Martin Fone's Blog, page 54

Rock, Paper, Scissors

A game of rock, paper, scissors (RPS) is an acknowledged way of settling a friendly dispute, often seen as a more sophisticated alternative to tossing a coin. It appears a deceptively simple game, two players facing each other and simultaneously making one of three hand gestures, a closed fist representing “rock”, a flat hand “paper” and a fist with the index and middle fingers extended “scissors”. The player selecting rock will win if their opponent has chosen scissors but will lose to paper. Scissors will beat paper and if the players make the same selection, the game will be drawn.

Citing a reference in a 16th century book by Xie Zhaozhi, the World Rock Paper Scissors Association trace RPS’s origins to a game called shoushiling or “hand command” played during the Chinese Han Dynasty (206BC to 220AD). By the 17th century, a version of the game called mushi-ken had reached Japan where the thumb represented a frog, the little finger a slug, and the index finger a snake. The slug triumphed over the frog but lost to the snake while the frog beat the snake.

The direct forerunner of RPS is Janken, a Japanese game, which used the now familiar rock, paper, and scissors gestures and grew increasingly popular in the 19th century. In a Malaysian version a bird replaced scissors and water paper with water beating rock as it makes it sink, a bird overcoming water which it drinks and a rock crushing the bird. In Indonesia a variant uses an elephant, indicated by a slightly raised thumb, and a human and an ant, signified by outstretched index and little fingers respectively. The ant frightens the elephant but is crushed by the human who, in turn, loses to the elephant.

It was not until the early 20th century that the game reached the West, a letter in The Times in 1924 describing a game of “zhot” which resembled what we know as RPS, claiming it to be of Mediterranean origin. This misconception was soon rectified by another correspondent who identified it as Jan-ken-pon, a game which they had seen played throughout Japan. This exchange suggests that RPS was relatively unknown at the time in Britain, at least to readers of “The Thunderer”.

The French children’s magazine, La Vie au patronage, described the game in 1927, calling it a “jeu japanois” while in America the 1933 edition of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopaedia noted that what it transcribed as John Kem Po was a common method of settling disputes amongst Japanese children. “This is such a good way of deciding an argument” it proclaimed “that American boys and girls might like to practice (sic) it too”.

But is it just a random game of chance or are there strategies that can be deployed that increase the potential of success? We will find out next week.

The Dr Britling Stories – Volume One

A review of The Dr Britling Stories – Volume 1 – by James Ronald – 240316

Moonstone Press have recently reissued the first volume of a collection of short stories and a novel-cum novella from the crime writer, James Ronald, with the promise of more to come. Curiously, despite the title, the final story in volume one does not involve his police surgeon cum amateur detective, Dr Daniel Britling. Instead the hero in Blind Man’s Buff, the first story that Ronald had published, in 1929, is Martin Longworth, a blind man who uses his heightened sensory powers to identify and ensnare a murderer who has eluded the police for eight years. It is a very effective and powerful story.

Ronald was a prolific writer and had a reputation as a writer of pulp fiction, many of his works finding their way into the many pulp fiction magazines that were around at the time. Do not let that put you off as he is a better writer than that. He writes with pace and urgency and while he has a tendency to veer towards the melodramatic and sensational and the plotting is rather obvious, his stories are compelling with more than a nod to Conan Doyle and R Austin Freeman. The genre of pulp fiction, with copy written to tight deadlines, means that what is lost in polish is more than made up for in action.

The opening story, Green Ghost Murder, published in April 1931, sees Britling recuperating from a bout of pneumonia but the lure of a local mystery, the re-emergence of the Green Ghost of Heaton, proves to be too much for his detective instincts to resist. Of course, there is a more corporeal answer to the mayhem being caused on the streets and Britling unmasks the culprit. For the reader there is little mystery as to whodunit and for those looking for more meaning in a slight story that probably would not bear it, it is a commentary on the desperate employment conditions of the time and what people would do to maintain their job and enhance their prospects.

Too Many Motives from April 1930 is slightly more compelling, with a financier, Mark Savile, with a reputation for being a ruthless operator, inviting four associates whom he hates to dinner. During the meal he takes delight in insulting his guests. Later, he is found dead, although his guests had all left the building while he was alive. Did one or more return to do him in or was there another explanation? Of course, to his police colleagues’ dismay, Britling can see the wood for the trees.

