The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

At twenty to two in the morning, a cab pulls up at the St. Kilda police station with a dead man inside. He was put in drunk on Collins Street East by a stranger in a light fawn coat, who saw his face under the lamp, said "You?" and walked away — then changed his mind and rode with him.

The doctor finds chloroform on a silk handkerchief marked O.W., and a hand-sewn pocket inside the waistcoat, torn open and empty. Detective Gorby, who talks his cases through to his shaving mirror, traces it from a wool king's mansion to the slums off Little Bourke Street — and to a young Irishman who can account for that hour and would rather hang than say. It outsold every detective novel of its century.