Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

In 1859, after the birth of his colicky, leather-lunged son and namesake, Ambrose Ganelon, founder of San Sebastiano’s famous detective agency, began taking long late-night walks through the tiny principality.

Usually he kept to the city’s well-lit heart, for he found something sinister in gaslight, associating it with theater illuminations and pretense. As if he could fight all this falsity by staring it down, the detective’s steps often took him to the rue Babette arcade.

A few years back speculators had purchased several blocks of fine old apartment buildings there, gutted the interiors, and lowered the high ceilings, making three floors where two had been and three apartments where there had only been one, renting out these vast warrens to people who wanted a prestigious ad-dress behind a noble facade.

Then, inspired by the Crystal Palace in London and the souks of Libya, they had roofed over the streets before these buildings with iron and glass. Here the apartment dwellers came to escape their cramped quarters, strolling in slippers and with pipe to look in the shop windows or sitting in the cafes where they welcomed their friends as if into their own homes.

Ganelon shook his head over this confusion of indoors and out, of private and public, of day and night. At one time he thought the principality’s bright young men who walked their pet lobsters and tortoises on leashes there, each creature beneath its own little shell arcade, were mocking the scene.

Now he doubted they possessed such subtlety. Cardsharps used to fleece their marks by what was called glazing, where you sat your man down with a mirror behind him showing his cards. Eventually even the dullest of marks refused to sit anywhere near a mirror. But these young men walking their pets in the arcade wore the latest thing in men’s fashions, jackets with large silver buttons on whose surface the sharper could again read the mark’s cards. The style had come from Fong a la Mode, the Paris fashion house owned by Ganelon’s archrival, that master of pretense, the evil Dr. Ludwig Fong.

Ganelon suspected his seeing Fong behind everything was the onset of oboe madness, a common illness among players of woodwind instruments. When he mentioned this in his secret correspondence with the Mistress of Balmoral she told him the affliction was widespread in Scotland, where it was called “piper’s giddy,” and sent him a local nostrum for it which involved oatmeal and sheep tallow.

There were other evenings when Ganelon turned his back on the gaslight to walk through rougher neighborhoods still lit by sperm-whale oil lamps, which gave off a mellower light reminiscent of his childhood. These walks always ended at the Forest Gate and the customs booth of the rue Chenier, where taxes were collected on farm goods brought into the city each day.