"A Mysterious Murder" by Jonas Kreppel (originally published in Yiddish as a pamphlet, 1908; translated by Mikhl Yashinsh and published in Adventures of Max Spitzkopf, The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes, 2025)
Time again to check in on Max Spitzkopf, the King of Detectives who appeared in a series of fifteen cheaply produced pamphlets published in Yiddish in 1908 Vienna. Sptizkopf, of course was a Jew' he ran the most famous detective agency in the empire and employed many loyal assistants -- all of them Jewish. One need merely reflect on how respected Spitzkopf was in his chosen profession to realize that here was a man who was a hero to his readers, many of whom were downtrodden by the bigotry of the era. Not only was Spitzkopf a Jew but he was a man dedicated to helping Jews. Spitzkopf's adventures -- poorly written to modern eyes, but thrilling to readers who had little to compare them to -- enthralled a very young future-Nobel Prize-winning author, and a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, Isaac Bashevis Singer to look back on his childhood in Warsaw with pleasure, recalling reading Spitzkopf's adventure whiloe huddled under a blanket at night.
":A Mysterious murder" opens with the trial of Wilhelm Grunfeld, a correspondence clerk accused of the murder of his employer, the manufacturer Leopold Konigsberg. Gottfried, the Provincial Judge in the case, is convinced that Grunfeld is innocent, but has no proof to back up his feeling. He asks Max Spitzkopf to look in on the trial and see what he can discover. Spitskopf dons a disguise (because that's what detectives do at that time, I guess) and goes to the trial. The evidence against Grunfeld is weak, IMHO (but I am not a prosecutor of that era): Grunfeld left the office at 7:00 PM while his employer was still there; on his way out he saw a strange cloaked female figure climbing the stairs; when he returned in the morning, he found his employer dead, stabbed through the heart, the safe open, and valuables missing. No witness came forward to corroborate Grunfeld's story of the mysterious cloaked figure. The police (who were not very good at their job, IMHO) decided that Grunfeld must be the guilty party, despite the fact that a search of him and his lodgings found no weapon and no loot. It took the (easily led, IMHO) jury just half an hour to find Grunfeld guilty, although they recommended that he not be sentenced to death. The judge, whose hands were tied, pronounced the death sentence but said that he would recommend that the kaiser take pity on Grunfeld and commute the death sentence.
Everyone in the courtroom was upset at the verdict, except for on man, whom Spitzkopf noticed stayed quiet and smiled knowingly at the verdict. Also at the trail was Fuchs, Spitzkopf's main assistant (also in disguise, natch). Spitzkopf told Fuchs to follow the man and leave a trail so that Spitzkpof could follow it later if need be. Fuchs followed and every ten feet dropped a piece of chalk, crushing it with his foot to leave a trail. The man Fuchs ws following met another man and they walked for about an hour, which leads me to wonder how much chalk Fuchs had in his pocket to begin with. Fuchs follows them to a coffee shack known to be the headquarter of the Plattenbruder, a vicious gang of thieves that even the police were afraid of. There had been another murder, with the same M.O. as that of Konigsberg. The gang had the loot with them in the coffee house. Fuchs is discovered as a spy and, although he was able to shoot two of the gang with his pistol, they soon overpowered him and beat the yarmulke out of him. Fuchs was bound head and food and tossed into a cellar, and a large box was placed over the trapdoor to the cellar.
When Fuchs did not return, Spitzkopf went in search for his assistant. Recognizing the coffe house as a den of violent thieves, he snuck around to the back of the building and hid in a shed -- the very shed where Fuchs was trapped in the cellar. Spitzkopf noticed many footprints around the large crate and, moving it, he found the trapdoor, and then Fuchs. He freed Fuchs and began to explore the cellar. Behind an easily-picked locked door he found a room full of treasure, all the loot the gang had recently amassed. He left he loot there and, replacing the crate so the gang would not suspect a thing, he and Fuchs left to report the find to the plice and arrange for a raid.
But when Spitzkopf arrived with the police, the room with the loot had been emptied! Now, with no proof, what can Spitzkopf do to capture the gang and free Wilhelm Grunfeld?
What indeed?
Needless to say, Max prevails and justice is served, because that's what Max Spitzkopf does. The adventures of Max Spitzkopf are written in broad strokes, resembling more dime novels than early pulp fiction. The detection is not on the level of Sherlock Holmes or his ilk; I doubt if most of Kreppel's readers has ever read a Sherlock Holmes tale. Nonetheless, there is a primitive excitement to the stories that the modern reader can easily feel. And anyone interested in the development of the detective story worldwide would be amiss to skip the Adventures of Max Spitzkopf.
Kreppel (1874-1940), a journalist and civil servant, was an outspoken critic of Nazism. The Max Spitzkopf stories were written anonymously for a press operated by his father-in-law. He spent three decades editing a German Jewish weekly, and writing historical and political tomes. A leading Austrian-Jewish intellectual, he was sent to Dachau in 1938 and then to Buchenwald, where he died in 1940. Sources differ as to whether he had been worked to death at Buchenwald, or murdered -- in the end, it amounted to the same thing.
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