Albert Jack's Ten-minute Mysteries: The World's Secrets Explained, from the Real Loch Ness Monster to Who Killed Marilyn Monroe

I was looking forward to reading this book. I like this sort of subject matter and the idea to encapsulate a series of 'mysteries' in short essays is, I think, quite good.

Some of the entries are quite good: the one on Marilyn Monroe was comprehensive and contained a lot of interesting information. In the same way, the pieces on the Devil's Triangle and Robert Maxwell seemed to be well informed.

Others are less good, for example, the piece on the Loch Ness monster is dominated by a strange theory that the famous 1930s 'Surgeon's picture' of the monster was actually that of the trunk of a swimming elephant (this topic is the inspiration for the front-cover picture). This theory is put forward despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence (including a personal confession) that the picture was of a small fake 'monster head' stuck on a toy submarine. The author is also confused by the date of the picture; on one page (186) it's given as 1933, on another it's 1934 (page 189). If you do a Google search you'll find that most sites give one or the other. I guess the first date might refer to the date the picture was taken and the second to when it was first published, but the fact that the author gives both points to sloppy research and poor editing. It looks like this book was written in a hurry and errors like this make me doubt the accuracy of all the entries.

More poor research can be found in the section on 'The Men Who Cheated Death'. One of these characters is John Lee aka 'The man they could not hang'. When they tried to hang Lee, the trap-door refused to open and - despite many successful test runs and visits by the carpenter - the door refused to open on the three times that Lee was standing on the trap. The author seems to think that no-one has any idea how this might have happened, despite the fairly well-known theory that the failure was due to the chaplain. The idea is that he stood on a warped board that was then pushed flat by his weight and extended to jam the trap-door - the chaplain was 'in position' during the three execution attempts, but not during the tests.

We could forgive this lack of knowledge, but if the 'Man they could not hang' is an unsolved mystery why on earth is it in this book? On the front cover it says 'The World's Secrets Explained', so where's the explanation. And where's the explanation for the 'Dover Beast' and the 'Chase Vault' and various other oh-so un-explained mysteries this book contains.

I was also irked by the length of some of the pieces: some are lengthy essays while others are very short (1 minute mysteries rather than ten). I think the shortest one was about the Cottingley Fairies which, not including the illustration, barely covered two sides. My impression is that these shorter items are just filler material designed to pad out the contents list.

I'm also quite disappointed by the publishers, Penguin. This is a name I thought I could trust to deliver quality factual material, and Penguin's reputation one of the reasons I bought the book. It seems my trust was misplaced. I won't make the same mistake twice.

Albert Jack's Ten-minute Mysteries: The World's Secrets Explained, from the Real Loch Ness Monster to Who Killed Marilyn Monroe

Albert Jack

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