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Lavender, Jimmie. Jimmie Lavender was created by Vincent Starrett (Riley Blackwood, Walter Ghost, George Washington Troxell) and appeared in forty-three stories in a number of magazines from 1921 to 1964, beginning with “Tale of the Three Suitors” (Wayside Tales and Cartoons Magazine, Aug. 1921); several of the stories were collected and published in The Casebook of Jimmie Lavender (1944).

Jimmie Lavender is a Great Detective. He is a consulting detective, privately employed, whose office is his third-floor apartment on Portland Street in Gotham. The office/apartment is a crowded place, full of both books and scientific instruments. Lavender is similar to Sherlock Holmes, although Lavender has dark hair leavened by a single, vivid white lock and is a golfer. But Lavender’s mind is as acute as Holmes’, and boredom afflicts Lavender as it does Holmes. Lavender has twenty years of experience as a detective and is well-respected by the police in Gotham, Chicago, and London, the cities in which he most often operates. However, unlike Holmes, Lavender does not look down on the police but sees himself as an equal and complement to them.

One reason that the police seem to respect and value him is that he is willing to bend and even break the law in order to put a criminal away. (He will also destroy evidence if a good man or woman is guilty but has harmed no one, but the police don't seem to mind that). The criminals of choice are gangsters and Gun Molls. Lavender's Watson is Charles "Gilly" Gilruth.

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