Swing High - Jack Ritchie

Story: Swing High

Author: Jack Ritchie

Book: Little Boxes of Bewilderment

Theme for the Month: Locked Room or Impossible Crime Stories

Jack Ritchie comes up with a different kind of an impossible crime here: a man is heard hitting the ground hard by several witnesses though nobody saw his plunge; there is only one building from where he could have been thrown out (or he himself jumped) but they just can’t identify a suitable location from that building where he could have been expelled from!

There are 5 floors in this building, the roof is blocked with a locked door and there’s no other means to reach the roof. The first two floors can be ignored as he wouldn’t have met such a violent death at such heights. The 3^rd floor window room belongs to a dentist – the doctor never left his duty room, the nurses & the patients in the waiting room can vouch for the fact that there was no one who didn’t come out after keeping the appointment with the doctor. The fourth floor window couldn’t have been used as the doctor has been away on vacation, the doors are locked and there is enough untouched dust in the room to show that no one has used the room in days. The fifth floor window room belongs to the ENT specialist – the room with the concerned window was locked with both the nurse and a patient waiting outside the room for the doctor to turn up and the doctor does turn up after the man met his death and both the doctor and the patient enter the room together!

So the impossible scenario which is hampering the further progress of the police investigation: from where did the man exit the building? The chief investigator does figure out how this clever murder was carried out but he doesn’t bring the culprit to justice. Why? Because he has his own secret agenda, to satisfy his own roguish motive - that is to use this same method of murder on his wife’s lover!

By Child Undone - Jack Ritchie

Story: By Child Undone

Author: Jack Ritchie

Source: A New Leaf and Other Stories, Little Boxes of Bewilderment, Boucher’s Choicest.

Story Number: 24

For a person who wrote close to a thousand stories, it is very perplexing to know that there are only 3 collections of his short stories! And finding reasonably priced copies of these collections is indeed a challenge in itself!

Haven’t seen too many references being made to Jack Ritchie in relation to a formal puzzle plot story but from the few stories that I’ve read, when he tried them, he could certainly compete with some of the best. In this story, playing fair with the reader and at the same time making it unguessable, he tries the classic gambit of what-is-the-factor-linking-a-chain-of-murders?

The story starts with 2 random killings on successive days. Nobody pays heed to them until the police receive an anonymous letter intimating them that the same gun killed both. A succession of murders follows – each time the victim is a man and each time there is an anonymous letter; the fourth one which the police receive would have been mailed six hours before the actual murder.

Captain Hayes and Sergeant Harrison find no clues, no motives and no connection between the victims though they notice some common traits among the murdered men. But with each murder, they find that the connecting links are reducing and at the end of five murders they have all but given up on the possibility of there being anything common among them, until, the 10 year old kid (Harrison’s son) walks into the police station, glances at the list which Hayes is pondering over and tells them what the connecting factor is! Based on this information, they catch the murderer on his sixth crusade.