Once again, Decoder Ring Theater presents another page from the casebook of that Master of Mystery,

that's Sultan of Sleothing, Martin Bracknell's immortal detective, Black Jack Justice,

starring Christopher Mott as Jack and Andrea Lyons as Trixie Dixon, girl detective.

The name's Dixon. Trixie Dixon, girl detective.

There is something about the life of a gumshoe that gives a person paused to reflect upon the great cosmic truths that bind us all.

And I don't just mean the cynical but not at all inaccurate observation that people are desperate,

money-grubbing scum whose only hope of clinging to virtue is an unfairly weighted risk versus reward balance when it comes to vice. That's part of it, of course, but too much reflection upon truths

quite that great

is the sort of thing that puts a girl detective in the nut house, the bottom of a bottle, or quite

possibly both. No, my friends, I speak of slightly smaller truths, but no less universal for all that.

Like the simple observation that most people tend to compartmentalize their lives,

and that most personal calamity tends to involve the walls of those compartments coming down,

even for a moment.

Most of the knocking on the smoked glass of the gray-green door that bore the moniker,

Justice and Dixon, private investigations, followed just such an incursion.

Loving wife from Box A meets enthusiastic secretary from box B, that kind of thing.

Of course, when the contents of more than one such a compartment are known to an outside individual,

the calamity is no less great.

But it often takes on a financial gleam, which in stuffy legal circles is known by the stuffy legal name of blackmail.

That tends to bring a certain amount of tap, tap, tapping at our chamber door as well.

I mention all of this because this particular story happens to involve not one,

but two such mixing of carefully compartmentalized lives.

...