THE CRIMINAL'S TRAIL

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22195, 11 September 1937, Page 18

THE CRIMINAL'S TRAIL

GREAT DETECTIVES AT WORK Man Hunters. By George Dilnot. Robert Hale and Co. 287 pp. (12/6 net.) Edgar Wallace himself said that if any man could be called an authority on crime and the underworld that man was George Dilnot. In this book he begins with some "discursions on detection," concludes with a father startling essay on the increase of crime—" There are not enough police, and there are too many police forces"—and reviews, in between, a great diversity of detectives and their work. There is a chapter on Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau, the organisation of the famous "G" men, some of whose exploits are well summarised; but summary treatment does not illuminate the organisation which Hoover has made so effective. Much better are such fully developed stories as that which describes the tortuous work that was necessary to catch Kemmi and his confederates, who got away with Max Mayer's £135,000 pearl necklace: or as that of the Austrian Inspector Zollnet, Chief of the police in a small Tyrolese town, who caught de Tourville, a murderer clever enough to beat Scotland Yard. Mr Dilnot's field is wide. One of his best cases is that of Najmark's forgery plot, hatched in Poland and international in scope: part of it was the forgery of about £45,000 worth of British national health and unemployment insurance stamps. Another belongs to the records of Canadian crime, and the credit to "Old Never-Let-Go," or John Wilson Murray, in his day the only regular detective of the Department of Justice. A third, remarkable for the comic—but undeserved—discomfiture of Herr Inspektor Braun of the Berlin police by a murderer named Hennig, ends more justly but still comically: Braun's excellent work was completed by chance, when an obscure Stettin detective, Joecks, arrested a bicycle thief and found he had a prize whose capture was worth reporting by special telegram to the Kaiser! The most celebrated case of mistaken identity, that of Adolf Beck, has often been recounted; but the merit of Defective-Inspector Kane in clearing Beck and uncovering the guilt of his double, Smith, is here brought into due prominence. The case of Seznec, now on Devil's Island for the murder of a man no trace of whom has ever been found, is perhaps the queerest of all those recorded here. It exhibits the elaborate, patient fact-heaping and 'factsorting of workaday French detectives, the brilliant use of scientific method by their experts, ' and the logicality—perhaps excessive—of a French jury. Convinced by circumstantial proofs, the jurors refused to be weakened by the absence of a body or by the evidence of witnesses who said they had seen the victim, Quemeneur, after the date of his alleged disappearance.