HIgh Tide

High Tide was a novel published by P.M. Hubbard in 1971. Almost a decade later, the story was adapted for the Armchair Thriller television series in four episodes, and I recently watched, the complete mystery on Talking Pictures. Benefiting from a strong cast, it's stood the test of time pretty well, even if by modern standards the background music seems very intrusive.

Hubbard is a writer who has been recommended to me by several good judges, but I've not read much of his work. In my shallow youth, I was deterred partly because he has a very low-key style, and wasn't especially interested in complex plotting, and partly because his main interests, such as small boat sailing, didn't coincide with mine. But I've come to appreciate his qualities more, and I intend to read him more extensively.

High Tide is an atmospheric thriller rather than a complex puzzle, but it does feature a neat variation on the "dying message clue". Curtis (Ian McShane, at his best in this role) has just been released from prison after serving a sentence for manslaughter. He was responsible for the death of a man called Maxwell, whose mysterious final words prompt a rather menacing chap (played by Terence Rigby) to pursue him. Curtis figures out the meaning of the message,and befriends a pretty but mysterious young woman as he tries to find out what Maxwell was up to.

His quest - undertaken by boat, in characteristic Hubbard fashion - leads him to a house occupied by an ill-matched couple, played by John Bird and the glamorous Kika Markham, who seem to have the clue to the mystery. The sequence in which Rigby's character gets his come-uppance is rather memorable. I enjoyed seeing this, and it's helped to strengthen my interest in Hubbard..

The Moai Island Puzzle

The Moai Island Puzzle by Alice Arisugawa is a Japanese mystery in the classic Golden Age vein which has recently been translated by Ho-Ling Wong into English and published by John Pugmire's excellent imprint Locked Room International. This edition benefits from an extremely interesting foreword by a leading exponent of the classic Japanese mystery, Soji Shimada.

The story is told by Alice Arisugawa, who is a university student and detective fiction enthusiast. He (yep, Alice is male) is a member of a small Mystery Club - and Ellery Queen and The Nine Tailors are referenced on the second page of the prologue, making it clear that the reader who is a Golden Age fan is in for a treat - a homage to the twisty murder mystery of days gone by.

The set-up is itself classical. Alice and his friend Maria make up a small party who travel to a tiny island off the coast of Japan in search of hidden treasure. The island is fictitious, but as the book's title makes clear, it is populated by a large number of moai, whose construction was influenced by the moai of Easter Island. And soon the moai themselves become clues to the puzzle.

Death has occurred on the island in the recent past, and soon crime returns. We are presented with a dizzying confection of cipher, locked room puzzle, and dying message clues as Alice and Maria try to work out what is going on. It's a well-constructed story with a satisfying pay-off, and there's even a mini-lecture on Dying Message Clues (in the tradition of Dr Fell's Locked Room Lecture). Great fun.

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