This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Thieves' Wit: An Everyday Detective Story (1918) is Hulbert Footner's first-person New York mystery told by B. Enderby, a young operative of a private detective agency who gets his "first case!" when the famous actress Irma Hamerton asks him to shadow the actor Kenton Milbourne — who has vanished along with a fortune in borrowed jewels and a stash of paste pearls. Enderby is soon moving between the theatre, Dunsany's jewel shop and the backstage underworld of Manhattan: a dead-end taxi driver, a wig-maker, a pearl specialist, and a gang run by the elegant Lorina (Mrs. Mansfield) whose members answer to Jumbo, Foxy and the boy thief Blondy (really Ralph Andrus). A coded letter, a disguised "English" who is really the jeweller Walter Dunsany, and a final confrontation with the financier Alfred Mount — who drinks poison rather than face the police — carry the tale to its close. Told with Footner's brisk humour and slang-savvy New York voice, Thieves' Wit is a brisk detective romp of disguise, theft and wit.
