The man who fell through the Earth by Carolyn Wells

I was enjoying it until that stupid ending. It was a nice mystery, for a while. A respectable businessman, Amos Gately, is found dead. Coming out of his own office, Mr Brice had seen the shadows of two men fighting and heard a shot. He was , from that moment, very much involved in the matter. His stenographer Norah was also interested, along with other characters: Olive Raynor was not a relative but had lived with him a long time, he was her guardian; and her friend Amory Manning, who disappeared the same night the body was discovered. When Olive asked Brice for legal counsel, he strongly advised her to hire a famous investigator, Pennington ‘Penny’ Wise. He came with young Zizi to help him. Olive asked Brice to check the hospitals to try and find Mr Manning, and Brice came across a curious case: a man was brought in, believed dead, but at the morgue he showed signs of life. At the hospital he was taken care of, until his strength came back, but he remembered nothing of who he was, only that he ‘fell through the Earth’. 

Going on with the investigation it comes out that Gately was a spy, a traitor of his Country, selling Government secrets to Germany. The others involved in the espionage are all arrested. 

Now, when first Brice spoke to Wise about the man who fell through the earth, who called himself Rivers while waiting for his real name to come back to him, Wise asked “can he be the missing Manning?” and Brice said “not a chance, the two men are totally dissimilar in looks and in build. Manning is heavy, almost stocky. Rivers is gaunt and lean (…) I tried to make out a resemblance but it can’t be done”. When he met Rivers himself, Wise asked for a picture of Manning and got one (on the front page of a newspaper). Wise studied the picture and compared it with the man before him. “Totally unlike, he said disappointedly. Not a chance, said Rivers-I wish I could step into that man’s shoes”

After all this, 40 pages later he recovers his memory and reveals it all: he killed Gately and he is Secret Agent Manning! After all those ‘not a chance’ and ‘totally unlike’, now he simply says he wore a disguise! He used to dye his hair black but when he disappeared falling down a manhole (it was a snowy, stormy night) the water washed out the dye ( !!!) destroyed his clothes, took away his spectacles, and at the hospital he was always clean-shaved, without his usual big-beard-disguise.

He also  spoke differently and even his friend Olive did not recognize him…. come on, what about his build and his voice?!?

Anyway, it’s an old book, dated 1919, still I feel tricked.

Olive and Rivers are in love, and to make you at ease that Brice is not interested in Olive that way, Carolyn tells us that Brice likes Norah.