The Pilot Who Wore a Dress: And Other Dastardly Lateral Thinking Mysteries

Copyright

HARPER

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

FIRST EDITION

© Tom Cutler 2015

Illustrations © Bart Aalbers

Match diagrams © Alexei Penfold

Cover layout design Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Tom Cutler asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008157210

Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008157203

Version: 2016-02-25

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Dr John H. Watson,

‘the one fixed point in a changing age’.

Epigraph

‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’

Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of the Four (1890),

by Arthur Conan Doyle

About the Author

Tom Cutler began his career with numerous false starts, as a teacher, set designer, speechwriter, printer, wine waiter, City drone and radio reporter, before settling down in book and magazine publishing. After building up extensive scar tissue he finally threw caution to the wind and launched himself as a humorous writer upon a reading public that had done nothing to hurt him.

Tom’s books cover a variety of subjects, including language, sex and music. Among his several international bestsellers are, A Gentleman’s Bedside Book and the Amazon number-one blockbuster, 211 Things A Bright Boy Can Do. His work has been translated into more languages than you can shake a stick at. Tom has written for the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Huffington Post and BBC radio, and he has a regular column in The Chap magazine.

He is a practising magician and member of the Magic Circle, as well as a detective story fan and longstanding Sherlock Holmes aficionado. A lifetime’s experience as a very devious bugger has helped him in the writing of this book.

Tom lives at the seaside, where he enjoys kicking pebbles.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

LATERAL THINKING CLASSICS

The sailor who ate the cream tea

The Wishing Cup of Keriput

Murder in the snow

The Yorkshire factory

The riddle of the Burns supper

The annoying computer password

Terry’s girlfriends

The lorry driver slaying

The magic bucket

The impossible brothers

Arms and the child

The window cleaner in the sky

The troublesome signpost

The Knightsbridge barber

The fastest beard in the world

The high window

The confusing coach trip

The pilot who wore a dress

Picking up the children from school

The car in the river

The sad end of Felicity Ffolkes

The blind beggar

A birthday message from the Queen

Talking rubbish

The Flood

Hospital assault

The two Italians

House painting made simple

The absent-minded taxi driver

Plane crash in no man’s land

The strange story of Antony and Cleopatra

Bird strike

Contradictio in adjecto

Unconscious sexism

The short week

The man in the lift

Mary’s mum

The deserted prairie cabin

The two prime ministers

LOCKED ROOMS AND IMPOSSIBLE MURDERS

The Tea-leaf

The Adventure of the Speckled Band

The Glass Coffin: an Inspector Jibson Mystery

A Game of Roulette

The Two Bottles of Relish

The Problem of Thor Bridge

LATERAL THINKING MYSTERIES FROM REAL LIFE

Arsenic and Old Luce

The rather-short-very-long baseball game

The curious case of dihydrogen monoxide

The Mary Celeste affair

The story of Big Ben

The Euston Road poisonings

Kentucky blues

Uncle Bob’s magic pipe

The incredible story of Kaspar Hauser

The great Epping Jaundice mystery

The fastest submarine in the world

LATERAL THINKING BETCHAS AND GOTCHAS

The cocktail glass

Nailed it!

Five into four will go

The kiss

Twelve minus two equals two

Nine plus nothing makes ten

Betting edge

The house move

Blind date

Magnetic matches

The glass mousetraps

Fire under water

Saucer sorcery

How to put your head where your bottom should be

Bend me your ears

The easy restaurant bill-dodging betcha

Thinking outside the box

THE SOLUTIONS

Also by Tom Cutler

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If you put your lateral thinking cap on you’ll realise that the more people I put in my acknowledgments the more books I will sell. This is because everyone I mention will buy at least one copy as a souvenir, and more to give to their friends to make them envious. Maybe The Book of Acknowledgements will be the next big seller.

Anyway, I’d like to offer a genuine thank-you to the following people. First, my editor at HarperCollins, Jack Fogg, whose idea this book was, and who first approached me to write it. Second, my always-encouraging agent Laura Morris, for sensible advice, several disgraceful lunches, and at least one wild champagne party that I only dimly remember. Third, my illustrator Bart Aalbers, who has added an exuberant twang to the whole shebang.

