title: The Thrift Shop Murders
author: Mr. Stanford Pritchard
description: The author has worked and/or written for The New York Review of Books, The New York Free Press, and Cavalier, and has been published in the Kenyon, New England, and Wisconsin Reviews, Tango News, and elsewhere. His books include Symphony, Restaurant, Benny's Mission, and Three Sexes in Search of the Creddlebones (novels), Terminal Vibrato, House of Travels (short stories), Blocking Out the Symptoms (plays), Making Up for Lost Dreams (poems), and The Elements of Style: Updated and Annotated for Present-Day Use (grammar and style). He has had nine productions of his plays in NYC, has played, and taught, jazz piano professionally, and is daffy about baseball.
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  # KNAPP: A WEAZENED WONDER
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Victor Speer
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
      
      
      
  
  
  from Memoirs of a great detective:
  
  
  incidents in the life of John Wilson Murray
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  A PLAGUE of sneak-thieving broke out in Erie in 1869, shortly after Murray
  became a detective. It grew to be epidemic. Furniture vanished out of houses.
  Clothing seemed to fall upon the backs of invisible wearers and saunter into
  Spookland. Ploughs disappeared from farmers' fields, as if they had started on
  the shortest route to China. Horses trotted off into nowhere. Entire shelves
  in stores were swept bare in a single night, and from one of them twenty dozen
  pairs of shoes seemed to walk out of sight at midday.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  "'We had better order the people to anchor their houses,' said Crowley to me,"
  says Murray, in telling the story. "We watched all day and we watched all
  night for weeks, but the stealing went o