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

that's Sultan of Sleuthing, 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.

It was commonly said of a great many things that its bark was worse than its bite.

I hadn't had more than a handful of actual run-ins with actual dogs,

though it wasn't always the barking ones that bit.

But the saying had been so far removed from whatever it might have once had to say on the

subject of canines that it didn't make much of a difference. The point seemed to simply be that

the thing that seemed most hostile is often not the most dangerous thing in the room, at least

not to you personally.

That wasn't a bad lesson, and if that was where it ended, it might have been useful,

in that it was a source of inspiration for a nice, healthy dose of paranoia.

But the phrase had come to be misapplied as often as not.

It was now a way of reassuring you that the Rottweiler in question was really just a big,

cuddly old teddy bear and nothing to worry about at all. See, when a dog is barking, it's telling you something. It's saying stay away. Too much faith that the bark is the bad part of the equation,

and you're likely to find out just how bad the bite really is. Of course, they didn't

really use it to mean dogs. They meant people who were almost always more dangerous. Lieutenant Sabian

was just such a one as that. He cornered the market on gruff and he had got pretty good at hollering

over the years, but times do change.

He used to arrest me a lot, and last month he and I actually had gone fishing.

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