Whereas Too Many Motives borrows wholesale from a Sherlock Holmes story, Find The Lady, published in May 1931, just takes the general concept from one of Conan Doyle’s cases. It also involves a character, Lord Clavering, who was caught up in Mark Savile’s deadly stratagems. Again, what really happened is fairly easy to spot but the disappearance of Lady Frances Dorian and her maid from a hotel in Brighton has more in the way of a real detective story with clues garnered from a number of on the spot interrogations of key witnesses.

The novel, Six Were To Die, is great fun with six financiers, who had left a colleague to carry the can for their defalcations, are threatened with death. During the course of the story, and despite Dr Britling’s best efforts, five are to die and the methods employed to bring about their deaths show an ingenuity that has to be marvelled at. If I was to be harsh, my disappointment with the story is that Britling’s focus seems to be more on how the murders were committed than the conclusions that could be drawn from the to prevent a recurrence. It takes an intervention from his twin sister, Eunice, who is not above a bit of insider trading herself, and her observations on the methods of a housekeeper to put Britling on the right track.

The denouement, melodramatic for sure, is at least exciting and while the murderer’s identity is known from the start, the big reveal is how he was able to penetrate into the house to carry out his clever murders.

Ronald’s fascination with the sordid world of high finance is an interesting reflection on a country plunged into a depression and struggling to deal with the aftermath of the great stock market crashes. They are stories of their time and while they may not have worn too well with age, they are entertaining enough to occupy an evening or so. I am looking forward to the second volume.

Bennerley Viaduct

Astride the Erewash Valley between Ilkeston in Derbyshire and Awsworth in Nottinghamshire stands the longest wrought iron viaduct in the British Isles, some 1452 feet long carrying the railway track 60 feet and ten inches above the river. The only other wrought iron viaduct left standing in Britain is in Devon, the Meldon Viaduct.

Completed in 1877 the Bennerley Viaduct was constructed for the Great Northern Railway to carry a line from Stafford to Nottingham via Derby. As the ground is marshy and unstable, partly due to the extensive coal mining in the area, a stone or brick structure was deemed unsuitable and as faith in cast iron structures had been shattered after the collapse of the Dee Bridge on May 27, 1847, engineers chose to use wrought iron, which was cheaper and lighter.

As well as being light, the latticework design could be assembled quickly, and its flexibility compensated for any give in the ground. The ironwork was prefabricated in Derby by Eastwood, Swingler & Co and assembled on site by Benton and Woodiwiss. The viaduct has sixteen spans, carried on fifteen evenly spaced latticework piers with brick support structures used to support the ends of the spans. There are a further three spans which cross the Erewash Valley railway line, although, technically, they are a different structure from the viaduct.

Inevitably, the construction work involved at least one fatality, as a local newspaper rather luridly reported: “The poor fellow was adjusting a loose plank when he lost his balance and fell from a height of 40 feet head first upon the permanent way of the Midland Railway beneath. He was said to have been alive when taken up, but as we listened to the description of the eye-witnesses and glanced, with a shudder, from the dizzy height to the pool of blood, which told its own dread tale too well, we felt that the chances of recovery from such a shock must be indeed small.”

On January 31, 1916, the viaduct came under attack from a Zeppelin L-20 which, lost in the fog on its way to drop bombs on the major northern industrial cities, was lured by the lights of Bennerley ironworks. At 8.20pm it dropped seven high explosive bombs over Ilkeston, one of which fell just to the south of the viaduct. Shrapnel marks can still be seen on the viaduct and the Midland railway line was damaged, along with a signal box and a cow shed. Two men and a cow were killed by the Ilkeston raids.

As a result of the Beeching report in 1963 which highlighted the decline in use of the line, the last passenger train crossed the viaduct in 1964, followed by the last goods train in 1968. After 90 years of service, the viaduct was abandoned but in 2022, thanks to £1.7m of funding from the Railway Heritage Trust, Railway Paths Ltd, and local donations, the viaduct was restored with a new pedestrian and cycle-friendly deck across the corrugated viaduct surface.

The Case Of The Happy Warrior

A review of The Case of the Happy Warrior by Christopher Bush – 240313

In delirio veritas. The fear of someone with a secret to hide is that the truth will emerge when their subconscious takes over as happens in the thirty-seventh novel in Christopher Bush’s Ludovic Travers, originally published in 1950 and reissued by Dean Street Press. In her feverish state, Alice Stonhill mutters a phrase repeatedly which, when he untangles the homophone it contains, allows Travers, at the second attempt, to unravel the truth and discover who killed Peter Wesslake. It is also another case where a physical characteristic betrays an identity.