Hats off to two old friends, Terry Guyatt, who first told me the story of the man with two girlfriends and gave me some early advice and encouragement, and John Kirby, for checking in regularly.

I thank my pal Chris Tuohy, who alerted me to the joke I used in ‘The annoying computer password’ mystery, and my new friend David Johnson, for sitting me down in the sunshine at the Yacht Club and listening to my early ideas. Cheers also to another new friend, Patricia Hammond, for sending me the most lovely and unexpected fan letter I’ve ever received.

I’m indebted to two excellent pub landlords, Richard at The Old Star and Mark at The Royal Sovereign, for providing me with old-fashioned liquid cheer when I was at low tide. I compliment Rob Sr and Rob Jr, Frank and Matt, and Richard, on their hard work, and I especially thank Arthur, for his zest, good humour, craftsmanship and strange unearthly whistling. His ‘Greensleeves’ is like something out of The Twilight Zone.

I’m grateful to the experts in the Magic Circle library, and at West Sussex Libraries, for providing, in the first case, information, and, in the second, refuge when the six people in the previous paragraph were making too much noise.

This book would have been a shadow of itself without the inspiring work of the towering Martin Gardner: mathematician, magician, sceptic, wit, puzzle collector and abundant author. I commend Michael Howell and Peter Ford for their superb 1985 page-turner, The Ghost Disease and Twelve Other Stories of Detective Work in the Medical Field, which filled me in on the Epping Jaundice, the Euston Road poisonings and the mysterious ailment that felled Clare Boothe Luce. I bow down also to Paul Sloane and Des MacHale, whose years of painstaking collecting and publishing of lateral thinking puzzles helped me track down some of the quirkiest, and I propose a resounding three cheers to those anonymous geniuses who came up with them all in the first place.

Finally, I thank Marianne, as usual, for everything.

FOREWORD

When people talk of the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction they’re usually referring to the 1920s and 30s, but some authorities believe that we are currently going through another ‘Golden Age’. The range, profile and quality of contemporary crime fiction are probably as high as they have ever been.

But one thing the current Golden Age lacks – which was very much present in the previous one – is a sense of fun.

As embittered middle-aged Inspectors with drink and relationship problems try to identify serial killers, as forensic pathologists sift through decomposing organs, and as dour Scandinavian detectives confront the unalterable bleakness of human existence, crime fiction has lost its traditional link with high spirits. Noir is the new black, and that’s just something readers have to take on board.

I’m sure, at universities all over the world, doctorates are even now being written about the reasons for this change. Whodunits in which the puzzle was paramount came to a natural end because there were no more puzzles left that hadn’t already been done. The country houses, perfectly designed for weekend house parties for guests with ‘dark secrets in their past’ and offering a wonderful range of domestics to act as witnesses, informants and suspects, did not survive the Second World War. No longer could their owners ‘get the staff’, and many were converted into hotels, boys’ prep schools and secret military training centres.

The great carnage of the war also made the Golden Age tradition of treating death as a kind of parlour game seem a little tasteless. Publications like The Baffle Book, a collection of murder puzzles very popular in the 1930s, appeared to be offensively trivial.

Another development, the abolition of the death penalty in 1965, meant crime novels were left with a lot more loose ends to be unravelled. No longer could the pointing finger of Hercule Poirot at the perpetrator in the library signal the permanent end of a case, with the hangman’s noose tying everything up in a neat bow. What had been black and white moved on to a colour-chart of greys.

So it was no surprise that crime fiction grew darker.

I’m sure I’m not alone in slightly regretting that change. ‘Murder as parlour game’ still holds a strong attraction, and it is no surprise how many books from the original Golden Age are now being successfully reprinted. Murder Mystery Dinners are a hugely popular form of entertainment, and new generations of young people are introduced every day to the fun of Cluedo.

It is firmly within that tradition of having fun with crime that this book by Tom Cutler fits. He has taken the original idea of selecting lateral thinking challenges and writing them up as mini detective stories, then asking the reader to work out the solution. The Crime Puzzle Book, thought to be dead after 1939, has been reborn in a new form for the 21st century.

I’m sure a great many readers will relish the challenges that it presents to them.

Simon Brett

Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger award-winner

and President of the Detection Club

INTRODUCTION

Two men are playing tennis together. After an exhausting three-set match, both of them win. How can this be? All will be explained in a moment.

