by Tom Cutler
So it wasn’t the police officer in this case who was unconsciously sexist, it was the woman driver. In fact, if you also thought that the police officer was a man then you too could be accused of this fault. It is a matter for you and your conscience. I’m not getting involved. These arguments are hard to win and I’ve got a bottle to open.
The short week
Friday was the name of Nemo’s horse.
The man in the lift
‘The man in the lift’ is without question the archetypal lateral thinking mystery and it is perhaps the best known. The answer to the problem is simple, as it is in the best lateral thinking mysteries. Gordon Gordon is of uncommonly short stature, and for this reason, though he can easily reach the lift button for the ground floor he is unable to reach higher than the seventh-floor button, so he is obliged to get out and walk the last three floors.
Apart from the bother of the lift, Gordon Gordon doesn’t give two hoots about being short. He’s one of those people with what satirical doctors have named ‘proctoheliosis’, that is to say, he thinks the sun shines out of his bum.
Mary’s mum
It’s easy to forget that this story is not about Mary but about Mary’s mum. If Mary’s mum has four daughters then three of them will be Mary’s sisters, April, May, and June. The fourth daughter, of course, is Mary herself. One thing’s for sure, she isn’t called July.
The deserted prairie cabin
With a candle, an oil lamp and some firewood but only one match, Hudson Flint should first light the match.
The two prime ministers
Winston Churchill was Prime Minister twice, from 1940 to 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. He had the same parents all his life. No wonder he looked so much like himself.
The Tea-leaf
One of the most ingenious and influential crime stories ever written, The Tea-leaf, 1925, contains a brilliant idea cleverly concealed by the character of the protagonists and the unusual environment of the crime.
The secret concerns a wrinkle commonly employed by ‘impossible’ murder authors and lateral thinking puzzlers. It is to do with the difference in the properties of water in its solid and liquid states.
The answer to the puzzle lies in the odd presence of a thermos flask in a Turkish bath. The tea-leaf in the wound links the weapon with the flask. The only plausible way you can explain the tea-leaf is that it came out of the flask sticking to the point of the dagger, and was then driven into the wound. But a flask, of course, can not only keep things hot – it can also keep things cold. Gradually the mist begins to clear.
The scientist Kelstern has manufactured a weapon in the form of an icicle, in a premeditated plot to kill himself and put the blame on his enemy Willoughton. He has, as we learn, been suffering from cancer and, we may guess, is facing death whatever happens. In the original story the weapon is made from solid carbon dioxide, which is harder than water ice, but this is not a critical point.
Another clue to motive lies in the furious emotions of the two men. Kelstern puts the deadly icicle into his flask, takes it with him to the Turkish bath, where he knows Willoughton will be, initiates a flaming row and once his enemy has left the room opens the flask and stabs himself in the heart. Whereupon the weapon miraculously disappears, melting away in the extreme heat.
He has committed suicide in a cunning and spiteful effort to hang his enemy Willoughton, and has nearly succeeded. Only his carelessness in washing out the thermos leads to the discovery of the crime.
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
The Speckled Band, 1892, is one of four Sherlock Holmes stories that can be classed as ‘locked-room’ mysteries. It was Arthur Conan Doyle’s own favourite.
The guilty suspect from the outset is Dr Grimesby Roylott, who is motivated to murder his stepdaughters by the fear of losing money to them upon their marriage. His training in medicine and his life in India come together with his penchant for exotic animals to provide one of the weirdest methods of murder in all fiction.
As Holmes and Watson look at the dead body of Dr Roylott, the speckled band around his head begins to move. And rearing up from his hair is the diamond-shaped head of a swamp adder, the deadliest snake in India. He has died within ten seconds of being bitten.
Holmes catches the snake with the adapted lash and throws it back into the safe, where it had been kept. Miss Stoner has had a lucky escape.
As they return to London, Holmes explains the solution.