In this story Travers is still in a state of limbo, waiting for his mukker, George Wharton, to retire from the Yard and join him in taking over Bill Ellice’s detective agency. To fill in time he helps at the agency and is present, albeit lurking in an ante-room, when Alice Stonhill calls to ask for help, fearing that someone is trying to kill her nephew’s second wife, Camille. There have been a couple of near misses, a shooting incident and a case of poisoning, but cautious Bill, fearful for his agency’s reputation, is reluctant to do anything. However, that does not stop Travers operating in an unofficial basis.

The story is narrated by Travers and falls into four parts. It is only in the fourth part that Wharton makes an appearance as Peter Wesslake’s body has been discovered and the case is now a murder investigation. As a consequence, the tale lacks a little of the usual cut and thrust between the amateur and professional sleuth and when the two do get together Travers is content to take more of a backseat, although, of course, Wharton naturally misinterprets what really happened and Travers is left to save his bacon.

As we are now firmly in the post-war era, some aspects of travel have become easier and some of the action takes place in Denmark where Peter Wesslake is supposed to have gone to attend a conference. Travers’ suspicions that this might be an elaborate alibi are confirmed by what he finds out there. Nevertheless, the signs that Britain is still recovering from the consequences of war are still there as longer-term guests at the Malfroi Arms still have to surrender their ration books.

A curious features of the book is the two references to Aneurin Bevin’s jibe that the Tories are “lower than vermin”. With relatively few notable exceptions, Golden Age detective writers tend to be conservative at heart, often wistfully looking back to an era of country houses, extravagant parties, and legions of servants, and, indeed, the essential premise of a cosy murder mystery is that out of chaos order will be restored. For the moneyed classes, the arrival of a socialist government and a high level of taxation was a source of concern and Bush, more than any other novelist of the genre I have read, seems particularly disturbed by a government that puts the interests of the workers first. He even misrepresents Bevin’s jibe; it was aimed at the Tories’ opposition to the establishment of the NHS – nothing ever changes – rather than the upper classes in general.

The action hots up at the Malfoi Arms where Alice Stonhill is celebrating her eightieth birthday. Camille is attacked and left for dead, Alice discovers an intruder in her room and, some time later, the body of Peter Wesslake is found in the woods. While there are very few credible suspects, in true Bush style, there is a much more intricate plot where an elaborate plan goes awry. Despite a confession, Travers is not convinced that it adds up and persuades Wharton to make a trip to the countryside to confront the Happy Warrior, a character who will fight for what they believe to the last.

The ending is as poignant as it is dramatic and rounds off what is an entertaining story, crisply told and a complex plot that is amongst Bush’s best.      

Team Of The Week

Grass roots football is poles apart from the pampered world of the elite game. The almost endless rain that we have endured over the last couple of months has meant that many non league teams are faced with a backlog of fixtures, a situation exacerbated by the refusal of the FA and their associated league committees to extend the season. So much for a duty of care to players.

The situation reached its logical conclusion at Beatrice Avenue, the humble abode of East Cowes Victoria on Tuesday night (April 16th). Their opponents were Totton & Eling, who had already played the previous day and had sustained three injuries and arrived at the ground fifteen minutes before kick off with just nine players, including the manager, analyst, and a novice playing his first game of competitive football. At least the analyst’s job was easy – we haven’t enough players! – and there was plenty of room on the bench.

Despite the overwhelming odds, the Millers put in a creditable performance, their defence not breached until the 31st minute. They went on to lose 6-0, a result that could have repercussions in the race for play-off places at the top of the Wessex League Division One. Unsurprisingly, they are playing again tonight, a home game.

Hats off to Totton and Eling, truly the team of the week!

The Dreadful Hollow

A review of The Dreadful Hollow by Nicholas Blake – 240311

Drawing its title from the opening line of Tennyson’s Maud: A Monodrama, the tenth book in Nicholas Blake’s Nigel Strangeways series, originally published in 1953, starts off as a relatively simple case of poison-pen letters, but takes a grimmer and more disturbing turn midway through the book. One of the characters, Stanford Blick, refers to the poem and this gives Strangeways an inkling of what he has become involved in.

