The Lazy Detective

Larry Hughes

To the world Larry Hughes is a cultivated gentleman of leisure, impeccable enough that any officer who dared haul him to a cell would face a ruinous suit for damages. To Labar and police circles worldwide, he is the audacious, ingenious mind behind half the professional crime in his division, running theft like big business through intermediaries who never touch the loot. He is the wall Labar must break, and the early chapters make clear that breaking him will be a man's-size job.

Harry Labar

Labar works the Stebbins shooting and the Streetly House robbery with patient, unglamorous craft — cordoning houses, searching a drunk gunman with his own hands, deferring questions until he's had eight hours' sleep. He knows Larry is guilty and knows he cannot prove it, a tension his friend Moreland needles him about constantly. His anonymous letter about Mrs. G. and her bookmaker's debts is the thread that pulls the Gertstein scandal into the case, making him the story's engine.

Penelope Noelson

Penelope has been spirited into Larry's country retreat, where she and the newly arrived Adèle Gertstein are told they are allies in a common cause — their own safety. Her curiosity is all aflame as she weighs whether Adèle's arrival bodes good or evil for her own case, and she dares not ask the questions burning in her. She is the reader's eyes inside the enemy's house, alert to every shift in Larry's bland, threatening hospitality.

Adèle Gertstein

Adèle reclines on the terrace of Maid's Retreat doing the thinking she hates, because a blackmailer wants five thousand pounds within the week or he goes to her husband Solly. She writes to Larry begging the money 'for the sake of old times,' hinting that publicity would embarrass him too, and coolly notes that Penelope has vanished. Her letter, intercepted by Labar, cracks the case open — she is both quarry and lever, and her recklessness keeps the plot tilting.

Solly Gertstein

Solly calls Maid's Retreat twice a day to wail about the Streetly House robbery and frets over Penelope's disappearance, fond and anxious and entirely unaware of what his wife is hiding. Labar and Superintendent Marlow recognise that if Gertstein learns how a scandal might reach him, he could deliberately gum up the investigation to hush it. He never appears on the page directly, but his money, his devotion, and his potential interference shape every move the police make.

Moreland

Moreland punctures Labar's theorising with the hard question — what if the crook has men, money, and brains too, and can foresee every move? He warns Labar that the abduction charge may collapse if the lady says she went willingly, and that he's playing a losing hand against Larry. Yet he is the trusted sounding board to whom Labar shows the anonymous letter about Mrs. G., making him the reader's window into the inspector's hunches and the case's real risks.