You never would have taken Jim Carranaugh for- a detective. He was too obvious. Entirely too big. Too big by a number of inches, both ways.
To be sure, he could and had, by strenuous starvation, trained down to two hundred and eighty pounds; also, he had reached four hundred and one. Some place between these two ex- tremes might be called normal, if Jim could be called a normal human at any time. Four inches and a half above six feet and almost an equal distance around his equator makes a fairly siz- able man, so it is no wonder he at- tracted and held attention wherever he went.
But for all his size, Carranaugh was nimble of hand and foot as well as of wit, and could catch a car or a culprit as readily as the point of a joke. His command of polyglot American was the marvel and joy of his friends. The English language could not be broken into too small or too irregular pieces to escape his power of mimicry. Had he not been the able detective he was, he would have made a rare- character actor; had he not been so good an actor he might not have been so efficient an officer of the law.
