Impossible Crimes – Page 2 – Solving the Mystery of Murder

Detective School Q – Case 1 “Detective School Entrance Exam” & Case 2 “The Tragedy of Kirisaki Island” – Amagi Seimaru

November 25, 2022November 25, 2022l. Stump1 Comment

Kyuu isn’t very good at schoolwork. It isn’t that he’s dumb, or that he struggles to learn in an academic setting. Quite the opposite in fact, he simply doesn’t try! Kyuu is a genius trained by an unnamed famous detective whose chosen career path has nothing to do with the classes at his normal high-school: he wants to become the world’s next Great Detective, following in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. To that end, Kyuu decides to forego life as an everyday high-schooler looking to become an everyday salaryman, and instead enroll in the highly exclusive and wildly competitive Dan Detective School, founded by Japan’s most famous living sleuth Morihiko Dan!

When Kyuu arrives at the Entrance Exam, he discovers that the task of the prospective students is to solve an old real-world murder, based on nothing but two photographs — one taken by the victim and the other the police — and six suspects (played by staff from the school). The victim is a master of Judo who was stabbed in his rental cottage in a snowy January, and six suspects were located, all having motives, no alibis, and were staying at a hotel across the lake from the victim. With the help of the identic memory of his new ally Megumi, Kyuu is able to immediately spot who he believes is the culprit and the two, together with other exam-takers, are then tasked with trailing their pick in Case 1 – “Detective School Entrance Exam” (Chapters 1-3), the beginning of shin-honkaku manga series Detective Academy Q by Amagi Seimaru.

Eagle-eyed readers of the blog might recognize Amagi Seimaru’s name by its frequent mention in the comments sections of my blog posts on reviews of the impossible crime manga (comic books) The Kindaichi Case Files. That franchise is itself split into many sub-series, the first of which is predominantly credited to the writing of Yōzaburō Kanari. However, starting with the second series, the writing credit is given exclusively to Amagi Seimaru, who was originally a co-writer and editor under Kanari. Very many The Kindaichi Case Files fans consider Amagi the superior writer between the two, finding the many series written under him to be on average better and more consistent in quality than the original Kanari run, an opinion shared by TomCat of Beneath the Stains of Time and more hesitantly by Ho-Ling of Ho-Ling no Jikenbo. More popular than the opinion that the Amagi-run Kindaichi Case Files series are better than the Kanari-run ones, though, is the opinion that Amagi Seimaru’s original mystery manga series also focusing on impossible crimes and locked-room mysteries, Detective School Q, is even better than those, and more consistent at that! Well, that sounds promising, giving my spurt of underwhelming Kindaichi Case File reads recently…

This is another case where I anticipate I’ll never be able to get the old-guard involved in reading the series (but what do I know? I’ve successfully converted some readers of Detective Conan, after all…). Admittedly, the premise is very kiddish and the tone follows suit. Lots of unfunny prat-falls and lame jokes typical in shounen (young boy) manga, almost cringe-inducing energy and endless melodrama over trivial things, and the incredibly juvenile concept of a detective-creating academy definitely reek of bad kid fiction.

On that note, though, something I’ve proselytized about a lot on this blog is that in Japan “kid fiction” is usually an indictment on the complexity of language and a few storytelling trends, and very little else. So-called “young boy” fiction tend to involve fantastical and melodramatic stories involving inordinately skilled school-age children, but besides that you can’t count on anything being quite how you expect. These “young boy” stories are capable of telling stories as complex or mature as “adult” stories, and frequently do! The demographic is mostly about accessibility, and is rarely used as an excuse to make something sub-par because it’s “for kids”. Hell, even subject matter is rarely policed as much as it is in the English-speaking world (when “kid stories” from Japan get translated into English, it isn’t uncommon for them to get as high as TV-Mature, or 18+, ratings, for instance).

I bring this up because, yeah, the first arc of Detective School Q, “The Detective School Exam“, would have turned me away from the manga immediately if I didn’t both have assurance the series was good or have foreknowledge of the potential of so-called “kid fiction” from Japan.

