The Great Detective's Shake Up: Fake's Fight for a Fortune

Museum Catalog Note *The Snake's Fight for a Fortune* by Wm. H. Manning is a serialized detective mystery published in Beadle and Adams' magazine for January 8, 1895. The featured installment begins aboard a schooner called the "Smiling Sally" docked at an East River pier in New York. An elderly man named Nathaniel Grafton meets with a young man claiming to be his distant cousin's son, Oswald Clarendon, to reconcile after fifteen years of estrangement. Grafton is unaware that Clarendon is actually Korgan Murch, an adventurer participating in an elaborate fraud scheme orchestrated by lawyer Levi Overbridge and associate Barney Lyons to defraud Grafton of his fortune. However, after Grafton departs, Murch is discovered murdered on the pier—stabbed through the heart. Overbridge and Lyons hastily evacuate the schooner and flee, abandoning their plan to pursue the inheritance scheme.