A dummy bell rope next to an immovable bed instantly suggested to him that the rope was merely a bridge for something passing through the fake ventilator, and the idea of a snake was an obvious one. But it would have to be recalled so Dr Roylott trained it to return when summoned by his whistle, probably by use of the milk. He would put the adder through the ventilator knowing that it would crawl down the rope onto the bed beside his stepdaughter, who sooner or later must fall victim.
Holmes tells Watson that during their vigil he was ready with his cane. As soon as he heard the creature hiss he lit the light and attacked it, driving it back through the ventilator, where it turned upon its master.
‘In this way,’ says Sherlock Holmes, ‘I am no doubt indirectly responsible for Dr Grimesby Roylott’s death, and I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience.’
The Glass Coffin
To discover how Sir Herbert Hardcastle has died, let us first eliminate the impossible. There is no way out of the room once it is locked, therefore whoever killed Sir Herbert must still be in the conservatory. The conservatory has been searched and there is nobody in it except for Sir Herbert. It follows, then, that either he killed himself – deliberately, or by mistake – or that an accident happened to him.
Using Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest theory is the best bet, we may assume that things have been done in the following order. 1) Sir Herbert enters the conservatory as usual and locks the door behind him, 2) he tends to his flowers as always, 3) at 5.20, his normal time, he closes the ceiling ventilators using the long pole to pull them shut.
Closing the vents is the last thing he always did before leaving the conservatory for the day so it must have been after he shut them that he died.
The nature of his head wound makes suicide practically impossible, therefore an accident must have happened to him. What was it, then, that hit him or fell on top of his head? The clue to this lies in two things: the hook in Sir Herbert’s tea, which is the broken-off business end of the vent-opening pole, and the unusual position of this pole, upside-down on the coconut matting.
The rusty hook is not heavy enough to kill even a 92-year-old man, but the pole definitely is, especially if it struck his head end-on. We know that the hook has broken off the pole, and Sir Herbert would not have put it in his tea; it can only have dropped in there. Now we begin to see the truth.
Sir Herbert entered the conservatory, locking the door behind him as usual to avoid disturbance. He tended to his orchids and at 5.20 took the pole from its clip, held it up, and slipped the hook into the ring on the frame of the ventilator window.
He pulled hard on the pole but the vent was too stiff. So, stretching out his arms and staring at his boots, he gave a final tug. At this point the ventilator window suddenly came free and shut with a bang, a noise heard by the housemaid. The rusty hook sheared off with the impact, and dropped with a splash into Sir Herbert’s half-finished cup of tea. The pole, under the force of gravity and Sir Herbert’s final pull, struck him hard, in the centre of the crown of his straw hat, then slid down the back of his neck, where it was caught by his shirt collar, which stopped its descent. The hook end was now falling faster than the blunt end and it was the hook end, minus its hook, that landed on the coconut matting, which held it fast as the blunt end shot out of Sir Herbert’s shirt and was thrown against the trunk of the banana tree, where it came to rest, as if casually leant there. All this happened in a flash, as the already dead body of Sir Herbert fell to the floor.
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What a way to go.
A Game of Roulette
Sigismund Firthkettle is the pen name of Arturo Willis (1900–1985). A Game of Roulette is typical of his style.
Jackson has been the victim of a poisoning technique once much loved by agents of US Intelligence. It is known as ‘aspirin roulette’. In the old days, agents would break into a victim’s house while he was out, go into the bathroom, open the medicine cupboard and drop a poison pill into a bottle of aspirin.
The beauty of this technique is that the set-up might predate the death by days, weeks or months. All that was required was for the victim one day to take an aspirin and, bang!, he would drop dead at home. It’s rather like Russian roulette, only quieter, with no clue left to find.
