The Martian Sherlock Holmes

 

The Martian crown jewels have been loaned to Earth for study and display at the British National Museum. It's time to bring them home. They are loaded onto a robot spaceship. But when that ship arrives at the spacedock on Mars' moon Phobos, the jewels are gone!

The technician who loaded the jewels aboard the ship while it was in Earth orbit had been searched after completing that job. So the jewels were DEFINITELY on the ship. If it had been found and boarded while in flight, that would have changed its course enough to detect. So NO ONE messed with the ship or the jewels in flight. The police were present when the cargo was unloaded on Phobos. Everyone, including the cops, were searched. The spacedock facilities were searched. An embargo is placed on Phobos, so there's no chance to get the jewels off the moon if they did somehow arrive. But where did they go? How could they have possibly disappeared from a robot spaceship while that ship was in flight? It's the ultimate locked room mystery. 

This is the premise of "The Martian Crown Jewels," by Poul Anderson, first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1958 and reprinted a year later in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The story is Sherlock Holmes pastishe and it is a load of fun.

When Inspector Gregg can't find the jewels, he travels down to Mars to consult with Syaloch, the famous consulting detective. I love how effectively Anderson takes the character of Holmes and translates him into an alien from a non-human culture:

The Inspector flet a cautious way into the high, narrow room. The glowsnakes which illuminated it after dark were coiled asleep on the stone floor, in a litter of papers, specimans, and weapons; rusty sand covered the sills of the Gothic windows. Syaloch was not neat except in his own person. In one corner was a small chemical laboratory. The rest of the walls were taken up with shelves, the criminological literature of three planets--Martian books, Terrestrial micros, Venusian talking stones. At one place, patriotically, the glphs representing the reigning Nest-mother had been punched out with bullets. An Earthling could not sit on the trapeze-like native furniture, but Syaloch had courteously provided chairs and tubs as well; his clientele was also triplanetary...

...Syaloch was a seven-foot biped of vaguely storklike appea\rance. But the lean, crested, red-beaked head at the end of the sinuous neck was too large, the yellow eyes too deep; the white feathers were more like a penguin's than a flying bird's, save at the blue-plumed tail; instead of wings there were skinny red arms edning in four-fingered hands...

Syaloch takes the case, of course, accompanying Gregg when the policeman returns to Phobos. What follows could very well have been a mystery from the Holmes Canon in how Syaloch acquires information, asks a few questions which don't at first seem to be related to the case, then deduces the solution to the case. The solution involves understanding orbital mechanics, so most of us poor non-engineer readers probably won't get it. But it's a fair solution to a great mystery. And Syaloch is a great creation, perfectly straddling the line between being alien and being Holmes-like.

And the story has one of the best final paragraphs ever written as Syaloch takes on another case:

Somebody, somewhere in Sabaeus, was farnikng the krats, and there was an alarming zaksnautry among the hyukus. It sounded to Syaloch like an interesting case.

The story has been reprinted a number of times in anthologies. If you have an account with the Internet Archive, you can read it HERE.