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Old Ebbie. Old Ebbie was created by F.A.M. Webster (Max Cramer, Alphabet Crisp, Lawrie Fenton, Husky Hillier, Bruce Logan, Peter Pirow) and appeared in thirty-six stories in The Blue Magazine and three story collections from 1922 to 1930, beginning with “The Strange Case of Dr. Stallard” (The Blue Magazine, Feb. 1922).

Old Ebbie is a Great Detective. Ebenezer Entwistle is an expert chemist who is often consulted by the police on criminal cases, and eventually begins charging for his services. Entwistle is tall and gaunt with piercing grey eyes and straggling grey hair. He rose from poverty to own his own shop in Pimlico. He has his own theories on medicine, which are invariably right, and is well-respected by many different medical men—every Sunday night he hosts a card game with Scottish, Spanish, English, Greek, and “Hindoo” medical men. Among the crimes he helps solve are a woman killing a noted scientist with strychnine, the murder of a monk involved in Rasputin’s killing, and Entwistle’s duel with his Moriarty, the anti-Semitic stereotype Hermann Steinway, “the most feared and powerful man in Central Europe.” Steinway appears to be only a businessman, but he traffics in drugs and white slavery, is behind Gandhi’s success and the rising in Kenya, and is responsible for the American Prohibition. (When Steinway finally confronts Entwistle the scene is a nearly verbatim replay of the Moriarty-Holmes confrontation in “The Final Problem”). Entwistle’s Watson is the India veteran and Africa Hand Captain Hicks.

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