Teahouse Detective

Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála "Emmuska" Orczy de Orczi (23 September 1865 - 12 November 1947) was a Hungarian-born British novelist, playwright and artist of noble origin. She is most known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel. This is one of her novels.

Baroness Orczy isn't only known for the famous adventure novel The Scarlet Pimpernel. She also gave life to one of the most nonconformist and passive detectives found in literature. The Old Man in the Corner isn't an average Sherlock Holmes; he is a nameless protagonist who solves crimes while sitting in the corner of a London tea shop as he converses with a journalist. He doesn't trust the English police and their ways to solving a crime. Instead, he relies on logic and human behavioral patterns to identify the true culprit.

These twelve mysteries by the author of 'The Scarlet Pimpernel' concern a mysterious armchair detective who solves crimes from reports and using logic. The stories describe murders, blackmail, theft and deception, but all have as their setting the fog-cloaked Edwardian streets: Fenchurch Street, Percy Street and Lisson Grove in London. Dublin, Glasgow, and Liverpool are also home to cases that have baffled detectives.

A brilliant study in the art of logical deduction by the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.l He sits in the corner of the A.B.C. café, a length of string in his fingers. As the afternoon winds down, he ties and unties intricate knots - in the string and in his mind. No one in the café knows his name, but the old man in the corner is the most brilliant sleuth in London. No matter how baffling the crime, he need only glance at the newspapers to know the culprit. Skeptical of the old man's powers of ratiocination, journalist Polly Burton tests him. An industrialist blackmailed? A body found rotting in an abandoned barge? A will forged in far-off Dublin? The man in the corner cannot be stumped. As he eagerly informs the mystified Miss Burton, "There is no such thing as a mystery in connection with any crime, provided intelligence is brought to bear upon its investigation." This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler.