The Case of The Musical Butler - Martin Edwards

Story: The Case of The Musical Butler

Author: Martin Edwards

Source: Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories

Story Number: 108

This Sherlockian pastiche happens to be the only one in this collection which would qualify as a traditional detective story – a story which not only demonstrates Holmes’ skill as a puzzle solver but also gives a rear insight into an unexpectedly compassionate side to his personality!

Bloodstained clothes belonging to a tramp has been found recently near the Oaklands Estate and Holmes is not at all surprised when the owner of this property turns up on his doorstep. Holmes is hardly interested in hearing the grievance of Sir Greville Davidson (probably a first in the canon?) as he believes that even if a crime has been committed, Greville would be least interested in finding the perpetrator. He gives him only 5 minutes to state his case but the story from Greville indeed proves to be an interesting one, worthy enough to cure his ennui for the time being.

Greville has employed a young butler by the name of Mark Meade after getting a very positive reference from the folks who had employed him before. And the butler has lived up to his expectations in every way and he has some unusual talents – the chief one being his musical talent to play Chopin exquisitely on the piano! Other unusual traits turn out to be the butler’s keen interest in literature and his unwillingness to mingle with people or go out of the house during his day off!  His services have been so indispensable that the heirless Greville decides to adopt him and name him as his successor. But as soon he breaks this news to the butler, he disappears without a trace. A few days later, he gets a mail from the butler but that mail still doesn’t reveal the cause for his disappearance.

Holmes employs the Irregulars to get a few facts and his deductive capabilities are on full display as he goes about solving the case of the musical butler - with the final revelation of the identity of the butler coming as quite a pleasant surprise!

The Habit of Silence - Ann Cleves

Story: The Habit of Silence

Author: Ann Cleves

Source: Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories

Story Number: 107

The Literary and Philosophical Society Library is the setting for this murder mystery which features the author’s series detective Vera Stanhope. Gilbert Wood, who is researching and writing a book on the history of the place, is found dead in the Silence Room – death due to a blow on the head by a heavy book! The closed group of suspects is restricted to the librarian, library assistant, one of the trustees and a poet who found the body.

All of them saw Gilbert going down to the Silence Room but no one heard anything as the person who was with Gilbert wouldn’t obviously talk or make any noise because of the very nature of the habit of keeping silent in that particular room. With no clues forthcoming from any of the witnesses, Vera has to dig deep into her psyche and recall upon the trauma which she herself had faced when she was just twelve to solve this murder and identify the guilty party!

Boom! - Cath Staincliffe

Story: Boom!

Author: Cath Staincliffe

Source: Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories

Story Number: 106

DC Lin Song and her boss decide to investigate the massive explosion as soon they get the site location. When they arrive at the half standing house, they find Greg Collins fighting for his life – from the impact of the blast as well as a gunshot wound. When he recovers, he isn’t able to recollect who shot at him. Greg’s wife, her lover and Greg’s business partner are the suspects but the lover pair seems to have disappeared. And the partner’s alibi isn’t holding up!

The body of the wife turns up in the river – dead due to drowning and the husband confirms that she couldn’t swim. Even before Lin and her boss are done with the guessing game of who(the lover or the husband’s partner) killed the wife and shot the husband, the lover’s dead body crops up in a car submerged in the canal basin, with a gun still clutched in his hand and dead due to a single gunshot from that same gun. With three different victims in three different locations and one suspect with a very poor alibi, Lin takes the help of the piled up forensic evidence to unravel the mystery behind the triple tragedy!

Best Eaten Cold - Stuart Pawson

Story: Best Eaten Cold

Author: Stuart Pawson

Source: Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories (a Murder Squad Anthology)

Story Number: 105

From the introduction: “Murder Squad is a group of crime writers, friends first met at meetings of the northern chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association and who decided to band together to promote their work. The squad was founded in the spring of 2000.” The members include Martin Edwards(who is also the editor of this anthology), Margaret Murphy(founder), Ann Cleeves, Stuart Pawson, Cath Stiancliffe, Kate Ellis, John Baker & Chaz Brenchley. This collection is their second anthology featuring stories from five of them, published 10 years after the first one. Halfway into the book, I’ve absolutely no hesitation in recommending this book to crime story aficionados.

Jessica Fullerton was known as the Queen of Short Story Writers and Artemesia is a writer who is struggling to get her stories published! Jessica’s stories are aired on the radio weekly and one such story turns out to be written by Artemesia. During the annual symposium event of short story writers, she starts dropping hints that her story was plagiarized by Jessica. 3 other unknown writers approach her and confess that they also had noticed something similar – a story written by them had been featured on the radio under Jessica’s byline. These 4 authors decide to meet at a later date and when they exchange notes, they realize that all of them had submitted their stories to a particular short story competition in which Jessica was the judge and she must have collected all the rejected entries and developed it as her own creations at a later stage!

They are unanimous in the decision that they should punish Jessica, though the punishment decided upon looks to be an extreme – murder! Each one of them decides to come up with their own means of a murder method and the next third of the book shows the hilarious approach of each of the 4 authors trying (finding a gun, finding a poison and administering it, making a bomb & finding a heavy weapon which could do a clean job) and failing in their mission to identify a foolproof method. In their next meeting, they rule out murder but instead come up with an ingenious way of pooling in their skills to mete out the apt punishment and what follows is brilliantly conceived and a memorable piece of storytelling!