Of course, in retrospect, “The Detective School Exam” is important as it establishes a few elements that will become the core of this series. Firstly, it introduces us to the central group of detectives, who each specialize in different areas that make up for the weaknesses of their classmates. Kintarō “Kinta” Tōyama has no common sense and isn’t very intelligent, but he has superb 20/10 vision and preternatural intuitive skills. Kyuu has neither discipline nor book smarts, but his deductive reasoning and creativity recalls history’s best detectives, and usually allow for him to be the one to piece everything together in the end. In fact, the specialty of Megumi Minami is central to the way Detective School Q takes advantage of its medium. Her borderline supernaturally acute “photographic” (identic) memory is essentially a giant signpost telegraphing to the audience that visual clues, clues not called attention to by the text but instead planted in the drawings of the comic book, will be part of the series. This is an aspect of Detective Conan or The Kindaichi Case Files that equally well takes advantage of its visual medium, but Megumi’s inclusion also permits for visual clues that don’t need to be addressed immediately, as it’ll be possible for other characters to “revisit” scenes later through her memory. It allows for visual clues that are more subtle and specific, and yet still fairplay while also not as bluntly telegraphed.

Outside of this, however? The core murder mystery is set-up in less than five pages, explored very little past that, quickly resolved, and explained in a few pages in the next chapter. Don’t get me wrong, the Ellery Queenian chain of detective is impressive, being a surprisingly dense and smart piece of ratiocination based on a single clue (or absence-of-clue, another trope of Queen’s) for a murder given less than five full pages of focus, and it perfectly sets up the series’ approach to visual clues. But then it being resolved so quickly and compactly also means you spend quite a bite of time in the “trailing the suspect” portion of the story, a semi-Holmsian tale in which the “suspect” constantly tries to elude the protagonists through a variety of tricks, along with other traps laid by the exam coordinators from Dan Detective School. It isn’t incredibly interesting, and a fairly unflattering introduction to the franchise for people who might be worried there’s a little too much anime in their mystery with its many parallels to “Exam Chapters” in other shounen series.

…Which, of course, is the reason why I decided to review these two arcs in one blog post. The running trend has been that the manga series I review start off incredibly underwhelming and take comically long amounts of time before finally picking up and becoming the great pieces of mystery fiction as which they are now known. To start this series off with an underwhelming review of a three-chapter introductory case would not be doing Detective School Q any justice as, like I’d already mentioned, the average quality and consistency in this series is quite high. So, what of Case 2 – “The Tragedy of Kirisaki Island” (4-13)?

“The Tragedy of Kirisaki Island” shifts gears as Kyuu, Kinta, and Megumi clear the first half of the exam. The final part of the entrance test involves journeying to an infamous island well-known for a gruesome series of impossible killings that occurred there many years in the past, committed by a man claiming to be a second-coming of Jack the Ripper himself. The examinees are instructed to solve these historical crimes, but before the test can even begin a member of their examination group is found murdered, inside of a room locked-and-sealed from within… and, just like the original Jack the Ripper killings, he’d been cut in half. And when more murders begin to crop up, each one involving a corpse cut into pieces, the remaining examinees are on the hunt for a vicious killer before they wind up on the chopping block next!

This is the series’ first proper murder mystery, and unlike both Detective Conan and The Kindaichi Case Files, Detective School Q‘s opener is great. Not only is it great, I’m actually shocked to find that I consider it one of the best mysteries I’ve ever read, and I’m even more shocked to discover that many people don’t even consider this a notable high-point in the series! If “one of the best mysteries I’ve read” is a medium-point in the quality of this franchise, that alone is a testament to Detective School Q‘s later accomplishments…

There’s one particular locked-room trick in this story which is a cussedly original take on an old-hat. As corny as it is, the novelty and elegance of the solution cannot be denied. That being said, the locked-room trick is good and original, but it isn’t an all-timer classic of raw ingenuity, and the impossible crimes are not what make this story such a masterful piece of mystery fiction.