Now that painkillers come in little packets the technique has changed. The way Bunce did it was to sneak into Jackson’s office, having been tipped off by Fernsby Intaglio’s director that he was outside, smoking a cigarette in the sunshine. Jackson had left his jacket on the back of his chair. In the pocket was a box of his usual aspirin and it was the work of but a moment for Bunce to take one of the carefully set-up foil packets made by the security services’ dirty-tricks department and switch it for the ordinary one. This new insert looked just like the supermarket one but contained a single deadly pill along with seven ordinary aspirins.
Then it was just a matter of time.
The poison of choice was saxitoxin, a fast-acting and very powerful shellfish toxin that causes so-called ‘paralytic shellfish poisoning’. Deadly even in small doses, saxitoxin’s symptoms can appear just ten minutes after ingestion. These include nausea, vomiting, tingling arms and legs, slurred speech, a choking sensation, breathing problems, unconsciousness, and death.
By the way, I bet you tried to lick your elbow.
The Two Bottles of Relish
The Two Bottles of Relish, 1932, is a firm favourite with impossible murder fans. It has wit, simplicity, and a shock ending that was quite a thing in 1932, when it was first published.
An Inspector Ulton comes to the flat to hear Linley’s solution to the mystery of Nancy Elth. He and Ulton go into his bedroom for a quiet discussion, so Smithers never hears Linley’s answer to the problem, but guesses it from his last words to the inspector.
As he is leaving, Ulton turns to ask Linley why Steeger cut down the trees. Linley tells him that he did it to get an appetite.
Put this remark together with the two bottles of relish bought by a vegetarian, but intended to spice up meat, and you have the unappetising solution to this intriguing and delightful mystery.
The Problem of Thor Bridge
The Problem of Thor Bridge, 1922, is one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes stories, and one of the most difficult for the lateral thinking reader to solve. Intriguingly the tale includes shadows of Conan Doyle’s own infidelity with a younger woman. In any case, it is a terrific plot and the solution to the mystery is as compelling as the problem.
To test his theory, Holmes conducts an experiment. Watson and he go to Thor Bridge, where he ties a large stone to a length of string and attaches this to Watson’s service revolver. He lowers the stone over the parapet of the bridge so that it hangs clear above the water. He then stands on the fatal spot, some distance from the edge of the bridge, with the gun in his hand, the string being taut between the weapon and the heavy stone on the farther side.
He raises the pistol to his head, and lets go his grip. In an instant the gun is whisked away by the weight of the stone, striking the underside of the parapet with a sharp crack before vanishing over the side into the water, and leaving a second chip of the exact size and shape as the first.
Using a grappling hook the police drag up Watson’s gun together with the murder weapon, which is tied to a stone in the same way. With this gun a vindictive Mrs Gibson has attempted to disguise her own suicide and fasten a charge of murder upon an innocent victim. Miss Dunbar has been vindicated.
The method was simple. First Miss Gibson demanded a meeting with Miss Dunbar and kept her note confirming the time and place. Holmes points out that in her anxiety that it should be discovered, ‘she somewhat overdid it by holding it in her hand to the last’. She then took one of her husband’s revolvers and kept it for her own use, hiding the second of the pair in Miss Dunbar’s wardrobe after discharging one barrel in the woods without attracting attention.
At the appointed time she went down to the bridge and when Miss Dunbar appeared she poured out her hatred. The governess fled back to the house, and once she was out of hearing Mrs Gibson put the stone in place and fired the gun. It was whisked out of her hand and over the parapet, sinking to the bottom as she fell dead upon her back.
‘I do not think that in our adventures we have ever come across a stranger example of what perverted love can bring about,’ muses Holmes.
Arsenic and Old Luce
On analysis the arsenic-containing flakes in the dust from the ambassador’s room were found to be particles of old green paint. Attention turned at once to the ornate ceiling, agitated every morning by the washing machine upstairs. The ceiling had been painted years before with what was found to be an arsenic-rich green pigment. This flaking paint, shaken off every morning by the shuddering washing machine, had been falling for months into Clare Boothe Luce’s food and drink, building up a cumulative dose of the deadly poison.