The reason lateral thinking problems are so tricky, and such fun to solve, is that we tend to think in a routine way. Our ingrained habits, inhibitions and false assumptions hinder us in winkling out the less apparent possibilities tucked away inside the lateral thinking shell. But if we can look at the problem from another perspective, the answer often pops out. As Sherlock Holmes tells Dr Watson, ‘When once your point of view is changed the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.’

It’s like the joke about the man who dies and goes to hell. He sees an ugly old villain making love to a beautiful young blonde. When he objects that this is hardly a harsh enough fate, the Devil replies, ‘Who are you to question that woman’s punishment?’

The term ‘lateral thinking’ was coined in 1967 by a man who liked to use an overhead projector named Edward de Bono (the man is named Edward de Bono, not the projector). Edward de Bono has said that the mind can see only what it is prepared to see, but that we can solve some otherwise tricky problems if we look at things from the side – which is what ‘lateral’ means.

For example, if we hear that Dr Alex Bernard is a vicar we will probably make several unconscious assumptions about him. But, as Sherlock Holmes also said, ‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,’ for Dr Alex Bernard is a woman. Thinking that a vicar named Alex is a man is not sexism, as some people would insist, but just a forgivable mistake, because if we didn’t make assumptions based on our experience of the way the world normally works we would be so abstract that we wouldn’t be able to laugh at jokes or get on with people at parties.

In this book I’ve decided to make the most of the combination of riddle and story that most lateral thinking problems embody. Solving these mysteries won’t require unusual intelligence or imagination, and all the information you need is there in the tale – though the solution may be hidden in plain sight by the way in which the puzzle has been framed. There is no cheating, but there is, of course, a fair sprinkling of red herrings.

The first section of the book contains celebrated standards from the lateral thinking hall of fame. There’s everything from the immortal ‘Man in the lift’ to the baffling ‘Murder in the snow’, along with some less familiar, and a few entirely original, problems.

It is a feature of lateral thinking mysteries that they involve lots of death and destruction, with a fair number of hangings, shootings and suicides. What is so alluring about all this violence I can’t say, but I’ve kept it all in, along with a few laughs, I hope.

Besides the classics, I’ve included a section featuring some of the finest ‘locked-room’ mysteries and ‘impossible’ crimes from detective fiction, adapted to the lateral thinking format. Some of the very best head-scratchers from masters such as Lord Dunsany and Arthur Conan Doyle are included.

A Real Life section features mysterious true events such as the curious case of the Mary Celeste, the dihydrogen monoxide affair and the riddle of the Epping Jaundice.

Finally, there is a part featuring bar betchas and gotchas, with lateral thinking matchstick puzzles, counter-intuitive gags and unlosable bets.

The Pilot Who Wore a Dress makes great solo reading but you can also use it to challenge a roomful of players. You can even pass the book round and take turns reading out the stories. Apart from the monkey business behind the betchas, which is included with the bet, you will discover the fun and quirky solutions to the mysteries in their own section at the back of the book. They are as compelling as the enigmas they explain.

I hope you find these lateral thinking mysteries as much fun to solve as I did to write. Good luck.

Oh, by the way, if you’re still wondering about those two tennis players, the answer is that they are partners playing a doubles match. Of course!

LATERAL THINKING CLASSICS

‘These little grey cells. It is up to them.’

Agatha Christie

The sailor who ate the cream tea

The mystery

On the western outskirts of Plymouth lies the little seaside town of St Havet. It has a striped lighthouse, a rocky foreshore and a few red cliffs, which fossil-hunters say are a goldmine of echinoids and ammonites.

The town’s pretty high street has the tang of salt in its nostrils, and several old-fashioned shops line the cobbled roadway: a haberdashery, a fishmonger’s where the gulls circle, and a greengrocer’s. There is a friendly pub, The Lion and Lobster, and a charming tearoom – Marianne’s – famous for its homemade clotted cream and giant scones. The tearoom boasts lace tablecloths, an excitement of doilies, and those things that look like three flying saucers on a stick, which they put cakes on at teatime. On the walls hang faded photographs of the skiffs of Worlock’s Hole.

One afternoon, not long ago, the bell on the door of Marianne’s tearoom tinkled brightly. A young man walked in and sat down in the sunshine by the window. He was the only customer. Daisy, the waitress, daughter of the late Marianne, and now sole owner of the establishment, greeted him with a warm smile.

