The Secret of the Tibetan Treasure

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. 

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Is this... the first non-Japanese mystery novel review of this year? I suppose it is...

Adam Merriweather, wealthy, well-known collector of Tibetan art and artifacts and brother of the equally well-known Tibetan academic Dr. Jed Merriweather, receives a visit by Jack Reffner, who offers him a religious manuscript and an adventurous tale of how he snuck into Tibet, a country normally closed to visitors, how he met a monk on the way back but accidentally swapped bags before being found out and deported out of Tibet. With no way to return the manuscript and out of money, Reffner hopes to sell off this manuscript to Merriweather. While the seller doesn't get nearly as much as he hoped from Merriweather, he still walks away with a cheque, but that's not of much help when he's later found murdered in his hotel room, strangled. A piece of what appears to be a Tibetan scarf puts Lieutenant Mack of the Chicago Police and his friend Theocritus Lucius Westborough, historian and amateur sleuth, points them in the direction of Merriweather. Merriweather admits Reffner visited him, offering the manuscript and we also learn that the lama Tsongpun Bonbo is in Chicago, as some years ago, his path crossed that of Reffner in Tibet: Reffner stole the centuries-old manuscript by Padma Sambhava, and Tsongpun Bonbo wants the manuscript returned to him. Merriweather seems to have some understanding for Tsongpun Bonbo's plight, but he still seems reluctant to immediately return the manuscript, having his assistant Chang, a Tibetan man, work on a quick translation in secret. Lieutenant Mack and Westborough figure Reffner's death has to do with this business as he was killed with a Tibetan scarf, so they concoct a plot to install Westborough in the Merriweather house for the time being, by faking an injury. The Merriweather house has its own museum wing named the Tibetan Room, which is filled with statues and other Tibetan art on the ground floor, and can be looked down upon from the gallery one floor above. It is here when later Adam Merriweather is found dead, but as the doors to the Tibetan Room were locked from the inside and the dust on the gallery balustrade above is not disturbed, nobody could've left the Tibetan Room until Merriweather was discovered, meaning he must have died from a natural death, right? Or was it Tibetan black magic that did him in? The answer is to be found in Clyde B. Clason's 1938 novel The Man from Tibet. 

I read the Dutch translation titled De man uit Tibet by the way, translated by H. Terwynne and featuring rather cool original artwork by C. Boost, both as cover and inside.

I had been wanting to read this book for some while, as it is one of the books featured in Arisugawa's gorgeous book An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891-1998. I never really read the text accompanying the entry about The Man from Tibet though, as I didn't want to have much fore-knowledge before reading the book, so I only had a small glance at the illustrations of the locked room situation and that was over 10 years ago, so I have to admit I had completely different expectations of this locked room mystery. In hindsight, I guess the title The Man from Tibet should have informed me this wasn't set in Tibet, but because the exterior design of the Merriweather house shown in An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room somewhat resembled a monastery, and I remembered a floorplan which seemed like a temple art gallery (in fact, it was the Tibetan Room), I always imagined the story was about a locked room murder inside a Tibetan monastery. And the cover art of the Dutch version didn't help much to correct my misunderstanding! With the book starting with an account of a visit to Tibet, even a few pages in, I was still fully expecting someone to talk about an impossible murder happening in Tibet long ago and how it would be solved many years later through discussions.

And speaking of the book starting with a travel account: those are probably the most engaging parts of this book! There are two different accounts of two people getting into Tibet, at the time a closed country, and both stories-within-the-story read as adventurous tales. Of course, this is a book from the thirties, so also cue somewhat dated views on "the Chinese/Tibetans/Japanese/Asians" in general found within these accounts, and even in the real-time parts, though on the other hand, there's also interesting parts on Tibetan religions, both on Buddhist and pre-Buddhist variants, and while a quick look on Wikipedia seems to tell me that historical academic understanding of pre-Buddhist Tibetan religions have changed now, the things said in this book seem to be commonly acccepted when this book was written, so that's nice. So while you have quite a few characters who basically confirm what you might expect an average person may think about Asians back then, there's also captivating (if somewhat dated by academic progress) parts on Tibetan religions in between, and they really set the stage for the murder on Adam Merriweather, set inside the Tibetan room full of statues and other religious artifacts collected by the victim. 

The book is surprisingly "spread-out" in terms of "active" mystery: the murder on Reffner happens rather early in the book, and then you have a very long investigative section where Mack and Westborough try to figure out who would have a motive to kill Reffner, but the Adam Merriweather/quasi-impossible murder doesn't happen until around the 3/4 mark, and obviously, by that time there's little time left to really explore the impossible murder and actually wrap up the mystery. I don't really like the way the Reffner murder is linked to the Merriweather household, as basically the murderer decided to use the most unique item in Chicago (a Tibetan scarf) to kill the victim and accidentally left part of it on the victim, so yeah, while I can accept that the Tibetan scarf is a clue that would only point to a very exclusive club in Chicago in the thirties, it's such a specific clue it feels very artificial. I do like a certain clue regarding the identity of the murderer left on the scene though, which is pointed out by Westborough. The quasi-impossible murder on Adam Merriweather is.... plausible, workable and fairly-clewed, but also not super surprising. It kinda reminded me of Norman Berrow's work: yes, it is a perfectly acceptable solution to a locked room mystery, and there's an actual trick behind and the author went the way to properly leave clues in the narrative and all that.... but it's also a very straightforward trick, and I think one specific clue was too much: it points too obviously towards the solution, and in fact, once a certain word was dropped I was already expecting the murder to be related to that even before the murder happened! I like the idea of how the murderer set-up the whole impossible murder though, and how it explains a lot of other mysteries that occur throughout the story, but there were a few times where I think Clason just... left clues indicating the murderer in rather obvious places because he didn't know how to else resolve the story, leading to things like the scarf and later, a certain disappearing object that is hidden in a rather risky place, and those are little moments where I think that it doesn't make any sense for the murderer to have done that, and it only makes sense from the POV of the author to leave such clues there even though the murderer wouldn't have done that if they have any notion of self-preservation. That said, I think the impossible murder itself, while not featuring a surprising solution, is reasonably memorable due to its unique setting of the Tibetan Room, and it makes good use of what's found in this place to murder Adam Merriweather. 

So The Man from Tibet wasn't exactly what I had expected it to be based on vague, 10-year old memories, but it was still an entertaining mystery novel. The best part of the book remains its original themes, focusing on Tibet, its religions and the art, and the way the Western characters look at those topics and for example the adventurous accounts of people visiting Tibet. As a mystery, The Man from Tibet is on the whole a competently written and plotted one, and while in some aspects, Clason seems to take the easy way out in regards to clewing and the 'main mystery' happens late and is a bit too telegraphed, I think the book on the whole is an entertaining one and worth checking out.