Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.
The eight stories here are the only ones Leather has written about his Singapore Police Inspector Zhang, who is not eager for publicity about his detective skills, but like Sherlock Holmes, does his work for the sake of the problems he can solve, as long as his faithful attendant, Sergeant Lee, knows his worth, and his other fellow workers. In the first of the stories, “Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish” for a locked-room murder, which allows him to give John Dickson Carr’s Gideon Fell lecture on the subject with similar prolixity. And he allows us to guess the solution by showing us the evidence twice.
Cecilia Wang appears to have shouted “I’m going to jump!” from the ninth story of an apartment building, also shouting her name in response to a question of Inspector Zhang, standing below with his wife. She falls a few seconds later, but the autopsy finds her lungs full of water. “An impossible crime,” says the inspector, gleefully, in “The Falling Woman.”
“The Dead Thai Gangster” was shot, but it couldn’t have happened on the plane Zhang and Sgt. Lee were taking to Bangkok. But he was dead, and had been alive a few minutes before; Zhang solves another impossible crime.
The burglar whose fingerprints are found on the murder weapon as well as his toothmarks on the arm of the murdered woman really does have “The Perfect Alibi”: he was in jail at the time of the murder. Zhang is a very methodical investigator, and the step-by-step approach he follows allows the reader to see the evidence that Zhang himself sees. The result is that, for the most part, these are fair play mysteries in which the reader has a chance of anticipating the detective’s solution. The pace, as a result, tends to be slow. Often Zhang arrives at his solutions before his Forensics Department has had a chance to process the crime scene. He would rather, as he says often, use “zee little grey cells,” because Zhang is a fan of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot as well as Sherlock Holmes. He is, in fact, a devotee of mystery fiction in general, contemporary as well as going back to the nineteenth century
“The Hotel Guest” claims to have lost his memory when he was mugged, but Zhang makes a series of deductions from observations of him, supplemented by what he sees in CCTV footage from the hotel elevator, and he solves the “case.” The story is reminiscent of Rodrigues Ottolengui’s “The Nameless Man,” where the detective’s friend Mitchel attempts to fool the detective, Barnes, with a fake amnesiac.
“The Disappearing Drugs” were supposedly dollied into an empty apartment but then managed to disappear without anyone entering or leaving. The CCTV footage gives Zhang a clue.
“Inspector Zhang goes to Harrogate” is another locked room mystery that Zhang solves by realizing the murder could be committed from outside the room. The occasion for Zhang’s being in England was a surprise birthday trip to a mystery writers’ convention, arranged by his wife, and Zhang revels in every minute of it. The victim, a mystery writer who made himself the best-selling author of eBooks by pricing the electronic versions of his mysteries low, is killed by a jealous rival author. Leather, in fact, was the second-best-selling Kindle author in 2011, and was involved in public disputes with other authors about his methods.
Zhang investigates, in “The Island of the Dead,” the murder of a rich cosmetic surgeon whose specialty is restoring virginity to the deflowered. Like his patients, the case is not what it appears to be. These stories, though a little repetitive and not fast-paced like the thrillers Leather usually writes, are each entertaining; they appeared first as Kindle editions and were collected in 2014.
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