Another tale of professional thief Lester Leith (hey, that rhymes…!), and another impossible crime. Who knew that Erle Stanley Gardner dabbled in the best subgenre in the world so frequently?

We follow the accepted pattern of Leith’s valet Scuttle — in actuality, police spy Edward H. Beaver — bringing once more to Leith’s attention some baffling crime that the police have been unable to solve. Whether it’s Scuttle’s intention that the more rope he gives Leith the more likely it is Leith will hang himself for the pleasure of Beaver’s superior Sergeant Ackley is unclear (sometimes it seems that Scuttle just wants to give Leith something to do), but this time, Leith is having none of it:

Lester Leith looked reproachfully at the spy.

“Scuttle,” he said, “is it possible that you are trying to interest me in that crime?”

“No, sir, not at all,” the spy made haste to reassure him. “Although if you were interested in the crime, sir, I am satisfied that this is a case made to order for you.”

This reluctance lasts all of a page or two — these stories would be pretty short otherwise — as the details of the murder of George Navin become only more enticing:

“Mr. Navin slept in a room which was considered virtually burglar-proof. There were steel shutters on the windows, and a door which locked with a combination, and there was a guard on duty outside of the door all night.”

Despite the precautions, Navin is discovered in the morning with his throat slit — the shutters bolted on the inside, of course, and no-one having gone through that door all night. So, despite signs that a ladder was used to access the room from the outside, there was no way to get in or out, yet someone did both. And somehow they also stole a valuable ruby that Navin himself had stolen from foreign parts some months before.

Cue Leith, whose claims that he’s only ever interested in providing armchair solutions to these diverting crimes have yet to be given any credence, rattling off the typical list of unusual objects (“…three fifty-dollar bills and fifty one-dollar bills…a diamond tiepin, an imitation of the ruby which was stolen from Navin’s house, and a very attractive chorus girl.”) which will, somehow, come into play when the small matter of solving the crime, and getting one over on Sergeant Ackley in the process, is concerned.

I speculated earlier in this series of reviews that the selection of these stories might well be predicated on finding only the best for the enjoyment of those readers lucky enough to track down this volume, and ‘The Exact Opposite’ bears out this supposition as it’s easily my favourite of the four I’ve read so far. It highlights one of Gardner’s genuine skills in how much life he gives even his minor characters — seriously, I’d read an entire series about one-time sleight-of-hand expert turned pickpocket Sid Bentley, whose naked avariciousness mixes with a down-at-heel acceptance that phenomenally hard to parse even if I took up ten times the words Gardner gives him on the page.

Bentley looked chagrined for a moment, and then sighed.

“You said that it’d be all right for me to pick up anything I could on the side, Captain,” he protested.

Lester Leith grinned.

“Well,” he said, “I had better amplify that. You can pick up anything you can on the side, provided you leave my pockets alone.”

Bentley matched Lester Leith’s grin.

“Okay, Captain,” he said. “That’s a go.”

I particularly enjoyed the moment that Leith has Bentley lift the imitation ruby that Scuttle has prepared for him, only for Bentley to be late handing it back over to Leith because “I had to go to a good fence and make sure that the thing I had was an imitation”. Because, of course, any pickpocket presented with such an apparently valuable gem would go and do that — it plays no part in Leith’s plan nor any meaningful purpose in Gardner’s narrative, but it speaks volumes about the life that Gardner has given this man who’s on the page for a mere fraction of the story.

Sergeant Ackley, brought into things by Beaver, is of course on hand to insist that Leith is doing something illegal despite there being no evidence of this, and the way Leith’s plan plays out is all the more ingenious for how Gardner leaves it to the reader to fill in certain gaps. The tendency for not all Gardner’s moving parts to quite gel looms large in his work, but here he’s constructed something of clockwork accuracy which falls out organically and manages to surprise without ever really surprising. There’s an argument that these are borderline inverted tales, since you’re more than clued in to Leith’s actions and you see the police action on the other side of the fence, and yet there’s still a pleasing element of unexpectedness.

Of particular interest to me from the historical perspective is the notion that the police here hand out “courtesy cards” to civilians who have done them a favour. W…what is going on there? I mean, sure, I could attempt to look it up online, but I imagine the practice is defunct now, and if one of you has the era-appropriate knowledge I’d simply love for you to be able to share it with everyone. What’s the point of hoarding obscure facts if not to foist them upon interested parties? Hit me up below if you’re able to help.