GREAT MYSTERIES OF HISTORY.

By Kenneth B. Platnick '58. Harrisburg, Pa.:Stackpole Books, 1971. 224 pp. Illustrated.$6.95.

Boxed in between two covers, no fictionalstory criminal escapes detectives: James Bond, Sam Spade and Mike Shayne, Ellery Queen and Perry Mason. Real life is more complicatedly expansive.

A "mystorian," Mr. Platnick treats great mysteries from the real world: great because the mysteries remain unsolved and great because they concern persons celebrated in history or events playing important roles in civilization.

Given first play is the baffling death of Dag Hammarskjold, poet, scholar, and statesman obsessed with the image of himself on Calvary: "naked against the night" and "nailed to the target." Why did the Albertina flying him to Ndola blow up and crash? Fired on? Bomb explosion within? Otherwise sabotaged? Forced down by a killer plane? It is "the perfect crime the airways" with "too many unanswered questions surrounding the mysterious and tragic death. . ."

In the reign of Charles II who killed sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a man of integrity, a sober judge? Before his body, stabbed, beaten to a pulp, neck broken, was found in a Primrose Hill ditch, all sorts of rumor" proliferated: suicide, scandalous marriage, debauchery with a prostitute, bankrupts After the corpse with money was located more rumors: Jesuit intrigues leading to court and crown. The murder remains "a practically insoluble, perfect crime."

What happened to the Honorable Joseph Force Crater, Justice of the Supreme Court State of New York? After dinner in a restaurant he shook hands with a friend hailed a taxi, stepped inside, and waved good-bye. Although $250,000 was spent attempting to trace him, it was the last anyone ever saw of him. No authentic clues, no corpse, nothing.

Victims in the 1880's of Jack the Ripper, the many sliced-up corpses appalled the English public and today can even cause medical students to blench. He wrote sassy letters to the police and eluded every trap Earlier identified as a butcher, a midwife, a well-respected surgeon's son, even the grandson of Queen Victoria, today he has become a legend, "virtually a myth, a fantasy of the past."

The scope of this book is commendably wide. In sifting the evidence in 16 cases of murder, royal intrigue, missing persons, lost continents and peoples, and creatures baffling science, Mr. Platnick treats Queen Elizabeth's rival Amy Robsart, The Grand Duchess Anastasia (the last of the Romanovs), the Man in the Iron Mask who ate and slept with it on, the "missing" Czar Alexander I, the lost Dauphin (Louis XVII), the legendary Atlantis, and the Lock Ness monster called Bobby. Sweden too has its Bobby named Storsjoodjuretuppenbarelserna.

Eight pages of notes and bibliographies suggest sources for further study. Relying heavily on The New York Times and TheLondon Times, the author defines the problems, cites the facts, and attempts to come to grips with real mysteries unresolved for years and even for centuries.