Point of View

The majority of the stories are recounted in the third person, with the notable exception of Pearls Are a Nuisance. This serves to keep tension high throughout the storylines and works well within the overall framework of a detective story. The detectives are often aware of facts long before the reader, which is a large part of the reason these stories exist. The reader, afterall, is meant to keep guessing at who is responsible for the killings, and any insight into the character's thoughts would ruin that aspect of reading them.

The stories are told almost exclusively through action. That being said, a great deal can transpire on a single page, so that these stories are typically far more fast-paced than a usual short story. Most of them take place in the space of a few hours, and there is very rarely any break between one...