The Puzzle Lock - Austin Freeman

Story: The Puzzle Lock

Author: Austin Freeman

Source: The Puzzle Lock. All the stories can be downloaded from Gutenberg at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500391.txt

Story Number: 14

Dr. Thorndyke, creation of Austin Freeman is famous for his forensic/medical/scientific detective methods in his novels and short stories. This story however is not a typical story which will fit into these characteristics. Here, he tackles a chronogram which effectively leads the police to completely apprehend a big gang.

The story begins with Thorndyke and his companion Jervis observing Inspector Badger following a couple of men. A few days later, Superintendent Miller comes to the doctor’s house to narrate a strange case – the police force is on the track of a ‘managing director’ of a big gang which mainly deals in the burglary of jewels. Luttrell, the man they have been following in connection to this case has disappeared. It turns out that Luttrell was also one among the two whom Badger was following; both men have not been seen ever since they gave Badger the slip. Luttrell is a dealer who has built up a fortress like office with a strong room guarded by a Puzzle Lock – a lock without any keys and which can be opened only by providing a 15 digit code. The only clue which Miller can provide is a seal from the ring belonging to Luttrell – which shows a four line Latin poem.

A few days later, Miller requests Thorndyke to accompany him to check out Luttrell’s office as the owner has noticed a leakage on the utility meter but he can’t detect the source for this leakage. By this time, the doctor has already converted that poem into a chronogram and in solving that chronogram has obtained the 15 digit code to the lock. When the strong room is opened, they find the bodies of both the missing men along with a dairy of the list of the gang members. The doctor also identifies the mastermind for the police by explaining the clues which aptly point to the guilty party.

By an Unknown Hand - John Sladek

Name of the Story: By an Unknown Hand

Author: John Sladek

Source: The Times of London Anthology of Detective Stories

Story Number: 13

Out of the 1000 plus entries received for the detective story competition hosted by the Times of London in 1972, this story with its stylish whodunit and a top-notch locked room murder was deservedly the winner of this competition. In fact, I’m a bit surprised that this story has not found its way into any of the locked room anthologies. However, this story has been collected in “Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek” edited by David Langford, along with his science fiction stories. John Sladek was first and foremost a science fiction writer but he is known to the mystery world for his two very famous locked room novels ‘Black Aura’ and ‘Invisible Green’.

Thackery Phin posts an ad in the newspaper requesting for a challenge to tackle his mental acumen. In response, the owner of an art gallery Anthony Moon hires him to act as a bodyguard to protect one of the gallery’s chief contributors Aaron Wallis. Somebody has been sending threatening letters to Aaron and the last one is very specific that he would die at 9 PM on that day. The same has been prophesized by Aaron’s brother as well - who is a soothsayer.

Aaron occupies the complete 11^th floor of an apartment complex and he is the only one who has a key to the floor. When Moon escorts Phin to this floor to start his vigil, Aaron is yet to come back to the house. He turns up at around 8, enters his house, searches the house by himself and provides a chair to Phin to take guard outside his apartment house. All the windows have been barred and Phin has taken a vantage point such that he has kept the apartment door and the only other emergency exit in view. At 1 o’ clock, Moon comes back to the floor to discuss the situation and they decide to call off the vigil as nothing has happened. When they both go to the ground floor, the security guard is having a hard time restricting the entry of two people who want to meet Aaron. They call Aaron from the security desk but he doesn’t answer. They decide to go back in the same elevator (which no one has had the chance to use till now) and when they reach the 11^th floor, everything looks the same as it was a few minutes ago – the door is locked, nobody has tampered with the emergency exit and the orange chair on which Phin was sitting is exactly in the same position as he had left it. But when they price open the door, they find that Aaron has been strangled, having met his death between 8 and 9.

Phin turns to some locked room mysteries of Dr. Fell & Father Brown for inspiration to solve this puzzle. He questions the 4 suspects and then summons them to a traditional rendezvous at Hyde Park where he expostulates and discards 7 very ambitious solutions before revealing the actual solution which is simple but elegant, fairly-clued and very satisfying from a locked room mystery fan’s point of view.

The Tale of Sir Jeremy Fisher - Don Carleton

Name of the story: The Tale of Sir Jeremy Fisher

Author: Don Carleton

Source: The Times of London Anthology of Detective Stories

Story Number: 12

In the search for a potential new Conan Doyle, the Times of London, in conjunction with British publishing company arranged a special detective story competition in the spring of 1972. The panel of judges included five luminaries, one of them being Dame Agatha. It seems they received more than a thousand entries and out of these, the best 10 have been included in this anthology including the top 5 winners.

