AVERAGE JONES

Ten detective stories about a self-described “Ad-Visor” that the versatile and once popular but now largely forgotten Adams (1871-1958) originally collected in 1911.

The greatest stroke of originality here is to give facetious New York socialite Adrian Van Reypen Egerton Jones a thirst for a hobby that turns out to be advertising, a medium in which he soon becomes an expert, and to present cryptic, enigmatic, or otherwise tantalizing ads that lead him to criminal investigation. Although some of the resulting stories are routine—Jones searches for a doctor’s missing son in “Open Trail” and a jeweled necklace in “Blue Fires,” pursues a veiled threat to the governor’s life in “The One Best Bet,” and answers an ad seeking a man without a family for dangerous but well-paying work in the two-part “The Mercy Sign”—others revolve around ads and crimes that are equally original. “The B-Flat Trombone” invites Jones to connect a stolid German instrumentalist with the fiery bombing of a building outside which he’s been hired to play. The trail to a deep-laid conspiracy runs through a series of canine poisonings in “Red Dot.” Jones alertly decodes the hidden threats in a series of ads in “Pin Pricks,” asks why someone would run a very public ad demanding a $50,000 ransom for a missing boy in “Big Print,” and masquerades as mute in order to expose an ingenious fraud in “The Man Who Spoke Latin.” “The Million-Dollar Dog,” whose heroine’s recent inheritance depends on her care for her late grandmother’s dog, is the most conventional of all the stories, but it ends on such a high note that no one will complain.

Uneven work that at its clever, resourceful best sows the seeds of mystery’s golden age.