deception by leading the reader off on false scents. Be that as it
may, the professional sleuth is in nine cases out of ten a dummy by
malice prepense; and it might be plausibly argued that, in the
interests of pure art, that is what he ought to be. But genius
always finds a way that is better than the rules, and I think it
will be found that the very best riddle stories contrive to drive
character and riddle side by side, and to make each somehow enhance
the effect of the other.--The intention of the above paragraph will
be more precisely conveyed if I include under the name of detective
not only the man from the central office, but also anybody whom the
writer may, for ends of his own, consider better qualified for that
function. The latter is a professional detective so far as the
exigencies of the tale are concerned, and what becomes of him after
that nobody need care,--there is no longer anything to prevent his
becoming, in his own right, the most fascinating of mankind.

But in addition to the dummyship of the detective, or to the cases
in which the mere slip of circumstance takes his place, there is
another reason against narrowing our conception of the riddle story
to the degree which the alternative appellation would imply. And
that is, that it would exclude not a few of the most captivating
riddle stories in existence; for in De Quincey's "Avenger," for
example, the interest is not in the unraveling of the web, but in
the weaving of it. The same remark applies to Bulwer's "Strange
Story"; it is the strangeness that is the thing. There is, in
short, an inalienable charm in the mere contemplation of mystery
and the hazard of fortunes; and it would be a pity to shut them out
from our consideration only because there is no second-sighted
conjurer on hand to turn them into plain matter of fact.