 “For resolving the most ingenious crime in ‘The Tale of Sir Jeremy Fisher’, Don Carleton won the second prize in this competition,” the judges quote in the introduction.

Scene of the crime: A three tiered pool. A big reservoir on top, from the reservoir water tumbles from a pipe down a narrow gulley to a shallow pool. From there it cascades down a wider gulley into a deep dark pool.

Jeremy Fisher, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wessex is found drowned in the lower pool with some head injuries caused before the death. A research scientist was on a boat in the reservoir, a group of archaeologists were on the site above the river, a student canoeing alone & a couple who saw Jeremy fishing 15 minutes before his death are the only witnesses and also the suspects, as each one of them has a likely motive. Nobody was seen approaching the dead man; all the others were constantly under observation by at least one other person.

After interviewing all the suspects, the Inspector(nameless throughout) has only 2 clues – a bottle of wine tied to a tree branch was found shattered with the broken string still tied to the branch and the broken paddle which the canoeing student claims was due to the river(which no one believes). Consulting the weather records and considering the motives of the various folks involved in conjunction with the two clues, the inspector shows how a murder could have been committed in that pool without anybody ever going near the victim.

Tomorrow’s post will feature the winning entry. J

One Drop of Blood - Cornell Woolrich

Name of the story: One Drop of Blood

Author: Cornell Woolrich

Source: The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich

Story Number: 11

The story ‘One Drop of Blood’ was the winner of the first prize in EQMM’s thirteenth international contest (1961). This story is a fitting example of the inverted detective story as pioneered by Austin Freeman where the reader follows from the beginning the plan and execution of the murder by the culprit. The second part of the story deals with how the police catch the criminal with a clue left behind or with a mistake which the murderer hadn’t anticipated.

The Crime: Corrine is madly in love with the narrator. She wants to marry him but he is not interested in marriage. Over a period of time, he starts getting involved with another girl and gets engaged to her, as a result of which he ends up spending less & less time with Corrine. One night, Corrine invites him to her new house to reveal the fact that she is carrying his baby. In a fit of rage, he gets hold of a sword available in the house and slashes her up which turns the walls into a tapestry of red. He successfully disposes of the body without anyone noticing him; he buys paints & brushes from the nearest hardware store and over several days, paints the walls to completely get rid of the blood spots. He also discards all the other articles (carpet, chair cushions, table, lampshade etc) in the house which could’ve given away the fact that a murder had occurred in that house.

The Detection: The police take him in for questioning when they find the body, many witnesses identify him, they find traces of blood on all his articles, they get the remains of the paint cans & brush handles, they know for a fact that there was a crime and it was committed by him, they have placed him in the vicinity of the house but they can’t place the crime itself in that house as there’s absolutely no sign of blood anywhere – all they need is a drop of blood. All the police techniques fail to get them the answers they need and they release him from custody.

He thinks he has finally escaped and goes ahead with his marriage plans but only a few days later, he is arrested by the police for the murder. They take him to that house and show as evidence that one drop of blood which he and the whole police force had missed over all those days of effort to find it!

The Perfect Murder - Jeffrey Archer

Name of the story: The Perfect Murder

Author: Jeffrey Archer

Source: A Twist In The Tale

Story Number: 10

Jeffrey Archer doesn’t need any introduction. Along with his bestselling novels, he is also a wonderful writer of short stories. His first three collections ‘A Quiver Full Of Arrows’, ‘A Twist In The Tale’ & ‘Twelve Red Herrings’ are a treat for any reader, which encompasses stories across all genres, each with a wonderful twist which the reader wouldn’t have anticipated. Somehow for me, his three recent collections didn’t leave up to the same expectations as the earlier three. I’m picking the first story from his second collection ‘A Twist in the Tale’ as it includes all the typical characteristics of an Archer story with an added bonus of the courtroom drama.

The story starts off with the narrator expressing surprise that his mistress Carla had slept with another man. One evening, Carla calls him and asks him not to come to her house as she is going off to her sister’s place, which he doesn’t believe. When he does go to her house to check up on this, he observes Carla engaging another man. After watching the man kiss Carla and leave her house in a BMW after tearing up the parking ticket, the narrator confronts Carla and in the heat of exchanging words, he hits her on the jaw and walks out. What he doesn’t realize till the next day is the fact that this blow proved fatal for Carla. When the police declare that they are looking for a murderer, he puts in an anonymous call and gives the description of the other man who was with Carla. The police track this man through the parking ticket that was issued and charges him for Carla’s murder.

