makes a specialty of get-rich-quick men, oil and mining stock
operators, wire-tappers and their kin, and who knows the
antecedents and history of most of them better than any other
man in the country. He is ready to take the part of either a
"sucker" or a fellow crook, as the exigencies of the case may
demand.

There are detectives--real ones--on the police force of
all the great cities of the world to-day, most of them
specialists, a few of them geniuses capable of undertaking
the ferreting out of any sort of mystery, but the last are
rare. The police detective usually lacks the training,
education, and social experience to make him effective in
dealing with the class of elite criminals who make high
society their field. Yet, of course, it is this class of
crooks who most excite our interest and who fill the pages
of popular detective fiction.

The headquarters man has no time nor inclination to follow the
sporting duchess and the fictitious earl who accompanies her
in their picturesque wanderings around the world. He is busy
inside the confines of his own country. Parents or children
may disappear, but the mere seeking of oblivion on their part
is no crime and does not concern him except by special
dispensation on the part of his superiors. Divorced couples
may steal their own children back and forth, royalties may
inadvertently involve themselves with undesirables,
governmental information exude from State portals in a
peculiar manner, business secrets pass into the hands of
rivals, racehorses develop strange and untimely diseases,