Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner is a classic collection of mysteries featuring the Teahouse Detective.
Mysteries! There is no such thing as a mystery in connection with any crime, provided intelligence is brought to bear upon its investigation. So says a rather down-at-heel elderly gentleman to young Polly Burton of the Evening Observer, in the corner of the ABC teashop on Norfolk Street one afternoon. Once she has forgiven him for distracting her from her newspaper and luncheon, Miss Burton discovers that her interlocutor is as brilliantly gifted as he is eccentric, and able to solve mysteries that have made headlines and baffled the finest minds of the police without once leaving his seat in the teahouse.
As the weeks go by, she listens to him unravelling the trickiest of puzzles and solving the most notorious of crimes, but still one final mystery remains: the mystery of the old man in the corner himself.