Given the context of the story, there’s an obvious conclusion many readers will draw that is immediately rendered impossible by the fact the murders are dismemberments. This ties into a fantastic “outer-“mystery surrounding the framework of the locked-room murders, boasting one of the cleverest misdirections and best hints of the genre, turning on something that is an inversion of the unique trick of Gur Gbxlb Mbqvnp Zheqref (spoilers, do not click unless you’re sure you’ve read both stories). Utterly fantastic first mystery for Detective School Q, and it sets a wonderful pace for the remainder of the series.

A few extra notes for the curious before I wrap this post up with the ranking of all two cases I’ve read. I recommend not watching the anime adaptation of this one. While I haven’t seen it myself, I know it cuts out a few noteworthy cases (including the just-reviewed “Tragedy of Kirisaki Island”), adds some weak filler cases, and only goes until about halfway into the series. Given that Detective School Q has an overarching plot, that means you’ll miss out by watching the anime, so I suggest keeping trying to find it in you to read the original manga version of this series.

Also, I won’t be mentioning these in the reviews themselves but leaving little notes at the end; these two stories span Volumes 1 and 2! So be sure to pick them up!

I’m pleased as punch to read a detective manga that immediately starts out good and doesn’t have to go through eight books of mediocre mysteries to get to the great stories. This, I suppose, is the benefit of reading a story written by someone who already has experience writing mystery manga. Amagi Seimaru has written many mystery series besides just Detective School Q and The Kindaichi Case Files. Most interesting to me is Sherlock Bones, a series of inverted mysteries featuring a young man who gets the help of a Sherlock Holmes trapped in the body of a dog! I may very well review that series as well!

I don’t believe this ranking is exactly necessary, but it’s a formality I’d hate to break…

The Tragedy of Kirisaki Island (Chapters 4-13)
Detective School Entrance Exam (Chapters 1-3)

The Kindaichi Case Files Quadruple Mini-Review – Series 1 “File”, Cases 4, 6, 7 and 8 “Smoke and Mirrors”, “The Legend of Lake Hiren”, “The Santa Slayings” and “No Noose is Good Noose” by Yōzaburō Kanari

November 21, 2022November 21, 2022l. Stump13 Comments

(Note: Although this is the third of this review series, I only encourage you to read the first post in the series in order to understand the premise of the series and the intent of the review series)

While on my hiatus, I’ve been catching up on my back-log of manga series I’ve started to neglect such as The Kindaichi Case Files and Detective Conan. Embarrassingly, my reviews for each are significantly behind my reading. I’m as late as book twenty-five of Detective Conan, and I’m six cases past where I last reviewed The Kindaichi Case Files. Initially, I had actually wrote four separate reviews for these four separate stories we’re reviewing today, but I realized at the end I have very similar opinions of these four stories. I knew that four back-to-back reviews saying essentially the same things would make for awful reading, and spreading it out would mean taking longer before I get to review genuinely good cases in this franchise — which is less fun for you and me. Therefore, I decided to blitz through my thoughts on these stories in a mini-review lightning round!

“Smoke and Mirrors”

Kindaichi is conscripted by the Fudou High School occult club to investigate the “Seven Mysteries of the School”. Practically every school in Japan has their own “seven mysteries” — seven different types of supernatural phenomena that many students claim to have witnessed with their own eyes — so Kindaichi is naturally skeptical of tales of fountain water turning into blood or twelve-step staircases suddenly manifesting an evil thirteenth step. However, he nonetheless agrees to investigate for an important reason: at Fudou High School, only six of the mysteries are known, and a letter has recently been discovered claiming that whoever discovers the seventh will be killed!

Naturally, once Kindaichi receives a phone call from the president of the occult club inviting him to an abandoned school-building so she may reveal the secret of the seventh mystery, a murder is committed with her as the victim! Through the window, he sees the club president hanging in a parallel room in an attached school building — a supposedly sealed school building — but by the time he gets to her, the room has been locked from the inside and her body vanished from within!

