TOBACCO AND CRIME

Hokitika Guardian, 27 April 1920, Page 4

TOBACCO AND CRIME

(By G. T. Crook)

A detective sitting in a cosy armchair, with a juicy briar pipe in his mouth and peering through tlie thick, curling clouds of blue tobacco smoke, is a fascinating picture.

lon can almost hear him thinking. \ou know that through those clouds of smoke ho can penetrate the most tangled. crime mystery that ever baffled ordinary man. Mysteries simply have no chalice when lie smokes. Alas! it is only an attractive and doubtless instructive vision. The real detective lias not even a cosy easy chair in which to sink his body in order that bis brains may work the more vigorously. A.s for smoking ! ill every police station in the metropolis there are notices posted: ‘‘Smoking prohibited.” The stern prohibition is the sole adornment of the corridor walls at police headquarters. (No wonder there are so many unsolved liiysteries,” says the cynic.) There are detectives who never smoke and who never have smoked. A few detectives smoke only cigarettes; others smoke nothing hut cigars, which means in these days that they smoke very few. One well-known detective confines Ins smoking to a single cigarette a day. lie lights it at 8.30 sharp every evening. lie has done this for so many years that it has now become quite a habit with him.

Another detective lias in front of him on his office desk a large briar pipe and a pouch of hospitable dimensions. He will oiler a friend a fill of tobacco, but be himself never smokes until lie goes home. As a devotee of the pipe I have many times reduced the size of that pouch.

One famous police officer, who has an exceptionally valuable collection of hooks on crime and smokes a weird blend of seven mixtures, told me that not more than 25 per cent of first-class criminals smoke tobacco in any form.

He attributed this abstention to professional exigencies rather than to a natural dislike of tobacco. For instance, a thief—a burglar, or warehouse. breaker, or even a pickpockethas to move about with the utmost circumspection. it is hi.s business not to he seen. At night the glow of a 'igbted pipe or a cigarette, might easily had to his downfall, and of course to smoko on premises which ho has broken into would probably result in hi.s capture by a keen-nosed constable.

Prison lilo, too, does not encomage the smoking habit. A man in gaol gets so accustomed to being without tobacco that when release comes he has little or no desire for the weed. A short time ago thieves broke into a West End tobacconist’s shop and stole thousands of choice cigars— not to smoke themselves but to sell to a receiver. There wore some loose ones lying about and these they throw on the floor and trampled upon. If they had been smokers they would certainly not have destroyed good cigars.