The Tiger Shoot
In a country full of tigers, a bullet looks like a story.
The scene
The Sariska hunting lodge of the Maharaj-Kumar of Achrol, eastern Rajasthan, November 1962. A weekend shoot, three thousand miles from a war with China that everyone at the lodge is trying not to think about.
The victim
Mr. James Whitmore, 56, the last European tea planter in the Doon valley, found at the foot of the family hill-shrine just before dawn, a clean shot through the heart. His own rifle is unfired and still on his shoulder. No tiger had been sighted that day.
The suspects
- Ramnarayan Goenka (Construction Contractor) — Has a road contract riding on land that belonged, until quite recently, to James Whitmore’s tea estate.
- Maharaj-Kumar Arjun Singh (Host) — Invited every guest at this shoot personally, including a European tea planter he has not spoken warmly to in years.
- Mrs. Eleanor Hughes (English Guest) — Knew James Whitmore in the Doon valley long before either of them ever came to Rajasthan for a weekend of shooting.
- Hari Singh (Gun-keeper) — Cleans and loads every rifle at this lodge, including the one found unfired on a dead man’s shoulder.
- Banwari Lal (Sub-postmaster) — Handles every telegram in and out of this district, and has read more of James Whitmore’s private correspondence than James Whitmore ever knew.
Every one of them is hiding something, and their alibis form a single shared timeline. Somewhere in it, one statement cannot possibly be true. Find the contradiction and you have found the killer.
How to read this case
A hunting weekend gives everyone at the lodge a plausible reason to be carrying a gun, and a plausible excuse for gunfire nobody thinks twice about, right up until the one shot that actually killed someone. James Whitmore’s own rifle never fired, so start by working out whose did, and why nobody at a shoot full of hunters and gun-keepers heard the one shot that mattered among all the others.
Why play it
The Tiger Shoot is a country-estate mystery with a colonial hangover: an English planter nobody quite trusts, a border war looming that everyone at the lodge would rather not discuss over dinner, and a weekend full of people who all know exactly how to handle a rifle. It sits comfortably in the classic shooting-party murder tradition, where the weapon of choice is everywhere and the real crime is figuring out which gun actually spoke. Recommended for fans of a mystery with old money, older politics, and a body found where a tiger should have been.
That is as far as any file goes without spoiling it. The rest, the confession, the weapon, the one lie that breaks the whole timeline, is yours to work out in the game.
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