Cherchez la femme. A wealthy playboy by day, at night Jimmie Dale puts on inconspicuous clothes and becomes The Gray Seal-safe cracker extraordinaire-who enters businesses or homes and cracks safes, never taking anything but always leaving a diamond shaped, gray paper "seal" behind to mark his conquest. He is about to give it up, when a woman known only as Tocsin catches and blackmails him-to continue-to war on certain crime organizations. Dale's adventures were generally first published in serial format in the People's Magazine a year before being collected into the novels. A movie serial, Jimmie Dale, Alias the Grey Seal (movie serial) based on the stories was created in 1917.