Investigation Department, preferring to be at liberty to choose what
cases he would take up. Above all things he loved the strange and
inexplicable. Gimblet had not always been a detective. Indeed, he often
smiled to himself when he thought of the extraordinary confidence which
the public now elected to repose in him.

No one was more conscious than himself that he was far from being
infallible; in fact, his admirers appeared to him to be wilfully blind to
that elementary truth; so that when he failed to bring a case to a
successful issue people were apt to show an amount of disappointment that
he, for his part, thought very unreasonable. It was, perhaps, in the
nature of things that the puzzles he solved correctly received so much
more publicity than was given to his mistakes; but he often could not
avoid wishing that less were expected of him, and that his reputation had
not grown so tropically on what he could but consider insufficient
nourishment.

In early days, after leaving Oxford, he had gone into an architect's
office and had flourished there; till one day an accident had turned his
energies in the direction they had since taken.

A crime had been committed during the erection of a house he was
building, and, when the police were at a loss to know how to account for
the somewhat peculiar circumstances, the young architect, going his
ordinary rounds of inspection, had seen in a flash that there was
something unusual in the disposal of a portion of the building material;
which observation, with certain deductions following thereon, had led to
the detection and arrest of the criminal. From that time on he had been
more and more drawn to the fascination of tracing events to their
causes, when these appeared connected with deeds of violence and fraud,