After consulting the dainty menu for a minute the man caught her eye again. She approached the table and asked him what he would like. ‘One of your famous cream teas, please,’ he said.

Daisy wrote this down carefully in her notebook and bustled off to the kitchen, emerging in due course with a steaming brown teapot, and a blue cup and saucer from a different tea service. She handed her customer his pot of tea and retired again to the kitchen. After a minute she was back, staggering under a tray laden with two scones the size of half-bricks, half a pint of strawberry jam in a pretty bowl with a silver spoon, and a saucer piled high with yellow clotted cream.

With an air of great deliberation, the man removed the scones from the plate and, using the spoon, distributed exactly twelve dollops of cream around the circumference of the plate. He carefully placed a dollop of jam between each blob of cream. In the centre of the plate he placed a scone, which he carefully cut into four pieces, before slicing the second scone in half and putting it on the plate. He poured himself a cup of tea and painstakingly dunked the small pieces of quartered scone in the tea before eating them, one after the other. He dipped the two halves of the remaining scone in the jam, and then in the cream, going around the plate like a clock face, but he took care not to dunk them in his tea.

Daisy had been watching the man carefully and she approached the table. ‘So, Sir,’ she said, ‘I see you are a sailor.’

The problem

How did Daisy know that her customer with the curious eating habits was a sailor?

Tap here for the solution.

The Wishing Cup of Keriput

The mystery

Sir Humphrey Bumfreigh (1873–1979) was an Egyptologist and explorer who became famous around the world for his discovery in 1922 of the desert tomb of King Orang Tua Keriput.

His adventure began in 1913, when the wealthy aristocrat Lord Elpus employed Bumfreigh to supervise his ambitious efforts to find the Keriput tomb, whose whereabouts had until that time eluded archaeologists. They began excavations in the Valley of the Wasps on the east bank of the Nile, near Thebes (modern-day Luxor). But in January 1921, after eight expensive years of finding nothing but quite a lot of sand, Bumfreigh was told by Lord Elpus that he had one last chance to discover the lost tomb before he turned off the money tap at the end of the year.

It looked hopeless, but on 6 December 1921 Humphrey Bumfreigh made the find of his life. While scraping dispiritedly around the bottom of an old wall, he uncovered four large stone steps. Some hieroglyphs on the steps suggested to him that this was the top of a staircase leading down to King Keriput’s tomb.

Bumfreigh immediately sent Lord Elpus an excited wire begging him to come, and on 11 January 1922, with Elpus at his elbow, and using a knife that his grandmother had given him for his sixteenth birthday, Bumfreigh made ‘a bit of a hole up near the top of this old door’, and was able to peek into the room behind. By the light of a flickering candle he could see gold and ebony artefacts which had been placed there before the time of Jesus, and which he was the first man to see for more than 2,000 years.

The tomb proved to be more spectacular even than King Tut’s, and over the next few years thousands of objects were cleared and many were sold off to collectors and museums. The Egyptian locals warned of ‘the curse of the pharaohs’, which would, they claimed, be visited at once upon violators of the tomb. But Humphrey Bumfreigh’s death in 1979, from a seizure brought on by kissing one of his team of nurses at the age of 106, seemed not to bear this out.

Perhaps the most mysterious of the Keriput finds was discovered in the sand in front of the steps to the tomb. More modern than the ancient relics, it was a plain ceramic pot, which the press dubbed the Wishing Cup of Keriput. Around its rim it bore a mysterious Latin-looking inscription that read: ITI SAPIS SPOTANDA BIGO NÉ. Neither Sir Humphrey Bumfreigh, Lord Elpus, nor anybody else could make anything of it, and the great explorer went to his death not knowing what it meant.

The problem

Can you decipher the mysterious inscription around the top of the Wishing Cup of Keriput?

Tap here for the solution.

Murder in the snow

The mystery

Known as the ‘Big Freeze’, the winter of 1962/63 was one of the coldest and longest British winters ever documented. December had started foggy and London was in the middle of what would turn out to be its last pea-souper. Halfway through the month a cold snap brought snow, causing people to ready themselves for a white Christmas. They began in earnest to shop for presents.