The ceiling was redecorated but the exhausted ambassador decided to retire from the job. Back in the United States her health and abrasive wit recovered. She died in Washington in 1987 at the age of 84.
The rather-short-very-long baseball game
The secret behind this delightful muddle is that the crew had broken surface near the North Pole in a stretch of open water surrounded by thick sea ice as far as the eye could see. Captain McLaren describes a light blanket of snow, with, here and there, small pools of meltwater refrozen into glass-like ice.
By deliberately siting the pitcher’s mound directly over the Pole, the men had created a situation in which, owing to the lines of longitude meeting at the Pole and making a nonsense of the notion of today and tomorrow, a batter hitting a home run would circumnavigate the globe and pass through 24 time zones.
If he hit a ball into right field it would fly across the international dateline and land in tomorrow. When the right fielder caught the flyball, it was already the next day where he was, so the batter couldn’t be considered out for a further 24 hours.
If the batter had hit a line drive, that is a sharply hit low-flying ball, into right field and a fielder had thrown it to second or third base it would have landed back in the day of play. Or yesterday, as far as he was concerned. A ball hit to left field would remain in the same day but if it was caught and thrown to first base it could go into tomorrow, depending on where the first baseman was standing.
Action around second base could take several days to complete for the same reasons.
It was a good job Captain McLaren and the Seadragon crew didn’t decide to continue playing till dark, because at that time of year at the North Pole it’s daytime all night.
The curious case of dihydrogen monoxide
Dihydrogen monoxide is just another name for water (H2O), which has two hydrogen molecules (dihydrogen) and one oxygen molecule (monoxide). Yes, it can be dangerous, but without it we’d all be dead. The director of DHMO.org is Dr Tom Way, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Villanova University, in Pennsylvania. His satirical website is designed to encourage people to add an appropriate dollop of scepticism to scientific-sounding scare-stories and think twice – not to say laterally – before swallowing bucket-loads of unnerving facts.
The Mary Celeste affair
To answer the Mary Celeste problem, you have to come at it sideways.
Despite the confusing mass of evidence, everything about the eerie case of this abandoned ‘ghost ship’ suggests a well-ordered, if rapid, departure in the lifeboat. It is highly suggestive that most of the
ship’s important papers, along with the captain’s navigational instruments, had been taken. If there’s one thing you need in a lifeboat, it’s navigational tools.
But for a captain and his crew to abandon a seaworthy ship for a small lifeboat in such a rush, something imminently dangerous must have threatened them.
It seems unlikely that the crew would leave the ship with only 3.5 feet of water in the hold, which they seemed to be pumping out. They were aware that this amount of water was not threatening the boat. It is even less likely that a drunk or mutinous crew would bloodlessly kill the captain and officers and then leave in a small lifeboat.
It is true that fumes from the denatured alcohol could have caused quite an explosion. Professor Andrea Sella of University College London built a model of the hold of Mary Celeste for a television programme using paper cartons for the alcohol barrels. He created a gas explosion that caused a pressure-wave and a large fireball that left no scorch marks. Had this happened on the ship it would still have blasted the crew sideways, but would they have abandoned ship after the bang?
My favourite answer to the problem is the one proposed by Captain David Williams. He suggests that after the crew had taken a break from the unremitting heavy weather by anchoring on the leeward side of Santa Maria Island, the Captain gave orders to get under way again and the crew went back to pumping the bilge of its 3.5 feet of water, and unfurling the sails.
Once under way, the sea floor beneath Mary Celeste was suddenly torn by a vigorous shallow earthquake, which vibrated the ocean and shook the ship fiercely up and down. So violent was this quake that the iron deck stove was thrown into the air, coming down outside the chocks that normally kept it from sliding about. The large drinking-water vessel was likewise bounced loose on the main deck, and the ship’s wooden compass stand was knocked over, breaking its housing.