Clason, Clyde B - The Man From Tibet (1938)

The Man from Tibet (1938) contains a locked room mystery. While the basic idea is simple, the impossible crime here shows imagination in its storytelling trappings. It is not related to the Zangwill-Chesterton tradition of rearrangements in space and time. Instead, it recalls the impossible crimes in S. S. Van Dine and Edgar Wallace, in its simpler technical approach, and the colorful storytelling woven around it.

The basic construction of the book comes from Van Dine's The Scarab Murder Case (1929). That novel dealt with murder in a private museum of Egyptology, a museum located in a private mansion, and whose suspects were mainly specialists in Egyptian art. This book uses a similar approach, with Tibet substituted for Egypt.

There are several limitations of characterization in the book. The lama is never convincing, with his child like personality. The rich son is constantly condemned for a lack of masculinity. This was a popular theme in the Depression, but measuring a man against standards of machismo seems inaccurate and cruel. Many of the other characters seem like stick figures. The non-impossible crime elements of the mystery are also fairly simple and uninventive.

All this said, The Man from Tibet is surprisingly entertaining. Clason has researched his subject in remarkable depth, and builds an appealingly intellectual novel out of it. The opening chapter of The Man from Tibet is pretty good. It is mainly a flashback to an adventure in Tibet, not a mystery story. Clason was interested in other Asian cultures, too. The sequence in the Japanese restaurant is delightful.

Mike Grost