Ruskin Bond presents a real-life crime story in 'In a crystal ball: A Mussoorie Mystery'

Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had a lifelong interest in unusual criminal cases, and his friends often passed on to him interesting accounts of crime and detection from around the world. It was in this way that he learnt of the strange death of Miss Frances Garnett-Orme in the Indian hill station of Mussoorie. Here was a murder combining the weird borders of the occult with a crime mystery as inexplicable as any devised by Doyle himself.

In April 1912 (shortly before the Titanic went down), Conan Doyle received a letter from his Sussex neighbour Rudyard Kipling:

Dear Doyle,
There has been a murder in India. A murder by suggestion at Mussoorie, which is one of the most curious things in its line on record. Everything that is improbable and on the face of it impossible is in this case.

Kipling had received details of the case from a friend working in the Allahabad Pioneer, a paper for which, as a young man, he had worked in the 1880s. Urging Doyle to pursue the story, Kipling concluded: “The psychology alone is beyond description.”

Doyle was indeed interested to hear more, for India had furnished him with material in the past, as in The Sign of Four and several short stories. Kipling,...

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