My third Mondays with Mr. Geddoes became my keyhole to the wider world. He had spent his youth bludgeoning kangaroos for the bounty and had learned tolerance and a certain irony from the blood. His wife, he said, adored him—by which I assume he meant that she blasted and shriveled him with demands. The president of any country that came up was a grand fellow to Mr. Geddoes, just for getting away with such stuff. Mr. Geddoes liked to see a bit of larceny well done, with no crudeness about it, but a high polish, such as might be administered with one of his own waxes. Mr. Geddoes loved mystery, and he read murders and puzzles with the palate of the most erudite connoisseur. No glossing over the exact nature of a poisoner’s tools could fool him. If it wasn’t possible to kill a person in a particular way, Mr. Geddoes knew and could tell you why. We often spent the entire half hour of his monthly visits in furious disagreement over the acceptable subterfuges a composer of mysteries might inflict on his readers to conceal, till the last page, the solution. An iron code was the criterion for Mr. Geddoes. He claimed there were only three tales in the course of his long reading that had flummoxed him till the last.

“Page fifty-two,” he would say upon returning some lurid paperback I’d loaned him on his last visit. After he left I would spend hours poring over page fifty-two to try to discover the precise detail that revealed the mystery’s solution. Often it was neither a plot point or clue, but rather some revelation of the caliber of the writer’s mind.

“I knew when he introduced that tawdry business of the red slippers,” Mr. Geddoes might say, “that it’s a mediocre mind this fellow has. He’s no greater craft than an obvious twist at the end, and it’ll be the one they suspected all along.”

He knew strange things, Mr. Geddoes. And he was hyper-observant. He was a man who could appreciate that the covers were clean, that the milk and bread were fresh. He noted the specific reason for placing goldfish beneath a lamp and for deciding against cats.