Sleuth Home - Detective Herul Cairns

Title:		Sleuth
Experience:		60
Archetype:		Tough and Smart
Age:		55 days
Gender:		male
Sleuth Theme:		Shady Character
Last Login:		Oct-22-2025
Account Status:		Inactive
Subscription Status:		Unsubscribed
Community:		Post History

Equipment

Completed Missions

• Packages Delivered: 0
• Overdue Books Returned: 0
• Nemeses Captured: 0
• Secret Plans Revealed: 0
• Artifacts Unearthed: 0
• Journal Pages Found: 0
• Brass Rings Won: 0

Detective Biography

Herul (pronounced Errol) Cairns was born in Yonkers to a Bowery Boy-turned-Presbyterian Minister and a showgirl-turned-Unitarian Minister. He became a detective young, aged 11, mainly tackling cases of missing schoolyard items, stolen bikes, buried treasure, all utilizing his knowledge of synonyms of words from memorizing thesauruses, being so known by the nickname "Thesaurus Cairns". Needless to say, while applying linguistic know-how to cases was a novel approach, success was low-to-middling at best. After being savagely beaten to the point of lost bladder control by his bully adversary, Mugs Beaney, in "The Case of the Frog in the Vault", he dropped what he called the "whole youth detective scene". Garage bands, girlfriends, a failed English masters, and a bad booze habit later, Cairns moved into a silverfish-infested basement office in Queens to resume his sleuthing.

We find him now after 6 years of this. He now has a laundry list of enemies: mobsters, murderers, thieves, adulterers exposed to their spouses. He has a lease, a divorce, and an incontinent terrier named Doc. He has a bad knees, yellow teeth and grey in his hair. His flavored Turkish cigarettes, an affectation pulled from the pulp novels that inspired him, have left him with a weak rheumy cough that punctuates his sentences. Living nocturnally, tracking his prey through a technicolor underworld of sordid nightclubs, gambling dens and 24-hour automats has bestowed him with a permanent squint in daylight. But his vision is clear, and perceptive. Few better followers of men live in this part of the city, and his ability to collate disparate case information is second-to-none. His reputation for solved cases is fairly good, though his tendency to act on impulse and gut reaction has led to a hasty accusation or two over the course of his career. He has also, incidentally, become known for his ability to take a beating, and moreover his brutal responses once roles inevitably reverse. This led to a reputation in certain circles a mob leg-breaker in times of financial hardship, an accusation it's been difficult for Cairns to shake. His childhood detecting technique, in reality a kind of free association between tangentially-connected factoids, now provides a meditative technique for solving cases. The local police consider him a nuisance largely, though they can't deny his results.

Politics

Contacts

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Arch Villains

None Caught

Books Collected

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