For the first time Nicholas Blake’s series sleuth seems to be a detective for hire as he is commissioned by the industrialist, Sir Archibald Blick, to see who is behind a series of anonymous missives that have upset the calm of the Dorset village of Prior’s Umborne, leading to one suicide and one attempted suicide. There are relatively few suspects and using his insight Strangeways quickly identifies the author.

His enquiries, though, do allow him to meet and get acquainted with some of the people around whom the rest of the book will centre. There are Blick’s two sons, the eldest, Stanford, who is eccentric with a touch of the mad scientist about him, and  Charles the hard working but unimaginative son who is a disappointment to his father and runs the factory in the village. Twenty years earlier Charles had been engaged to Celandine Chantmerle, a woman with piercing blue eyes, who suffered from post-traumatic stress after finding her father at the bottom of the eponymous hollow and was paralysed thereafter. Her sister, Rosebay, has fiery red hair and while devoted to her sister is having a fling with Charles. And then there is the best character in the book, the religiously obsessed Daniel Durdle who stalks around the village and seems to hold an unnatural sway over many of its inhabitants.

At Celandine’s birthday lunch, one of the presents she is given is a pair of binoculars which have been modified so that when the focussing screw is turned, two needles appear which were intended to pierce her eyes. Disaster is averted thanks to the timely intervention of her sister, but what intrigues Strangeways is why the screw was so stiff. Sir Archibald then visits Prior’s Umborne and the dreadful hollow claims its next victim. There are many nocturnal comings and goings on the night in question and Strangeways, ably assisted by Inspector Blount of the Yard, has his work cut out establishing a timetable of events and testing alibis.

One thing he establishes is that Blick was responsible for Chantmerle’s financial ruin and, by extension, his suicide. Moreover, Durdle has a closer connection to the Chantmerles than the sisters realise. To clarify matters, Strangeways sets a trap into which the culprit falls and he is able to see the wood from the trees.          

The final chapter is superbly constructed as Blake, the pseudonym of Cecil Day Lewis, interweaves Nigel’s explanation of whodunit and why with the dramatic events that are unfolding in the village. Durdle, in his role of rabble rouser, gathers a lynching party to seek revenge on the author of the anonymous letters, but his plans go awry as he becomes the next victim to fall prey to the murderer. Despite Strangeways and Blount’s best efforts to apprehend the culprit, the dreadful hollow claims another victim. It makes for a thrilling finale.

As I have come to expect with Blake’s books, it is beautifully written, erudite and yet a page turner. There are some finely drawn characters and the book has more than its fair share of unpleasant individuals, Celandine having more than a touch of Miss Haversham about her. The mystery itself takes some time to get going and there are times when the plot seems to go round and round in circles. Fortunately, Strangeways’ knowledge of Tennyson’s Maud is better than mine and he manages to straighten matters out in the end.

A Special Kind Of Mirage

Those imbued with a less romantic spirit, though, sought to provide a rational explanation of the phenomenon of The Flying Dutchman. An early attempt appeared in Frank Stockton’s Round-About Rambles (1870) in which he tells of a captain’s reaction when some of his crew reported a sighting. “This strange appearance”, he explained, “was caused by the reflection of some ship that was sailing on the water below this image, but at such a distance they could not see it. There were certain conditions of the atmosphere…when the sun’s rays could form a perfect picture in the air of objects on the earth…this appearance in the air is called a mirage”.

A mirage is an optical illusion caused by the refraction of light. When light hits a boundary between two layers in the atmosphere which are at different temperatures, it bends and travels through the new layer at a different angle, the degree of change dependent upon the difference in density between the two layers.

Refracted light poses an almost insoluble problem for the human brain. When we see light, our brain assumes that it has travelled in a straight line from the object that has emitted it. Even if the light has refracted along the way, it simply places the object where it would have been had the light travelled in a straight line. Just think of what happens when looking at a fish in a clear stream; it is not where your brain tells you it is.

There are two basic forms of mirage; inferior, where the image appears to be lower than it really is, and superior, where it is higher. A superior mirage can make things appear bigger, closer, distorted so that the object appears stretched or elevated, an effect known as towering, and as if they are suspended or floating in air. It can even make an object below the horizon become visible.

The phenomenon of The Flying Dutchman is thought to be a complex form of superior mirage, a Fata Morgana, which occurs when there is thermal inversion, where cold, dense air near the Earth’s surface is trapped beneath a layer of significantly warmer air. If the thermal inversion is greater than 10 degrees Celsius in 100 meters, the curvature of the light rays within the inversion layer is stronger than the Earth’s curvature, effectively trapping them in an atmospheric duct. The duct will then concentrate the rays rather than allowing them to disperse into space. Mindbogglingly, if our eyes were strong enough, a duct would allow you to see around the whole of the earth and your own back and shoulders turned towards you.

