Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine #097v018 (1951-12)

A simple matter of deduction by Lord Dunsany

Do you remember Mr. Linley, the detective in Lord Dunsany’s “The Two Bottles of Relish”? Well, here is a brand-new Mr. Lin Icy story, never before published anywhere in the world... As you read this tale of pure deduction, you will be reminded of those marvelous opening scenes in most of the Sherlock Holmes stories — those magnificent curtain-raisers in which the Master takes up a simple object (like a watch or a walking-slick), examines it almost casually, and then, to the utter amazement of Dr. Watson (and the reader), reels off a staggering series of deductions; except that in this case Mr. Linley examines an ordinary crossword puzzle and then, with all the sharpness and shrewdness of Holmes himself narrows a field of seventy-five suspects to the one and only possible murderer... Shades of Sherlock, here is classic criminological coup in the grandest of ail ’tec traditions!

As Smithers, that admirable specimen of a modern Watson, says: “It was all pure magic to me.” That’s what Lord Dunsany’s detective stories are — pure magic, written with charm and a delicate aura of fable; you can almost see Lord Dunsany sitting in his study, working wonders with words, in a patch of Irish sunlight...

“Yes,” said Smithers, “Mr. Linley is a wonderful man.”

Smithers was being interviewed by a man from The Daily Rumour, who would far sooner have interviewed Linley. But Linley would not talk about himself, and so they had gone to Smithers.

“I understand that you lived in the same flat with him,” said the journalist.

“That’s right,” said Smithers. “I did for a couple of years.”

“And what was the most remarkable case in which he took part?” asked the interviewer, a young man of the name of Ribbert.

“I couldn’t say that,” said Smithers. “I’ve seen so many of them.”

“You’ve told us of some.”

“Well, I have,” said Smithers.

“Are there any that you haven’t told us about?” asked Ribbert.

“Well, yes,” said Smithers. “There was the case of Mr. Ebright, who was lured to an empty house by a telephone call, and there murdered. You could find an empty house before the war, if you looked for it; and this man had found his way in — through a window at the back, the police said — and had hired Mr. Ebright there somehow, and was waiting for him when he came. You may remember the case.”

“I think I do,” said the journalist.

“There were no clues in it,” Smithers went on, “no clues at all; not what you would really call clues. And that was what brought the detective in charge of the case to Mr. Linley, and that is why you might call it one of his cleverest bits of work. The detective thought Mr. Linley might help him, because he was Inspector Ulton who had been helped by Mr. Linley before. I was there at the time, when Inspector Ulton came in, and after they’d said Howdydo, he says to Mr. Linley, ‘There’s a case with a certain amount of mystery about it, and we thought that you might perhaps have an idea that would help us...’ ”

“What are the facts?” asks Mr. Linley.

“There are very few of them,” says the Inspector. “It’s a case of murder.”

I was surprised to hear him say that, because it’s a word that Inspector Ulton never seemed to like to use. But he used it this time. “He was killed with a hammer or some such object,” Inspector Ulton says. “His skull was battered in, and the hammer, or whatever it was, had been cleaned on a bit of newspaper. The body wasn’t found until two days later, so that the murderer got a good start. We know it was premeditated murder, not only because the dead man, Mr. Ebright, was lured there by a telephone call, but because there are no fingerprints except his in the whole house. And that means the murderer must have been wearing gloves all the time, even when he was doing a crossword puzzle, which is the only thing besides the sheet of bloody newspaper that had been left in the room in which the dead man was lying — a bare room in an unoccupied house in a little street near Sydenham.”

“How do you know that it was the murderer who worked on the crossword puzzle?” asks Mr. Linley.

“Because he would have been doing it while he was waiting for the other man to come,” says Inspector Ulton. “He must have got there first so as to let Mr. Ebright in.”

“Yes, that is so,” Mr. Linley says. “Could you let me see the puzzle?”

“It’s only an ordinary one,” says Inspector Ulton, “and all the letters are done in capitals, which give us no clue to his handwriting.”

“Still, I would like to take a look.”

And Inspector Ulton takes an envelope out of his pocket and pulls out a torn sheet of newspaper. “There it is,” he says. “No fingerprints.”

And there was the crossword puzzle, nearly all filled in.

“He must have waited for a long time for his victim,” says Mr. Linley.

“We thought of that,” says the Inspector. “But it didn’t get us any further.”

“I think the crossword puzzle will.”

“The puzzle?” says the Inspector.

“I don’t know,” says Mr. Linley. “Let me look at it.”

And he looks at it for quite a long while. And then he says to Inspector Ulton, “Who did it?” Which seemed odd to me at the time. But he explained to me afterwards that they usually know at Scotland Yard who has committed a murder, but that what they want to know is how to prove it. But Inspector Ulton only says, “We don’t know.”

And then Mr. Linley asks, “What was the motive?”

“Ah,” says Inspector Ulton, “if I could tell you that, we wouldn’t need to trouble you. The motive would lead us to the man like a foot-track. But there’s no motive and no clue, or none that has come our way.”

And Mr. Linley goes on looking at the crossword puzzle, and Inspector Ulton says, “What do you make of it?”

“A friend of his,” says Mr. Linley. Which was hardly the right word to use of somebody who had murdered him. But that was Mr. Linley’s way of putting things.

“A friend?”

“Someone of his acquaintance,” says Mr. Linley. ‘Or he couldn’t have lured him into that deserted house.”

But that was getting nobody any forrarder. For Inspector Ulton says, “We had thought of that, and had gone carefully over the list of all the people he knew. But the trouble is there are seventy-five of them. It would be one of those, as you say. But we can’t very well put seventy-five men on trial.”

“No,” says Mr. Linley. “The dock couldn’t hold them all.”

