He was one of my pupils, and a better one I never had.
I have therefore selected a few of his early cases to illustrate the kind of work that a young detective has to engage in.
Let him tell about his first case himself. I thought it would be more interesting to let him do his own talking, and accordingly wrote him and asked that he would describe his first case in his own way. Here is the answer I received:
MY DEAR MR. BRADY,--You ask me to write you a letter and tell you all about my first case and how I became a detective.
Now it will be very easy for me to do this, for I have never forgotten a single thing that happened that night, and I don’t believe I ever shall forget, if I live to be a hundred years old; and yet, after all, it wasn’t much of a case. It would have been mere child’s play to you if you had been in my position, which, of course, you wouldn’t. For you wouldn’t have allowed yourself to be deceived the way I was--that’s one thing sure.
I was between eighteen and nineteen then, and had left school some six months before I got the idea of being a detective.
My father was dead against it from the start, and my mother wouldn’t let me even mention the subject, but you see I had been reading about you and your wonderful cases in the NEW YORK DETECTIVE LIBRARY, and I got an idea that I would like no better fun than to be a detective myself.
“Pooh! You haven’t got the courage to be a detective!” exclaimed my father one evening, when I broached the subject for the hundredth time. “You’d run at the first fire, Sam.”
“Did I get my cowardice from you, sir?” I asked mildly.
“Don’t say it came from my side of the house, Mr. Kean!” snapped my mother. “My father was all through the Mexican war, and you got a substitute when they drafted you time of the Southern rebellion. The boy is a plaguey sight braver than you are.”
Now I had my mother on my side from that moment.
The result of my father’s fling was a big family row, which ended in the old gentleman’s getting me a letter of introduction to you, Mr. Brady. I took the letter down to your office one morning, and that’s the way it began.
“I don’t know about this,” was the first thing you said. “Young men born with silver spoons in their mouths rarely make good detectives. Don’t you think you’d better try your hand at some other line of business, my friend?”