Martin Hewitt

The finest cameo in the world — a sardonyx of three colours carved in the first century and the size of a man's hand — is bought for five thousand pounds and promised to the British Museum, until two nights before it leaves the dealer's safe thieves come down through a trap-door in the roof, force three locked doors, and the treasure simply vanishes; the police are baffled, the dealer is ruined, and Martin Hewitt, the calm smiling investigator London called the heir to Sherlock Holmes, takes the case and appears for once in his career to fail completely — yet Hewitt did not fail, for he found the truth at the bottom of that empty desk and chose to keep it buried, in a quiet and ingenious tale of forgery, reputation, and a detective generous enough to let a guilty man keep his secret; this is Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt, created for The Strand Magazine to fill the void when Sherlock Holmes plunged over the Reichenbach Falls and illustrated by the very artist who drew Holmes, from Martin Hewitt, Investigator, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Arthur Morrison wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.

by Arthur Morrison

55 min·No. 196