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 Justice. Jack Justice. There are, I'm sure, vocations where the one that got away is a less grating prospect than in the detecting business. Fishermen, for example,

seem to thrive on the notion. Come to think of it,

I should probably learn a fish. Any activity where having almost caught something is a subject

fit to brag about is one that Jack Justice could truly excel in. Why, I had lost count of the

malefactors that I had almost caught, done it almost single-handed. All fun aside, it is the nature of what we do.

No detective, public or private, could expect to solve every case,

and more than we'd care to mention simply peter away without a definitive result of any kind.

Even when a real resolution is reached off and we're out of the room for the end of the story,

we've moved on, we're up to our necks and another mess by the time the players have all got their just desserts.

You learn to just let it go.

But for every detective, there are those cases that you can't stop playing over and over.

They ended badly or unhappily, or worst of all, sometimes they didn't end at all.

And for some reason, you couldn't put it on the shelf with the others.

They hung around your neck and weighed you down, always with the idea that you could have done more.

That somehow, if you'd just been a little bit faster, a little stronger, a little smarter,

maybe it wasn't true.

We weren't like the mask and tights set that were all the rage in the

comic books. Leaping over tall buildings in a single bound was not my speed. And if anyone who'd hired

me over the years had the contrary impression, that was just their own too darn bad. I knew all that.

...