Experience had
taught him that the time and labour this task involved were well-spent.
If an unexpected development of the case altered the facts of the
original summary Crewe prepared another one in the same painstaking way.
The summaries, when done with, were methodically filed and indexed and
stored in a strong room at the office for future reference, where he also
kept full records of all the cases upon which he had been engaged,
together with the weapons and articles that had figured in them: huge
volumes of newspaper reports and clippings; photographs of criminals with
their careers appended; and a host of other odds and ends of his
detective investigations--the whole forming an interesting museum of
crime and mystery which would have furnished a store of rich material
for a fresh Newgate Calendar. It was an axiom of Crewe's that a detective
never knew when some old scrap of information or some trifling article of
some dead and forgotten crime might not afford a valuable clue. Expert
criminals frequently repeated themselves, like people in lesser walks of
life, and Crewe's "library and museum," as he called it, had sometimes
furnished him with a simple hint for the solution of a mystery which had
defied more subtle methods of analysis.
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