This story’s impossible crime isn’t even remotely difficult to figure out, and for that I blame the atrocious English title for this case, as well as the uninspired central trick. What makes this case work decently well is the identity of the killer, which is fairly surprising as it’s one of the few instances in which Kindaichi divests itself of the typical “avenger from the past” motif that it relies on so heavily. The killer’s motive in this case actually ties into the architectural history of the school buildings and the fact it used to be a hospital, and while I think this element of the plot is a bit of an extreme departure from the “supernatural school mysteries” premise that we opened with, in such a way that I actually feel like it’s a waste of the premise, it’s nonetheless one of the better stories we’ve seen so far for having it.

“The Legend of Lake Hiren”

Years ago, a movie-obsessed social recluse, bullied into hiding, kept undergoing plastic surgery to make his face look like whatever his favorite movie character is at the time. However, after so many surgeries, his face was eventually disfigured and disgusting, forcing him to adopt the identity of the only fictional character he could resemble: Jason Voorhees, from Friday the 13th. Haunted by his disgusting appearance and manifesting the personality of the man he resembled, “Jason” proceeded to murder thirteen people with an axe, chopping the faces off of each and every one! He was soon caught and sentenced to prison for this gruesome murder…

Years later, Kindaichi and Miyuki are roped into taking Miyuki’s cousin’s tickets to the screen testing of a soon-to-open resort, which itself is also a competition to determine who will receive the resort’s immense membership free of five-million yen! And it is at this resort that bodies start to show up, each killed with an axe before having their faces cut off, supposedly killed by a recently-escaped “Jason”…

This story epitomizes my central issue with this manga: despite the stories being four times as long as Detective Conan cases on average, you’re really getting half the mystery plot and a quarter of the cluing. This is especially exasperated by the fact that every case is a serial killing (typically involving three victims) and in each of the stories only one of the murders really contributes to the mystery plot. The other two are either committed to supplement the trick of the first murder, or for ultimately no reason and are usually forgotten aside from providing a motive. As a consequence, you get clues that only exist in respect to the one murder, and the other two tend to be long time-fillers that have to happen before Kindaichi can figure out the mystery (for some reason?). The result is that the stories often feel thinly plotted and sparsely-clued, not adequately taking advantage of the standardized length of the plots, and this story is the worst example of that! Especially since you’d need to have your own face cut off not to figure the mystery out…

One thing I did like, the movie motif does come back, as the motive relates to a traumatic event in the characters’ pasts involving an “unsinkable ship” which does, in fact, sink. This is of course a reference to the film Titanic. It’s an underplayed part of the story, but I appreciate this touch of thematic cohesion… It’s still quite a bad story though.

“The Santa Slayings”

At the Hotel Europa, a troupe of actors are preparing to put on a mystery drama, in spite of recent death threats against the unlikable and grouchy head actress. It only stands to reason that, despite the heavy police presence, the lead actress manages to get herself murdered by potassium cyanide in the wine she drank as part of the production…

This one is a pretty standard theatrical mystery, but to its benefit it is one of the tighter mysteries in the series. The tricks involving the central murder of poison are ludicrously cheap and obvious, sadly, and the locked-room murder that gets committed later is pretty obvious, pulling from a well of standard mystery tricks that anyone who has read a mystery story before will likely immediately identify as the solution. There is a double-edged bend to the theatrical murder that I enjoy, especially with how it’s weaponized against the killer, but it’s all standard, average fare.

What kills “The Santa Slayings”, however, is its attempt to give the killer a tragic backstory. The backstory is unearned, essentially un-clued except by one of the most ridiculous visual clues in the medium, and entirely ludicrous. It’s such a huge damper on the story, and the killer explaining it takes up a third of the story!

Oh yeah, and there’s something involving a drug-dealing Santa, which thematically has nothing to do with the story around it and sticks out like a bizarre red thumb. Not very good.

