{"id":3837,"date":"2012-07-07T22:22:05","date_gmt":"2012-07-07T22:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=3837"},"modified":"2012-07-07T22:22:55","modified_gmt":"2012-07-07T22:22:55","slug":"dear-mr-spade","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=3837","title":{"rendered":"Dear Mr. Spade"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><span style=\"color: #800000;\">by\u00a0Charles Rzepka<\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Dear Mr. Spade:<\/p>\n<p>Greetings from Sussex! Please accept my congratulations on your successful termination of the Maltese Falcon affair. But perhaps I\u2019m being premature. As you will have guessed from Miss O\u2019Shaugnessey\u2019s acquittal following the best legal defense money can buy, powerful interests are working to insure that the woman otherwise known as \u201cMiss Wonderly\u201d will never face imprisonment, and for good reason. Since the confiscation of her family\u2019s estates on the personal orders of Vladimir Lenin a decade ago, Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya has become a valuable agent of our government. You\u2019ve experienced her arts of persuasion, Mr. Spade, and your refusal to \u201cplay the sap\u201d for her bespeaks a degree of self-control matched only by yours truly. (Granted, \u201c<em>the<\/em> woman\u201d did me in, but Maria is no Irene Adler\u2014who, I\u2019m certain, would have made short work of you as well.)<\/p>\n<p>I have a proposition. The \u201cdingus\u201d awaiting disposal on an evidence shelf at San Francisco police headquarters may have nothing to do with Caspar Gutman\u2019s delusional provenance, but it is of interest to His Majesty\u2019s government. Beneath its grey layers of lead is the prototype of an advanced listening device smuggled out of Odessa by our man in Istanbul, Colonel Kemidov. Knowing he was under surveillance, Kemidov hid the device inside his paperweight. He then duped the falcon-besotted Gutman and his \u201cfine lot of lollipops,\u201d as you call them, into stealing it. Maria, helped by our agent Floyd Thursby, had already infiltrated Gutman\u2019s gang intending to retrieve the bird, but she did not anticipate matching wits with Samuel Spade, who certainly deserves some remuneration for all his hard work. If you are still on friendly terms with Detective Sergeant Thomas Polhaus, I am prepared, on the authority of my brother, Mycroft, to offer you $5,000 for the black bird.\u00a0 Surely Polhaus can be persuaded to intercept it on its way to the rubbish bin for a small fraction of that sum. Yes, Miles Archer will not receive justice, but you despised him and, after all, you did what you could. Give it some thought.<\/p>\n<p>Thursby\u2019s demise has raised suspicions that Maria may now be working as a double-agent, but it\u2019s best she continue to believe we trust her. Thus I expect you to keep this communication strictly confidential. As you\u2019ve been known to say, \u201cFive thousand dollars is a lot of money.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Yours sincerely,<\/p>\n<p>Sherlock Holmes, GBE, Ret.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by\u00a0Charles Rzepka Dear Mr. Spade: Greetings from Sussex! Please accept my congratulations on your successful termination of the Maltese Falcon<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=3837\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Dear Mr. Spade<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3837"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3837"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3843,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3837\/revisions\/3843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}