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.

They say that it is possible to have entirely too much of a good thing, my friends,

and on this subject I feel fairly confident in my lifetime of research and am prepared to come out strongly in support of said old saw.

No matter what it is or who, or I suppose when or why, but not really. Regardless, there comes a tipping point with anything where having more of it ceases to be a good thing.

Now, here we enter into some important qualifiers, namely just what constitutes a good thing.

At least for purposes of this idiom, for a standpoint of basic health, any whiskey, even excellent whiskey, is not really a good thing,

so much as it is a depressive poison.

This I know to be true.

However, I also know that no whiskey, being the amount that had before me as his rivaled little tale of adventure began, is frequently a bad thing.

Whereas Miss Dixon's seldom mentioned exercise routine, which is a good thing in that it keeps me long and lean and cat-like and entirely desirable to a wide range of deeply undesirable men is also not a really

good thing so much as a necessary evil. So it is safe to say that our cliche de jour speaks not

of the body but of the heart, my friends. And how often has that thing been wrong? Or perhaps

the mind, there is nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so, and so that

which was once thought good wears out its welcome. A giddy thrill becomes comfortable,

becomes boring, becomes kicked out my door with little or no notice. It's all a rich pageant,

ain't it? All of this is slightly beside the point, my friends, even if the cumulative effect does bring to mind mental pictures of a certain well-toned girl detective wearing her lacy unmentionables and pitching an empty whiskey bottle at the back of somebody's head.

Oh, don't pretend you weren't. I know it's the reason you keep coming back. No, none of this really matters. You can't have too much of a good thing.

But with the thing that walked through the door and flopped in our client chair on this particular

Wednesday, I had more than enough before I even saw him.

I have a problem. Oh, hello, Freddy. Hi, Jackie. I have a problem.

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