But one could see that Inspector Ulton didn’t think that very funny. And then Mr. Linley goes on. “But I think I can whittle them down a bit for you. To begin with, he has one of those new fountain pens that will write for weeks on end without refilling them. Not quite everybody has one. So that reduces your list by two or three. And then he would have sent it to be refilled about the time of the murder, which reduces it a good deal further.”

I saw that he must, have got that from the crossword puzzle. But after that it was all pure magic to me. For he goes on, “And I fancy he is a man who has a garden. I should say a fairly good one. And then he lives among chess players, though he doesn’t play himself. And he is not without education, but was never at Eton or any similar school. And he has a gun and probably lives near a river or marshes.”

“But wait a moment!” says Inspector Ulton. “How do you know all this?”

“And one thing more. He knows something about geology.”

And all the time he was holding this bit of a sheet of paper in his hand and glancing now and then at the crossword puzzle. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, and I don’t think Inspector Ulton could either. And then Mr. Linley begins to explain. “You see, we begin with his seventy-five friends — because it isn’t a casual burglar trying to rob him. A man doesn’t go to meet a stranger like that with jewelry on him; or with money either, unless he is going to pay blackmail. And if he’s going to pay blackmail, there’s no need to murder him. No, it was one of your seventy-five. And you see the track of his pen?”

“Yes, I see that.”

“And you see where it began to give out at the third word and could hardly manage the fourth? So he gave it up and went on with a pencil.”

“Yes, I see that too.”

“Well,” says Mr. Linley, “there are words in a crossword puzzle that you get helped to by the letters of words you have done already, but the ones a man puts in first are the ones he knows. Now look at these, Inspector. The first two clues that he went for, which are not nearly the first in the crossword, are Four of thirty-two and A kind of duck. Those are the two that he picked to do first. And he puts in Rooks and Shoveller.”

“Two birds,” says the Inspector.

“No,” says Mr. Linley; “the second is a bird, and the kind of bird not likely to be much known except among shooting men, and not always by them unless they live by muddy places in which the shoveller feeds. But rooks are what chess players call what the rest of us call castles. But though he is familiar with the correct name for them he doesn’t play chess, for he has missed a very easy clue in five letters, Starts on her own colour. He would never hear chess players talking about that, because it is too elementary. But he can’t be a chess player himself if he doesn’t know that that refers to the Queen.

“And the third one he picks out,” Mr. Linley goes on, “is London’s clays and gravels. And he writes down Eocene. Which is quite right. But not everybody knows that, and it seems to make him a bit of a geologist. And then we come to his fourth effort, when his fountain pen gave its last gasp. The; clue to that is A classical splendor of the greenhouse. And he gets that one at once, or at any rate it’s his fourth choice, without any letters to help him. And that is why I say he is not without education, because he must have known something of Horace to get that word, and must know something about a glasshouse, and I should say a well-kept one, which makes him a bit of a gardener. Amaryllis is the word that he has written in.”

“Why, that narrows it down a lot.”

“Yes,” says Mr. Linley. “We have now got a sporting friend of Mr. Ebright — if one can use the word friend, and if one can use the word sporting — who has probably quite a nice garden, and either a knowledge of geology or else he lives on those very clays and gravels and so knows their correct name, and also he is an educated man. Now among Mr. Ebright’s educated friends several would have been at Eton, Winchester, or Harrow. But you can eliminate all of them because of a staring gap in this puzzle. Number 9 down, you see. It says Long, short, short (six letters). If he can’t get that he has certainly never been at Eton. The simple answer is Dactyl — simple to anyone who has ever had to do Latin verses. And, indeed, you would get that much at a private school.”

And I put in a suggestion then. “Mightn’t Mr. Ebright have come in,” I said, “and interrupted him?”

“He might have,” said Mr. Linley, “but he had done all except three or four, and that Number 9 is one of the very first you would expect him to pick, if he knew anything about it, because it is so easy.’

“Well, I think you have helped us wonderfully,” says the Inspector.

“And I think we might follow his preferences a little further,” goes on Mr. Linley, “though that will not be so easy. He was using a soft pencil and it was soon blunted, and I think we may allow him some knowledge of entomology, because he wrote this in while his pencil was still sharp, without the help of any letters from words that cross it, for they are more blurred and the pencil was pressed harder.”

And Mr. Linley showed us the word Vanessa, and the clue to it, which was The family of the peacock.

“With a magnifying glass,” went on Mr. Linley, “we might get some more. But perhaps you have enough when we have identified the murderer as a man acquainted with Mr. Ebright, who probably owns a garden, was educated, but not at Eton, knows geology, or lives on the London clays or gravels, is associated in some way with chess players and yet does not play, and has at one time or another collected butterflies. If you don’t actually place him from that, it will at any rate remove suspicion from most of your seventy-five suspects.”

“And sure enough it did. There weren’t as many as half of them who had gardens. Only twenty of these turned out to have had a classical education and of those twenty, five had been at Eton. Of the fifteen remaining, only half a dozen knew anything of geology, and only two of those had ever collected butterflies, and one of them was found to have two nephews who often stayed with him on their vacations from Cambridge and were good chess players. And he did not play.

“All that was found out by Inspector Ulton and Scotland Yard, and it was a lot to find out. And they even found out that he had sent his pen to be refilled about the time Mr. Linley said. And they arrested their man, and he was tried. But the jury didn’t feel that you could quite hang a man on the evidence of a crossword puzzle, and the verdict was ‘Not Guilty.’ ”

“Then he is still going about!” said the journalist.

“Yes, when last I heard of him,” said Smithers. “But I don’t think there’s any harm in him now. It was a near thing and it frightened him, and I don’t think he’ll try it again. You see, Mr. Linley nearly had him.”