A bookmaker — a person who accepts and pays out bets on horse races at agreed odds. The phrase “turf accountant” was a genteel elevation of the trade, lending an air of professional respectability to work that existed in a persistent legal grey area throughout the 19th century. The first documented English bookmaker, Harry Ogden, stood at Newmarket in 1795; by the Victorian era the profession had grown enormously, with bookmakers employing runners who carried “clock bags” through the racecourse crowds and hiring bodyguards against protection gangs. In detective fiction, the turf accountant appears as a creditor with a violent streak, a blackmailer, or a bridge between the fashionable racing world and the criminal underworld.