Mr Mulliner has other relatives he doesn't talk about.
Mr Mulliner's stories always feature some distant relation of his, and usually involve the course of true love going haywire before all is sorted out happily. Pure logic demands that he must have other relatives whose lives, while equally colourful, don't make for such straightforward boy-meets-girl stories, and the dictates of probability demand that, with so many relatives, quite a few of them must have gotten entangled in rather famous historical incidents. It follows inevitably that one member or another of the Mulliner clan is in some way responsible for most of the unsolved mysteries in the historical timeline.- The lost Ark of the Covenant? Gaius Flavius Mollinarius, ostensibly a Roman soldier in occupied Jerusalem, is in fact a secret convert to Judaism and a double agent for the Judean People's Front. The group's attempt to get the Ark safely stowed away in Jerusalem's famous Well of Souls goes wildly haywire when, misunderstanding their instructions, Mollinarius has it shipped instead to an obscure chamber of the same name, far off in Tanis, Egypt. Unclear where the Ark has ended up, Mollinarius and his best friend, Joseph of Arimathea, set off on a wild goose chase in search of it, eventually reaching Roman Britain. Mollinarius, liking the climate, decides to stay and start a family. Joseph, after living some years in the Castle of Aarrgh, opts to move back to the Mediterranean and donate his souvenirs (including a rather interesting grail) to a temple near Alexandretta.
- The Shot Heard Round the World? Lieutenant Fitzwilliam Mulliner is woefully ill-suited to army life—in fact, he's an utter pacifist—but he joins the British Army in an attempt to impress his beloved, and is quickly called to serve in the American Colonies. He hopes to get through his first battle, on 19 April 1775, by filling his gun with blanks, but when he tries to test the ruse in his tent early that morning with a trial shot, both sides assume the battle has begun and set to with a vengeance. The mortified Lieutenant Mulliner, not wanting to be blamed for the ensuing Revolutionary War, sneaks back to England as soon as possible, and posterity is left with a mess of contradictory accounts and speculation as to which side fired that first historic shot.
- The Abominable Snowman? On an ordinary study trip near the Reichenbach Falls, geologist Cholmondeley Mulliner meets up with Mr Sigerson, a Norwegian explorer who looks exactly like, but claims not to be, Sherlock Holmes. The two men strike up a friendship, and decide to travel together to the Himalayas. All goes well until Mulliner, making some investigations among the mountains, is astonished to glimpse a giant bipedal ape. The nearsighted geologist doesn't realise it's the tall, ungainly figure of Sigerson, clad for warmth in a thick hooded snowsuit made of fur, on his way back from a visit to the Dalai Lama! By the time Mulliner discovers his mistake, the rumour has already spread around the area, and gotten connected to the Yeti of pre-Buddhist lore. Matters only get worse when locals misinterpret the prints of Sigerson's large, roughly foot-shaped leather snowshoes as the "tracks" of the creature. Since Sigerson wants to preserve his privacy, the two men feel they have no choice but to let the legend of the Abominable Snowman snowball out of control. (As it happens, there is also a giant ape in the mountains, the Migou, but that's a complete coincidence.)
