who employs the methods of A. Perhaps A makes a hobby of forcing kitchen windows, or using chance-found ladders, or is in the habit of taking a meal after the robbery is committed. Anyway, there are characteristics of A. So B arrests him, and generally he is right. You, on the other hand, would find, in the remnants of a stolen meal, proof that the robber was starving and would look for a hungry-looking, left-handed man!"