A smuggling ring works the East River wharves, and Old Sleuth goes among them in disguise — the docks, the dives, the tug at midnight, the informer who is not one. Old Sleuth was Harlan Page Halsey, a Brooklyn school-board man who invented the American detective serial and gave the language the word sleuth in the sense we use it. This is dime fiction doing exactly what it was built to do.
