The Woman in Green

Dressed to Kill

Terror by Night

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon

The Horla

Non Stop New York

Appointment with Death

Harry Lime: Too Many Crooks

The Saint Closes the Case

The Saint Plays with Fire

The Saint Overboard

Destroyer

The weed of Evil bears bitter fruit.

The Green Lama

The Green Lama: World's greatest Buddhist superhero!

Death From The Deep

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon

Mr Wong, Detective

Sequal to Mr Wong, Bank Manager, which didn't do too well at the box office

Canal Boat Mystery

And now, a trip to the Twilight Zone. A 43 foot long, four-foot wide canal boat with a top speed of four knots has gone missing and the police are utterly baffled as to its whereabouts.

Given that such a vessel is, as the name implies, confined to the canals and that your average canal boat is about as stealthy as a hod of bricks in the middle of the road, one must either conclude that the art of detection is not what was or that the Shropshire Union Canal has just made the Bermuda Triangle look like a goldfish bowl.

Tiny Detail

A yacht has been found off the coast of Australia with the sails set, the engine and computers running, life jackets and emergency beacons intact, and the table set for a meal. There were no signs of anything wrong, save for a torn foresail.

All very Marie Celeste, isn't it? Even the torn sail isn't that odd, since it probably happened when the craft fell off the wind and the jib was free to flap about until it tore itself to pieces. What could possibly have happened to have plucked three people into thin air?

At least, it's mysterious if you only rely on the BBC's print version of the story, which leaves out a tiny little detail found as a mere aside in the video report: the liferafts were missing. Suddenly it goes from mysterious to prosaic as the question changes from "How did they disappear?" to "Why did they jump into the liferafts from a perfectly sound boat?"

My money is on strong current, close reef and panic, which is how a friend of mine ended up in the water off the coast of the island of Hawaii clinging to a liferaft case dropped courtesy of the US Coast Guard that lacked any sort of instructions on how to open the blasted thing* while he watched his supposedly doomed catamaran crest a wave against a lava cliff, turn 180 degrees, slip back down without a scratch and head off to New Zealand.

*His remark at the time was "What am I supposed to do? Take it home and fry it in butter?!?"