The second part of the story is the trial of the accused with our narrator taking a very keen interest in the proceedings. But in those six months leading to the trial, he has had a terrible time, looking over his shoulder all the time, every telephone ring or the door bell sending shivers down his spine, his work life deteriorating to such an extent that he gets fired.  Being unemployed end up as a blessing in disguise as he is able to attend the court proceedings everyday and watch the trail of the man whom he has accused for his own crime. In spite of a gritty performance from the defense lawyer, the case against the accused looks hopeless. Will an innocent man go the chair? Has our hero committed a perfect crime? The end of the tale reveals a cunning twist which the reader can anticipate (but few will) as all the required clues have been fairly presented in the second half of the story.

No Comebacks - Frederick Forsyth

Name of the story: No Comebacks

Author: Frederick Forsyth

Source: No Comebacks

Story Number: 9

Frederick Forsyth is probably most famous for his novel ‘The Day Of The Jackal’ which won the Edgar for the best novel in 1972. He has a number of other noteworthy novels to his credit but his short story collection is rarely spoken off. It contains 10 skillfully plotted stories with an ultimate twist in the end. I pick the title story in the collection as this suits best my definition of a fine story.

Mark Sanderson is one of the richest bachelors in London who has the habit of eventually getting whatever he wants. He always wanted to have only one woman as his wife but that lady is married to another man and stays in another country. A chance meeting ignites his passion for her, he courts her for a week and ends up proposing to her when she is about to leave for Spain, which the lady politely declines saying that her husband in Spain needs her more than he needs her. She agrees that she would marry him had it not been for her husband.

After brooding over for weeks, he decides that she has to be his wife and this obsession with the lady turns into madness and what follows is a detailed plot to assassinate the husband. He first hires a detective agency to learn every detail about his intended victim, gets a new house for himself under an assumed name, does research to find a mercenary team in England, through the team in England he hires a top notch assassin from another country so that the assassin doesn’t identify the very famous personality that he is in London, all breathtakingly told in the same style as the jackal who plots the assignation of the French president in the famous novel. The assassin then has to think off a way to smuggle a gun into Spain and he finally carries out his execution successfully at the end of 3 weeks. The killer and the client meet for the final payment and there in the last line of the story, the client gets the biggest jolt of his life as does the reader!

The Mystery Of The Five Hundred Diamonds - Robert Barr

Name: The Mystery Of The Five Hundred Diamonds

Author: Robert Barr

Source: The Triumphs Of Eugene Valmont (Queen’s Quorum title #35). This book (along with other works) is available on Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19369

Story Number: 8

Robert Barr wrote only 8 stories featuring Valmont, all collected in ‘The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont’. Some critics consider Valmont to be the forerunner of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Out of these eight, ‘The Absent-Minded Coterie’ has been rated by critics as one of the great detective stories of the early days. However, I chose the story in which Valmont debuts, though it’s not exactly a triumph for Valmont.

The French government has come into the possession of a very rich necklace, a necklace consisting of around 500 diamonds in various sizes and shapes. Because of its history of having exerted a malign influence over everyone who had the misfortune to be connected with it, the French decide to sell it to the highest bidder. The duty of protecting the necklace from falling into the wrong hands and also to protect the individual who will buy that necklace is bestowed upon Valmont, the chief detective to the French Government. On the day of the sale, the city of Paris is not only playing host to some of the wealthiest gentlemen from Britain & America but also to the cleverest thieves from the two continents.

The elaborate groundwork laid done by Valmont and his team to identify the most likely buyer and the most likely person to attempt the theft turn out be inadequate as we learn from the turn of events. An American easily outbids the others by quoting an exorbitant amount and immediately hands over a cheque and requests to take possession of the necklace. The French police have no idea who this gentleman is, they have no clue as to how exactly the man is trying to swindle as the cheque is cleared and the money is transferred over. The American has an accomplice in the audience who holds up everyone in that room at gunpoint so that the American can get a head start of five minutes, at the end of which, he himself vanishes.

What follows is an elaborate hunt to catch the mastermind of this daring scheme in which the mastermind is always one step ahead of the entire police force. It is not until this man reaches the American shores and sends across a detailed letter addressed to the French police do they understand how exactly this whole plan was carried out.