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Show HEW SCOTLAND YARD London's Detective Headquarters Headquar-ters in Fact and Fiction. Writers of Romance Have Attributed Wonderful Feats to Marvelous Sleuths Like an American City Hall. London. Scotland Yard, the most famous detective center in the world, owes Its fame to fiction. Plots far more Involved than the mysterious Doctor Crippen case have been worked out and the solutions credited to this Institution by a host of story writers led by Charles Dickens. Writers of romance, good and bad, have had a hand in creating impressions of secret passages, elaborate disguises and superhuman su-perhuman powers of deduction. Stealthy sleuths glide forth into the highways and byways to recover necklaces neck-laces of incredible value, to find abducted ab-ducted maidens and solve the dark and bloody puzzles of impossible murder mur-der mysteries. This is the Scotland Yard of fiction. The Scotland Yard of fact is a hand-1 some red brick building, elaborately trimmed, and very much like an American Amer-ican city hall in appearance. Nowhere within its door is there a hint of sensationalism. sen-sationalism. The building was designed de-signed to afford a headquarters for the vast police business of London, and it is business, from its foundation founda-tion stones to its weather vanes. Technically, the present Scotland Yard of present police fame is new Scotland Yard. Old Scotland Yard opens off Whitehall, midway between the present police headquarters and Trafalgar square. In long bygone days the detectives had three little rooms in the old yard, littered beyond belief with papers dirty and unbusiness like. It was these three rooms that Dickens Dick-ens knew. Detectives and police were under separate administrations then, and it was only when the police made a failure of a case that the detectives were called. Anyone who was willing to pay the cost anywhere in the United Kingdom had a right to call a detective from ' Scotland Yard. At present, a Scotland Yard detective is not allowed to leave London except on rare occasions. It was from the old force that Dick ens drew material for the detective sketches that all Dickens readers The New Scotland Yard in London. know. Inspector Veild, "a man of portly presence, with a large, moist,, knowing eye, a husky voice and a habit of emphasizing his conversation by the aid of a corpulent forefinger, which was in constant juxtaposition with his eyes and nose," was, In reality, reali-ty, Inspector Field, whose memory still Is green. Field also was the original orig-inal of Inspector Bucket in "Bleak House." Inspector Stalker, one of Dickens' characters, was Inspector Walker in real life. A few years ago there were many men on the force who remembered Thornton, the man whom Dickens changed to Dornton, the sergeant, "famous for pursuing the Inductive process, and, from small beginnings, be-ginnings, working from clue to clue until he bags his man." However, the Scotland Yard is said to be overwhelmed as the hub of detective de-tective skill. It would not be fair for an American correspondent to intimate inti-mate that the constables in London are up to the American standard of efficiency and intelligence in police duty. Much less Is expected of them, as a rule, and they have a much less troublesome class of people with which to deal. The London public, even in the worst quarters of the city: has a greater fear of the police than has the New York or Chicago public. From the constables are recruited the men who compose the aristocracy of the detective force. These are the men who eventually handle the "big cases." |
