Read Online The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt - Free Book Online Page A

never the ears.
    The shadow at the base of a brown brick warehouse. The tunnels of alleys. The clip of footsteps. A hallway lit in silver. The ruins of a church. A slash of light from a window with the shades drawn. And then the shade rises. A hand. A patch of imagined gaslight. A lost letter lifted by the wind. A startled look of recognition as a stranger hustles past, then turns around halfway down the block at the very moment you turn around, and you both know something you will never tell anyone else.
    Not in so many words did I tell myself that such mornings offered the best of life to me, but the evidence was all around me. Not in so many words did I understand that life was dark and wild, and that it insisted you look at it, pry into it, and face it with equal amounts of suspicion and affection. But who could not see this was so? I knew who I was, but I could not say it. Not in so many words. Yet, as I learned eventually, when words became the coins of my realm, how many words does it take?
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    I N GENERAL, LESS was said when I was a child. More was implied. Perhaps because there were commonly shared assumptions about things, both good and bad, or because people knew “their place” and everyone knew everyone else’s place, which also was good and bad. But for one reason or other, less was said. Detectives never talk a lot anyway. You never met a detective who runs off at the mouth. Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of the British TV series Foyle’s War, which is set during the Second World War, for instance, never used a word that didn’t count. Such a good writer.
    I don’t know that people did more thinking simply because they did less talking. One thing, though: Speaking less allowed for fewer careless outbursts, thus creating at least a veneer of civilization. The abrupt nod of the head. In my childhood I saw so many men, in particular, give one another abrupt nods that seemed to convey a good deal more than a mere greeting or agreement. Don’t see many these days. The nod that seemed to be worth a thousand words has been replaced by them.
    Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle had a habit of nodding just before he quietly clobbered someone with a devastating piece of information, which often revealed that person’s culpability. He would go straight to the point. He would say “Right,” meaning “Wrong.” He would say “No. You’re lying.” I miss the world where people said “No. You’re lying.” Sometimes Foyle would just raise an eyebrow.
    And all this emerged from a sense of justice, a font of justice, because the detective we most admire and honor is imbued with justice and is not simply assigned to see that justice is done. He must not only think justice is right. He must not only believe that civilization depends on its enactment. Justice must flow in his microbes and genes, so that when he goes after a bad guy or arrests him, he is satisfying something essential in his own makeup. In truth, he could no more live without justice than without air or water. I am thinking of all of them, the best of them. Holmes, Maigret, Poirot, Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Philo Vance, Marlowe, Spade, Archer, Wolfe. But here on this walk of mine, I am thinking especially of Foyle, who, even after he retired from the police department, could not let an injustice stand, particularly as it involved the weak. In the last episodes of Foyle’s War, the war is over, and crime is not officially Foyle’s business. Yet he pursues unfairness, cowardice, and bigotry for no other reason than that they must be pursued. Foyle was not merely a policeman. He was a man. His job, his position in the world, was that of being a man. What child would not wish to grow up to be Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle? What child with a nose for crime?
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    H ERE’S HOW NOSY I could be: When I was six, my parents rented a small summerhouse in Westport,