The Pilot Who Wore a Dress: And Other Dastardly Lateral Thinking Mysteries. Tom Cutler
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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!
‘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?
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?