This is a 1913 collection of ten short detective stories by a not well known writer. Jack Lanagan is a police reporter for a daily newspaper in San Francisco, who has the confidence of the chief of police and access to all sorts of levels of city life.
By : Edward H. Hurlbut ( - 1954)
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Jack Lanagan of the San Francisco Enquirer was conceded to have “arrived” as the premier police reporter of San Francisco. This honour was his not solely through a series of brilliant newspaper feats in his especial field, but as well by reason of an entente that permitted him to call half the patrolmen on the force by their given names; enjoy the confidences of detective sergeants, a close-mouthed brotherhood; dine tête-à-tête in private at French restaurants with well-groomed police captains on canvasback or quail out of season, and sit nonchalantly on a corner of the chief’s desk and absent-mindedly smoke up the chief’s two-bit cigars.
It was an intimacy that carried much of the lore of the force with it: that vital knowledge not of books. Bill Dougherty on the “pawnbroker detail” knew scarcely more “fences” than did Lanagan; Charley Hartley, who handled the bunco detail, found himself nettled now and then when Lanagan would pick him up casually at the ferry building and point out some “worker” among the incoming rustics whom Hartley had not “made,” and debonair Harry O’Brien, who spent his time among the banks, was more than once rudely jarred when Lanagan would slip over on the front page of the Enquirer a defalcation that had been engaging O’Brien’s attention for a week.
So it went with Lanagan; from the “bell hops” of big hotels, the bar boys of clubs, down to the coldest-blooded unpenned felon of the Barbary Coast who sold impossible whiskey with one hand and wielded a blackjack with the other, the police sources were his.
Consequently Lanagan, having “arrived,” may be accorded a few more liberties than the average reporter and permitted to spend a little more time than they in poker in the back room at Fogarty’s, hard by the Hall of Justice. Here, when times were dull, he could drift occasionally to fraternise with a “shyster,” those buzzards of the police courts and the city prisons who served Fogarty; or with one of the police court prosecuting attorneys affiliated with the Fogarty political machine, for Fogarty was popularly credited with having at least two and possibly three of the police judges in his vest pocket. Or he could rattle the dice with a police judge himself and get the “inside” on a closed-door hearing or the latest complaint on the secret file; and he could keep in touch with the “plain-clothes” men who dropped in to pass the time of day with Fogarty; or with the patrolmen coming on and off watch, who reported to Fogarty as regularly as they donned and doffed their belts and helmets things they thought Fogarty should know...
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