Extract

‘Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent … If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on … it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.’ — Sherlock Holmes

Is there anything more alluring than an unsolved mystery? Than a knotty little problem we’re yet to unravel? A strange little secret that has never been told?

Well … sure. Sex, for one thing. Drugs for another. Also: food, wine and books; sport, travel, music; good action movies and and a brisk ocean swim. (Recently, I’ve also found myself really, really enjoying old re-runs of Home and Away, but statistics would suggest that that one’s just me.)

But apart from those ten or eleven things, and maybe four- or five-hundred others, I think it’s fair to say that there’s absolutely nothing more alluring than an unsolved mystery; nothing better calculated to get our heart pumping, and our nervous system ever so slightly on edge. Be it buried treasured, a grisly murder, a missing person, or a pesky – ghost, we all like to sit back and wonder ‘what if ’ – or possibly ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘where’ or ‘when’. So why not just sit back with this book? After all, it’s got everything that your average armchair detective might need, from severed heads and splatters of blood, to spies, sharks, sex, ships, sportand samurai. If you want thrills, then you’ll find them right here. And if you want chills, I believe that we have them too.

What you won’t find, perhaps, is excessive detail … or extensive footnotes … or exhaustives nit picking. Rigorous historical scholarship is all very well, but should it be allowed to get in the way of a really good story?

Well … probably. But what about fifty good stories? I say, no, sir! Not on my watch. It’s time to let scuttlebutt reign. So light up your pipe, grab a deerstalker hat, and lock the door because you probably look silly. Sherlock himself would be stumped by these mysteries. And that’s only partly because he doesn’t exist