Armchair detective an arm-chair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived." "The first example of armchair detecting can be found in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. In "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842), C. Auguste Dupin, working wholly from newspaper accounts, arrives at the correct explanation for a young woman's mysterious disappearance." Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner sits in a restaurant and talks to an acquaintance about cases, almost always finishing by revealing that he has solved the crime. A more literal use of this term can be found in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels
Jack Spratt (fictional detective) Inspector with the Reading, Berkshire "Nursery Crimes Division", with his assistant Sergeant Mary Mary (another nursery rhyme character). Spratt and Mary were originally introduced into the alternate Fforde universe in the Thursday Next novel "The Well of Lost Plots" (2003) before taking over their own "Nursery Crimes" series: Jack Spratt (fictional detective) Jack Spratt is the protagonist in a series of alternate history science fiction fantasy novels by Jasper Fforde. He was named after the character from the English nursery rhyme. As revealed in "The Big Over Easy", for example, he hates eating fat, and was once married to a