While a thermal inversion does not necessarily create an atmospheric duct, an atmospheric duct cannot occur without a thermal inversion, and a Fata Morgana requires both. A Fata Morgana can be seen anywhere and at any altitude, once the conditions have been met, and it will display any form of distant object such as boats, islands, and the coastline. Often it will change rapidly, showing inverted and upright images that are stacked on top of each other or alternating between compressed and elongated images. However, to see one the observer must be within or below an atmospheric duct.

And the Arthurian connection? Fata Morgana is Italian for Morgan the fairy, a reference to the sorceress Morgan le Fay who in some Arthurian legends is his half-sister. Her first recorded appearance was in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini (1150) and she was said to have used witchcraft to conjure up mirages of fairy castles or false coastlines to lure sailors to heir death, especially in the Strait of Messina. We may no longer imbue the sighting of a Fata Morgana with superstitious dread, but the power of the image still remains.

Power On The Scent

A review of Power on the Scent by Henrietta Clandon – 240307

I seem to be on a random sort of thematic chain at the moment. Having just finished two books that involved a poison despatched by dart I now have two books, of which this is the second, where a wasp, one actual and in this case putative, make an appearance.

Originally published in 1937 Power on the Scent is another novel that John Vahey, better known as Vernon Loder, published under the name of Henrietta Clandon and is one of four novels reissued by Dean Street Press. I found it the weakest of the four for a number of reasons. It reads more as a social comedy than a murder mystery, nothing wrong in that per se, but the detection or gathering of information and clues takes a form of leisurely chats in social settings which, given their lack of variety, get a little tedious.

It also suffers from a lack of focus as there are too many sleuths involved. We have husband and wife detective writing duo who have an interest in criminology, Vincent and Penny Mercer, and Penny acts as narrator, penning her story under the name of Henrietta Clandon, a neat trick. The side of the well-meaning amateurs is completed by Mr Power, a lawyer-cum-detective. For the police we have Inspector Voce and Sergeant Bohm from the Yard and the local police led by Captain Hollick, who resents the presence of amateurs on his patch, and Inspector Hollick, both anxious to avoid local scandals.

Added to that the murder mystery itself is not very compelling. A retired stockbroker, Montague Mercer, is found dead in his own garden, wearing a rose which bears traces of cocaine. Mercer has an allergy to the drug and did he sniff the rose and with it the cocaine, causing his death? And who laced the rose and why? The irony is that Mercer was a famed amateur horticulturist who had developed the particular type of rose, the Rennavy Rose, which he named after his erstwhile secretary and the village’s femme fatale, Mrs Davy-Renny. Mrs Davy-Renny sent the rose to Mercer via her made which had come from a bouquet bought for her by the local policeman, Inspector Kay.

As Power discovers during the course of the investigation, the Rennavy Rose has a particular characteristic which meant anyone who knew about it, especially its creator, would not be disposed to sniff it. The post mortem shows that Mercer had abdominal injuries, which, after the ingestion of a heavy breakfast, were probably serious enough to kill him. This suggests that his death was murder but by whom and why?

Mrs Davy-Renny is the honey pot around whom the local eligible men buzz. Was the murder incited by a lover’s jealousy? And what of the mysterious behaviour of Stibbins, the main beneficiary of his uncle’s will and client of Mr Power, seen snooping around the gardens with a camera?        

The sleuths discover that Mercer was involved in a  dodgy share promoting scheme with Tressey-Withers and that several of the key suspects had had their fingers burned and the expected beneficiaries of Mercer’s estate, Stibbins and Mrs Davy-Renny, are facing a significant reduction in their anticipated legacies. Mr Power, as all lawyers should, he sees justice is done.

As to Mercer’s murder, the death of Jolson, a retired bank manager and a shrinking violet, who owns a boisterous Great Dane, seems to confirm Voce’s suspicions. We are treated to an amusing analysis of the shape of bruising caused by a Great Dane’s and a human’s head, which together with a recollection of how a school bully was dealt with, seems to seal both the culprit and the method. Using a hat in the summer as an ornament for the hand rather than sitting on the head also becomes highly relevant.

