• Complain

Cutler - The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries

Here you can read online Cutler - The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: London, year: 2016;2015, publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Cutler The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries
  • Book:
    The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    HarperCollins Publishers
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2016;2015
  • City:
    London
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Heres a simple one to get you started: four bodybuilders are huddling together in the street, under a small ladies umbrella, yet after 20 minutes not one of them has got wet. How is this possible?Separated into original brainteasers and timeless conundrums, plus locked-room head-scratchers and unsolvable crimes borrowed from the very best of detective fiction, this cunning collection will give your lateral thinking muscle a proper workout. See if you can crack the problems by tracing the clues tucked away in each mystery, without sneaking a peak at the answers at the back of the book. These puzzles are perfect for the squashed commute and after-dinner whoopla alike. They are guaranteed to entertain and delight, whether youre a wannabe Sherlock Holmes or a budding Jonathan Creek. Side effects may include bafflement, laughter, smugness, and exclamations along the lines of, Its so obvious once you know the answer.Oh, and about those bone-dry bodybuilders - who said it was raining? So obvious!

Cutler: author's other books


Who wrote The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

HARPER

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

FIRST EDITION

Tom Cutler 2015

Illustrations Bart Aalbers

Match diagrams Alexei Penfold

Cover layout design Holly Macdonald HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Tom Cutler asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at

www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780008157210

Ebook Edition November 2015 ISBN: 9780008157203

Version: 2016-02-25

This book is dedicated to Dr John H. Watson,

the one fixed point in a changing age.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of the Four (1890),

by Arthur Conan Doyle

Tom Cutler began his career with numerous false starts, as a teacher, set designer, speechwriter, printer, wine waiter, City drone and radio reporter, before settling down in book and magazine publishing. After building up extensive scar tissue he finally threw caution to the wind and launched himself as a humorous writer upon a reading public that had done nothing to hurt him.

Toms books cover a variety of subjects, including language, sex and music. Among his several international bestsellers are, A Gentlemans Bedside Book and the Amazon number-one blockbuster, 211 Things A Bright Boy Can Do. His work has been translated into more languages than you can shake a stick at. Tom has written for the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Huffington Post and BBC radio, and he has a regular column in The Chap magazine.

He is a practising magician and member of the Magic Circle, as well as a detective story fan and longstanding Sherlock Holmes aficionado. A lifetimes experience as a very devious bugger has helped him in the writing of this book.

Tom lives at the seaside, where he enjoys kicking pebbles.

Contents

If you put your lateral thinking cap on youll realise that the more people I put in my acknowledgments the more books I will sell. This is because everyone I mention will buy at least one copy as a souvenir, and more to give to their friends to make them envious. Maybe The Book of Acknowledgements will be the next big seller.

Anyway, Id like to offer a genuine thank-you to the following people. First, my editor at HarperCollins, Jack Fogg, whose idea this book was, and who first approached me to write it. Second, my always-encouraging agent Laura Morris, for sensible advice, several disgraceful lunches, and at least one wild champagne party that I only dimly remember. Third, my illustrator Bart Aalbers, who has added an exuberant twang to the whole shebang.

Hats off to two old friends, Terry Guyatt, who first told me the story of the man with two girlfriends and gave me some early advice and encouragement, and John Kirby, for checking in regularly.

I thank my pal Chris Tuohy, who alerted me to the joke I used in The annoying computer password mystery, and my new friend David Johnson, for sitting me down in the sunshine at the Yacht Club and listening to my early ideas. Cheers also to another new friend, Patricia Hammond, for sending me the most lovely and unexpected fan letter Ive ever received.

Im indebted to two excellent pub landlords, Richard at The Old Star and Mark at The Royal Sovereign, for providing me with old-fashioned liquid cheer when I was at low tide. I compliment Rob Sr and Rob Jr, Frank and Matt, and Richard, on their hard work, and I especially thank Arthur, for his zest, good humour, craftsmanship and strange unearthly whistling. His Greensleeves is like something out of The Twilight Zone.

Im grateful to the experts in the Magic Circle library, and at West Sussex Libraries, for providing, in the first case, information, and, in the second, refuge when the six people in the previous paragraph were making too much noise.

This book would have been a shadow of itself without the inspiring work of the towering Martin Gardner: mathematician, magician, sceptic, wit, puzzle collector and abundant author. I commend Michael Howell and Peter Ford for their superb 1985 page-turner, The Ghost Disease and Twelve Other Stories of Detective Work in the Medical Field, which filled me in on the Epping Jaundice, the Euston Road poisonings and the mysterious ailment that felled Clare Boothe Luce. I bow down also to Paul Sloane and Des MacHale, whose years of painstaking collecting and publishing of lateral thinking puzzles helped me track down some of the quirkiest, and I propose a resounding three cheers to those anonymous geniuses who came up with them all in the first place.

Finally, I thank Marianne, as usual, for everything.

When people talk of the Golden Age of crime fiction theyre usually referring to the 1920s and 30s, but some authorities believe that we are currently going through another Golden Age. The range, profile and quality of contemporary crime fiction are probably as high as they have ever been.

But one thing the current Golden Age lacks which was very much present in the previous one is a sense of fun.

As embittered middle-aged Inspectors with drink and relationship problems try to identify serial killers, as forensic pathologists sift through decomposing organs, and as dour Scandinavian detectives confront the unalterable bleakness of human existence, crime fiction has lost its traditional link with high spirits. Noir is the new black, and thats just something readers have to take on board.

Im sure, at universities all over the world, doctorates are even now being written about the reasons for this change. Whodunits in which the puzzle was paramount came to a natural end because there were no more puzzles left that hadnt already been done. The country houses, perfectly designed for weekend house parties for guests with dark secrets in their past and offering a wonderful range of domestics to act as witnesses, informants and suspects, did not survive the Second World War. No longer could their owners get the staff, and many were converted into hotels, boys prep schools and secret military training centres.

The great carnage of the war also made the Golden Age tradition of treating death as a kind of parlour game seem a little tasteless. Publications like The Baffle Book, a collection of murder puzzles very popular in the 1930s, appeared to be offensively trivial.

Another development, the abolition of the death penalty in 1965, meant crime novels were left with a lot more loose ends to be unravelled. No longer could the pointing finger of Hercule Poirot at the perpetrator in the library signal the permanent end of a case, with the hangmans noose tying everything up in a neat bow. What had been black and white moved on to a colour-chart of greys.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries»

Look at similar books to The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries»

Discussion, reviews of the book The pilot who wore a dress: and other dastardly lateral thinking mysteries and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.