"MRS. SHERLOCK HOLMES."

Taranaki Daily News, 29 November 1918, Page 6

"MRS. SHERLOCK HOLMES."

NEW YORK WOMAN SLEUTH.

"The Woman Sleuth" New York calls her, b€t to her friends she is just a simple, ciiiarming woman, answering to Mrs Grace Humiston, but withal one of the busiest persons in the whole of New York and with unlimited resources at

her disposal in the prosecution of her especial work—keeping track of a big city's criminal force, and its many ramifications.

Mrs Humiston, who is a trained lawyer, says she made efficiency her watchword, and on it she has built up whatever reputation she lhas achieved in the solution of sociological problems defying the keenly-trained masculine brains of the Criminology Investigation Department. Maybe she owes not a little of success, too, to the fact that her husband happens to be a particularly brilliant man of law, and the family heart* is as good a place as an office, and better oftentimes, whereat to untie knots, and settle questions, and sift the pros And cons that girdle a vexed world. But ,those who vouch for her personally say that above all she is a "regular woman," wlliich, interpreted, means that she still regards a hat as "the darlingest thing," and not a piece of unnecesasry headgear, and a fashion display has the power to lure her quite as easily as it does the delinquents who stand before her desk wlhen she gets down to the business of the day. There is a long and creditable list of cases to Mrs Humiston's name, but she is devoting her fullest energies and abilities towards women and girl mysteries—with which New York and its environs abound.

She is a sleuth of unbelievable tenacity when it comes to a question of unravelling t«he tangled skeins of a murder mystery or a disappearance. Since her first great success in bringing to light the murderers of Ruth Cruger—a horror that mystified New York for a long while—Mrs Humiston found her name thereafter spelt in capital letters and her office besieged by countless parents, all demanding that s«ie find for them an erring son or daughter. And—she isn't even pretty, almost middle-aged—wears her hair parted in the middle, and she doesn't frivol.