Crossover Cover: Hoare and the Matter of Treason

Captain Bartholomew Hoare makes conversation with Horatio Hornblower, who has just come out of the Port Officer's office. Hoare first met Hornblower (from C.S. Forester's novels) in Perkins' story "Hoare and the Frog Prince." Vice Admiral Sir Hugh Abercrombie asks Hoare to look into the disappearance of one of his senior confidential clerks, after his underling Lestrade fails to turn up any results. Given his investigative work and his description as resembling a ferret, this Lestrade is probably meant to be an ancestor of Inspector Lestrade from the Sherlock Holmes stories. Abercrombie also has a meek clerk named Cratchit, presumably a relative of the equally mild-mannered clerk Bob Cratchit from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Hoare and his gunner’s mate, Titus Thoday, find a figurine of a falcon inside the man’s room. Hoare “had seen a similar figurine before, somewhere in the Med, in ninety-one or thereabouts—in Malta, if memory served him correctly.” The figurine Hoare previously encountered was the Maltese Falcon, of course.