The local police’s unwillingness to create waves means that the case fizzles out with a whimper. Clandon’s style is witty, not least in its title, and there some acerbic asides, particularly about the writing industry and some in jokes which with the passage of time lose their bite, but, sadly, it was not a book with which I felt particularly engaged.     

Book Binding Of The Week

I cannot say that I have given anthropodermic bibliopegy much thought but the practice of using human skin as a form of binding for a book has recently been in the headlines when Harvard University announced that it was removing the binding from the copy of, appropriately enough, Des Destinées de l’Ame they have held since the 1930s.

The book, written by Arsène Houssaye in the 1880s, a meditation on having a soul and life after death, came into the possession of a physician, Ludovic Bouland, who then bound the book with skin taken from a dead female patient. We know what her destiny was.

The ethical dilemma, of course, is that the skin was removed without her consent. That said, whether we are buried or cremated our skin disintegrates and with the passage of time, Harvard’s point seems a little moot.

As we are encouraged to give hope through our death by agreeing to donate organs, perhaps this form of consent should be extended to our skin. I rather fancy the idea of a smart row of leather bound books being bound with my gnarled and wrinkly skin. Now, where is my will?  

Death In The Clouds

A review of Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie – 240305

The twelfth novel in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, originally published in 1935 and going under the title of Death in the Air in America, is a variation of a murder in a railway carriage with an impossible and closed crime thrown in for good measure. Her eccentric and megalomanic sleuth is on board a flight from Paris to Croydon, the reverse journey that formed the basis of Wills Crofts’ 12.30 from Croydon a year earlier, and to the consternation of the passengers, Madame Giselle, is killed. Poirot finds a thorn which has been tipped with poison and the suggestion is that the murderer a blowpipe to strike her. The other inescapable conclusion is that the murderer must have been one of the other eleven passengers or the two stewards.

Amusingly, the blowpipe is found hidden under the seat occupied by Poirot and it takes the prompt intervention of the usually inept Inspector Japp to allow the xenophobic instincts of the jury at the inquest to win the day and point their finger at the suspicious and exotic foreigner. Just like a railway carriage, the passengers on the plane are a motley collection including Countess Horbury, a showgirl made good but who is estranged from her husband, her maid, the Hon. Venetia Kerr, a horsey English aristocrat who is making a play for the Countess’ hubby, Armand and Jean Dupont, two archaeologists presaging the author’s growing interest in the subject, a mystery writer, Daniel Clancy, a businessman under pressure, James Ryder, a dentist, Norman Gale, and Jane Grey, a hairdresser who had a win on the Irish lottery and treated herself to a holiday in France.

Much of the story is seen from the perspective of Jane Grey whom Poirot rather takes under his wing and seeing which way the wind is blowing facilitates a position for her initially as his secretary and then as a member of the Dupont’s next archaeological expedition where her incipient friendship with Jean will presumably flourish. Poirot, anxious to clear his name, sets down to the task of sifting through the passengers and the detailed list of all their luggage which he insisted was drawn up in order to find the culprit and an explanation of why the murder was committed.

Madame Giselle, of course, is a moneylender and the holder of secrets that some of her clients would not like to be made public. Although not above a little blackmail, Giselle does wipe the slate clean by making arrangements with her maid to burn all her papers in the event of anything happening to her for fear that they would fall into the wrong hands. The literal-minded secretary burns the papers but not Giselle’s little black book which contains some clues upon which Poirot’s little grey cells can work.

As is often the case with Christie’s novels, it is almost impossible for the reader to be sure who the culprit is, often their identity pulled out of the sleuth’s chapeau at the last minute and whose guilt and motive is only lightly foreshadowed, if that, until the big reveal. The identity of the culprit here is a bit of a surprise and I did have a little trouble accepting both the motivation behind and the method of the crime. It seemed a rather convoluted way to get one’s hands on a pot of money and required getting rid of two people without rousing too much in the way of suspicion. The method needed a quick change that would have challenged even an accomplished actor and was highly risky. I have never been lucky enough to find the toilet vacant twice in a couple of minutes on a flight. Different times, of course.

Fanciful as much of it is and frustrating for the would-be armchair sleuth, nonetheless it is an entertaining enough read, not a classic but not one of Christie’s worst. With his eye for detail and an overabundance of little grey cells, Poirot is a match for even the most cunning of criminals. Nevertheless, it is always useful to travel with a wasp in a matchbox. I wonder how you get that past airport security.