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 Trixie Dixon Girl Detective. The name's Dixon. Trixie Dixon Girl Detective.

They say that if one is unlucky at cards, it follows that person must therefore be lucky in love.

I take issue with this truism, geared as it seems to be towards consoling a loser rather than mocking him cruelly and taking his last dollar, as is my want.

That aside, the saying ignores the power that one has to be the architect of one's own good fortune,

to say nothing of the fact that games of chance and matters of the heart employ a startlingly similar series of skill sets.

Emotional inscrutability, cunning, guile,

ruthlessness in a keen sense of when to throw in the towel,

cash in your chips, and head for the hills, whistling,

don't fence me in.

Or maybe that's just me.

Having said all of that,

it is an established scientific principle

that opposites tend to attract,

and perhaps this, combined with our popular postulate on the subjects of love and cards,

might finally explain the friendship of Blackjack Justice and his old partner in crime,

Freddie the Finger Hawthorne.

No man was ever luckier in love than old Squarejaw,

who, in spite of a list of personal and professional shortcomings that would choke a mule, still had the affection of an attractive and apparently sane youngish divorcee named Dorothy.

And Freddie?

...