As we get into the mystery-story section of The Pulps, we first encounter “Mr. Alias, Burglar” by Ridrigues Ottolengui. Although amusing in a way, it is obviously inspired by Sherlock Holmes and suffers from the defects of some of the worst Sherlock Holmes stories.
The tale opens by introducing Mitchel, a wealthy and extremely self-confident amateur detective who apparently solves murder cases after the typical drawing-room fashion. A man who goes by the name of Alias approaches him and declares that he can rob him without his detection. They agree to bet on this and then go their separate ways, Alias to the work of committing ther robbery and Mitchell to the work of foiling or detecting it.
As Tony Goodstone points out in his brief commentary on this story, it commits the “cardinal sin” of revealing all the clues at the end instead of delivering them throughout the story for the reader to figure out—but it has to do this because there is really no mystery here. Instead, the story features Mitchell mind-reading, predicting the future, and jumping to conclusions, all while pretending that his baseless assumptions are the power of deduction. Much as Holmes leaps to the conclusion that Watson must have been in India because he has a suntan—and turns out to be correct because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have it so—Mitchell precisely guesses when and in what way Alias will perform certain acts, and what his reactions will be to certain phenomena.
The story is entertaining mostly because of the dialogue: In the key scenes, these two men arrogant men, both supposing themselves to be intellectual giants, exchange verbal barbs. Their ripostes are fun to read, but they don’t have nearly the gravity that Ottolengui apparently thought they did.
