In the story, a man searching for his sister in New York gives up on the inept police detective and consults the famous private detective Shamrock Jolnes. The story is a parody of the detective fiction genre, and of the famous Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in particular. Shamrock Jolnes' introduction includes the following sentence: "The famous sleuth's thin, intellectual face, piercing eyes, and rate per word are too well known to need description."