Posted by Tim Johns on 9/27/99 from wes22.bham.ac.uk:
Some time ago a thread centred on the following piece of dialogue from the title-page of The Big Six
"But who are the Big Six?" asked Pete.
"It's the Big Five, really," said Dorothea. "They are the greatest detectives in the world. They sit in their cubby-holes in Scotland Yard and solve one mystery after another."
"But why Six?"
"There are only five of them and there are six of us," said Dorothea.
The problem was to find any reference to Dorothea's Big Five outside the pages of AR. Who were they? Were they fiction or (as seemed more likely) fact as presented by the popular press? I have now come across the following in Scotland Yard by George Dilnot (centenary edition 1929 p. 268) which gives a partial answer to those questions, but also adds to the mystery:
The "Big Four" superintendents, as the newspapers love to call them, are the link between the Scotland Yard administration and the divisional detectives. Each is responible for the detective work of a quarter of London.
The new question is: How did four become five? Four possibilities:
1. Dorothea made a mistake.
2. AR made a mistake.
3. A fifth superintendent was added in the ten years between the publication of Dilnot's book and that of The Big Six
4. The Big Five have nothing to do with the Big Four (the least likely explanation, I think).
The investigation continues.