FICTION AND FACT

Evening Star, Issue 22462, 6 October 1936, Page 11

FICTION AND FACT

PRIVATE DETECTIVES THE OTHER MAH'S SECRETS . Fiction and fact rarely appear to provide stranger contrasts than in the lives of private detectives, to whose activities references have recently been made from the judicial bench, writes W. F, Hartin, in tho ‘ Daily Mail.’ Sherlock Holmes, always living at a high pitch of excitement, seems a creature entirely apart from the people who appear in news about the mundane details of divorce inquiries. The fact is that in real life we often are not aware of that truth which is at least as strange as fiction. Private detectives, who are now m greater numbers than ever throughout the country, are finding on everwidening scope for their activities. Commercially their uses have multiplied enormously in the last few years. Women have founded agencies, and it is safe to say that the staff of no agency is complete without ono experienced woman detective. There was, for instance, the case of a reputable firm who decided to institute their own inquiries about chocolate of indifferent quality which was being supplied in their packages by an unknown traveller. Where many men failed a woman trapped him in a little village huckster’s shop which had been opened for her, ADEPT AT DISGUISE. She is a woman who is an adept in disguise as a charwoman or flowerseller, but this was the first time she had attempted to play the role of a village grocer’s widow, and the hardest part of her job was to allay the suspicions of the village, so that there would be no gossip which might forewarn the traveller. While the job of keeping erring husbands or wives under observation for purposes of divorce proceedings is still the private detective’s most frequent task, the demands of big stores run it a close second. Shoplifting by customers and pilfering by certain of the staff have involved firms in such heavy losses of stocks that now part of the organisation of a sale is often the recruitment of men and women detectives to the temporary staffs. They parade for duty behind the counters and in the various showrooms, and to all intents and purposes are indistinguishable from the ordinary assistants. They are additional to the private detectives that most stores employ permanently. One such woman, engaged in the last few months, was instrumental in retrieving from a professional shoplifter two fur coats worth several hundreds of pounds. BORDERLINE CASES. The shoplifter, to accomplish this impudent theft, had come into the store with two male companions and a new cheap coat, which she had obviously bought for the express purpose of discarding when she had appropriated a more valuable one. “ Our work,” said one agent, formerly famous at Scotland Yard, “ is often concerned with what one might call borderline cases. Some firms, who aro doubtful about a certain employee, are unwilling to prosecute, or, indeed, to resort to dismissal without concrete evidence. “ In such cases we may have to introduce ourselves as members of the staff, and, to avoid suspicion, it becomes necessary to know at least something of the business procedure of the firm. “ Still another class is the person being blackmailed. Even though we advise him that the courts will preserve anonymity, he is often reluctant to go to tho police. Often the inquiry presents tho difficult problem, ‘ Does the end justify tbo means?’ “ A young man’s parents came to us with the time-honoured details of his indiscreet letters to an apparently innocent English girl whom he had met at a certain Riviera resort. They wanted us to get them back, and the only way appeared to be to break into tho suite of rooms occupied by her ami her mother. Was such a step justified? THE MISSING LINK. “ We bad learnt that this girl was no ordinary husband-hunter; but while

our agent in Paris was making inquiries about her crooked associations he provided the French detectives with f>he very link they wanted in a long series of jewel robberies. “It was an unparalleled piece of luck. Tho suite was raided, and the letters fell into the pocket of our agent. The question is not always answered so easily as that.” A war-time officer of distinction whom I have met has agents all over the Continent, and his work is now almost exclusively concerned with the difficulties encountered by the fashionable Riviera crowds. At a moment’s notice he once left by aeroplane for a famous Continental resort with letters of introduction that assured him an apparently endless vista of entertainment from an exclusive circle of friends. Among them was a handsome young French business man, so passionately attached to an English girl of 19 that his flying week-end visits were encroaching more and more on his working week. There was nothing known against this man—at the same time there was nothing positive known about him. One indiscreet inquiry, one bungling move, and the man would immediately have been placed in the position of a person of consequence injured and affronted in the most despicable manner. Eventually' he was found to be a married man, whose wife lived in Bordeaux; it was also discovered that he had no business of an honourabje character in Paris; and he was rapidly approaching the end of his tether financially when his English “fiancee ” —an heiress to many thousands—was finally persuaded to bid him a very curt adieu, Such incidents in the life of a private detective occur again and again. Many start with the same set of facts, but they hardly ever have the same ending.