“No Noose is Good Noose”

The students and faculty at a preparatory school have ceased to be surprised when someone commits suicide on the premises. In two years alone, more than two dozen students have hung themselves somewhere in the school. It has since been merely written off as a curse of the school and treated as an expected part of everyday life. However, when chickens start being cut up and hung around school, with threatening messages being left around, the school’s mathematics teacher Yoko Asano is the prime suspect thanks to a series of rumors. She’s only finally arrested when she’s found inside of a locked-and-sealed room with the hanging body of a student…

In a better series, this story wouldn’t stand-out at all, but it’s easily the best Kindaichi case we’ve seen so far! What this story essentially turns on is an Agatha Christie-styled gambit with the addition of a locked-room mystery with its own false solution, and a somewhat obvious alibi trick. While individually these two tricks aren’t even close to being impressive, still essentially being two very old dodges everyone should recognize immediately, it was surprising to see them combined in an actually incredibly smart way to create a surprisingly tight murder plot. The clues also make brilliant use of the school setting, with its alibi plot using a class schedule in place of a Croftsian time table, and things like test sheets becoming actual clues in the mystery — Kindaichi even lays a trap for the killer using a school exam!

In a void this isn’t a great story, as it’s still quite obvious and not totally inspired, but it has some fun with the school setting to generate some creative clues, and the combination of two age-old dodges into a surprisingly dense plot make “No Noose is Good Noose” the most decent Kindaichi case thus far… Gives me hope for what’s to come!

Two quite bad stories and two pretty… decent ones fill out this portion of The Kindaichi Case Files, which actually drops us off near the middle point of the original File series. It really is hard to find so many different ways to say “this story reuses old concepts with little originality, and is therefore quite obvious”. Early Kindaichi is kind of hard to review, because it really is a lot of stories that are underwhelming in similar ways. I know the series improves though, and I definitely look forward to it…!

This review has a lot less production value than my typical Detective Conan reviews, and there’s a reason for that — Conan volumes are written with three stories in mind, so the format lends itself to one post dedicated to three or so stories. But since I’m compressing four reviews into one post, it’s a bit harder to do… I was considering turning this into a running format for these reviews, but I decided against it, and will return to reviewing each story as if it were a novel with the next story, “The Headless Samurai”.

And, as always, rounding everything out with new rankings…

No Noose is Good Noose (Series 1: File, Case 8)
Smoke and Mirrors (Series 1: File, Case 4)
The Opera House Murder Case (Series 1: File, Case 1)
The Santa Slayings (Series 1: File, Case 7)
Death TV (Series 1: File, Case 3)
The Legend of Lake Hiren (Series 1: File, Case 6)

The Author is Dead (2022) by A. Carver

October 23, 2022October 23, 2022l. Stump2 Comments

A couple of months ago, A. Carver left a message on my blog asking me to review his debut impossible crime novel The Author is Dead. He pitched it to me as [a case involving] rooms taped shut from inside, plus other classic impossible scenarios, [which] also directly reflects on particular Golden Age Detection texts. The detectives are a modern-day teenager and a mystery reader born in the Golden Age itself, and more broadly includes elements both of classic detective fiction and the world of today. Naturally, I couldn’t be more interested!

Adam Carver is an author of the wildly successful Gothic mystery series of Castles in the Sky, stories “as brilliant and melodramatic as the author himself” which were often compared against the works of Agatha Christie “and other equally dead authors” only for it to be decided that his were unequivocally the best of the entire history of the genre. Enjoying great success and wealth, Adam Carver spends his days in his modern castle-mansion overhanging the edge of an island in the middle of nowhere with his wife Victoria… His works are often discussed in the online messaging board Besieging Heaven where fan-fiction writers, fan-artists, review bloggers, and all stripes of fan meet to bond over their shared admiration for the great Adam Carver.

…that is to say, within The Author is Dead, this is the life of the author Adam Carver!

The novel follows Alex Corby — known in the Besieging Heaven group as “RedRidingBlood” — a young, self-conscious mystery reader and reverent fan of Adam Carver. By random chance, Alex won a competition hosted by Besieging Heaven‘s owner to join him and other influential members of the community in an opportunity to meet their mutual hero Adam Carver at his great modern castle Carver’s Rest to celebrate his birthday. Only, of course, with a mix of the weather and her misreading “10 am” as “10 pm”, she was 13 hours late, and missed her one chance to meet the great, the glorious, the charming, the brilliant Adam Carver, and feeling stupid in the process…

She is received at the house by Carver’s agent, Maria Bole, who admonishes Alex her mistake but nonetheless sends her off to her room in the dark of the dank castle’s corridors. