Sergeant Beef and his biographer Townsend are called by Beef’s nephew to the circus where he works to investigate a Romany fortune teller’s prediction someone will be murdered there. The circus’ jack-of-all-trades, Len Waterman, accuses Townsend of making Beef look bad in his books, saying that other detective story writers don’t report their investigators’ failures: “You can’t tell me that that there Lord Simon Plimsoll don’t ever make a mistake.” Artist Cora Frances wonders if Beef knows her friend, Amer Picon. Beef says Picon was involved in one of his cases. He later says to Townsend that Lord Simon Plimsoll, Mr. Philo Vance, or Dr. Thorndyke couldn’t have guessed the murder victim would show up in the ring despite being ill, and rhetorically asks if Sherlock Holmes prevented the murders that he had to find out about. Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective Lord Peter Wimsey appeared in the first Sergeant Beef novel,
Case for Three Detectives, under the alias “Lord Simon Plimsoll,” and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot as “Amer Picon.” S. S. Van Dine’s detective Philo Vance and R. Austin Freeman’s sleuth Dr. Thorndyke are solidly in the CU. Sherlock Holmes needs no introduction.
This crossover is one of over a thousand covered in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, coming this summer from Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!