The Austin Murder Case - John L. Breen

Story: The Austin Murder Case

Author: John L. Breen

Source: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Parade

Story Number: 104

EQ’s Introduction to this story: Fans and aficionados have always regretted that certain famous detectives have appeared only in full-length novels. S.S. Van Dine is one such example who never wrote a short story about the sophistic and sophisticated Philo Vance. John L. Breen has set out to rectify this shortfall by providing his version of a Philo Vance short story – what might be called “a hitherto undiscovered account of one of Vance’s greatest triumphs” – a pastiche with parody touches, every tone and every accent the right “McWright,” the real “McDine” ….

Jack Austin is leaving New York and moving to Hollywood to make talking pictures and he is throwing a big party to celebrate the occasion. And he has sent an invitation to Philo Vance and Van Dine through Markahm – where each guest will come dressed as his favorite movie star! Vance goes in dressed as Doug Fairbanks and is immediately assured in by his host who is dressed as Charlie Chaplin. The other guests include a respected jurist, his daughter, a society vamp, a playboy, the Broadway producer who will be hit the hardest because Jack is moving, a theatrical agent, a debutante and another actor – while all of the guests were wishing Austin good luck, a few of them were not really on the best of terms with their host. And before the night is out, the host is found dead – stabbed several times with an Orient letter opener!

And it doesn’t take too long for Philo Vance to figure out who the killer is – the dying message clue is aptly interpreted by him and the clue on which the whole case hinges – how did the killer escape from having blood on him when it was such a bloody murder, is interestingly hidden among the useless trivia that is presented to the reader when the reader is getting impatient with all the unwanted knowledge that is being introduced to him!

It contains all the trademarks of a Van Dine story and much more – you see Philo Vance doing double somersaults, you see Van Dine falling in love (thereby breaking his own rule from the 20 rules for writing detective stories), eleven footnotes in a span of thirteen pages with one footnote quoting “were this a full-length novel, I would reproduce those remarks here, since they would undoubtedly be of interest to collectors. Unfortunately, the short-story form offers less latitude for the introduction of such peripheral matters," and so on!

“Or You Can Drink The Wine…?” - Paul C. Doherty

Story: “Or You Can Drink The Wine…?”

Author: Paul C. Doherty

Source: The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

Story Number: 103

A locked room mystery dating from almost 3500 years ago, features one of Doherty’s chief characters Amerotke, the Chief Judge of Egypt.

The Lady Tiyea was supposed to have committed suicide but the circumstances under which her body has been found troubles Amerotke. The poison was found only in the wine and not anywhere else in the room, the wine hadn’t been completely consumed, the lady had taken a lot of trouble to apply makeup before retiring for the night (as was the custom then) and she had planned and instructed her servants on the tasks for the next day – a few key points which a person about to commit suicide wouldn’t think of carrying out.

But the circumstances doesn’t allow for any other explanation – the wine was poured in to the goblet by her maid who tasted it before handing it over to another servant who also took a sip before giving it to the lady, both these servants notice the Lady sipping the wine as soon as it is handed to her, she goes inside her room and locks it and a servant takes guard outside her room. When the door is broken open the next day, the Lady is dead due to a venomous poison which is found in the wine. If there was no way a person could have walked into the locked and guarded room, how was the poison induced? The clues are fairly laid out, the interviews of the husband and the servants are quite vivid and the final clue which Amerotke finds after a very detailed examination of the makeup kit - all of them clearly point to one person as the murderer and the reader should have the pleasure of identifying the solution much before it is revealed!

The Crime At Big Tree Portage - Hesketh Prichard

Story: The Crime At Big Tree Portage

Author: Hesketh Prichard

Source: The Dead Witness – A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories edited by Michael Sims

Story Number: 102

A unique story for the following reason as cited in the introduction to this story: Hesketh Prichard has created an original and intriguing variation on the Sherlock Holmes type of detective in November Joe – a detective of the woods! He notices seemingly irrelevant minutiae in the wilds of the north; like Holmes, he turns coy about the clues’ importance until he is ready to talk – and, when he solves a case, doesn’t hesitate to serve as a vigilante judge and jury.

This story originally appeared as the third chapter of November Joe: Detective of the Woods and is set in the autumn of 1908. The narrator James Quartich has been asked to take a sabbatical and he decides to spend a few months hunting in the wilds of Canada but he ends up tagging along with Joe, who has been asked to investigate a murder at a camping site. The dead body of Henry Lyon and the woods are closely inspected for clues but both the gentlemen end up with different views of the murderer.  James is amazed at the keen observation skills of his companion who has pointed out that the murderer hasn’t left a single clue and that all the clues would be present in the previous camp which the gentlemen might have used. When they reach this camp, sure enough, they are able to make out that two men spent the night together and Joe propounds a series of observations about the characteristics of the murderer from the various clues strewn around, though he doesn’t explain as to how he inferred them from the available clues. To find the murderer, they go to the city where the murdered man lived, find out the names of the men who were absent (turns out to be 5) from the settlement during the crucial period, track down each one of them and just match the characters as propounded by Joe to one of them. Only then does he explain the significance of the clues!