Tangled Like Threads

A mother was the most respected role, while a prostitute was undoubtedly the most despised. When those two identities were combined in one woman, what attitude should her son have toward her? What would be the most normal reaction upon hearing news of her death?

Every character in a novel needed a setup. A good character concept often won the audience's approval quickly and became hugely popular.

But fake was fake. There were many writers of detective fiction, yet few succeeded. The main reason was that the ideas they devised were too implausible, with no possibility of actually being carried out. Readers could see through them at a glance.

The same went for magicians. Those "little tricks" came from clever ingenuity. Once the audience understood the trick behind them, they could perform magic themselves with enough practice. They were not wizards.

Conan Doyle called Houdini a true wizard. Perhaps he simply had not seen through Houdini's tricks.

Conan Doyle was an excellent novelist, but not a real detective. Judges relied on reason, while detectives relied on intuition. In the Jack the Ripper case, everyone from royalty to gang members had been investigated; every social class was involved. The police did not merely engage in "drawing-room socializing" like Victorian ladies. They had to go everywhere, and with their broad experience, even a dismemberment scene as horrifying as hell would not faze them.

The police did not need to face as many locked rooms as detectives in novels. Their job was to find suspicious suspects in the vast sea of people, like an owl searching for field mice in a barn. Interrogations, investigations, gathering evidence, and round-the-clock stakeouts—though no one knew which unlucky fellow it was, the policeman disguised as a woman must have looked ridiculous.

Neville's Boggart had tormented him terribly,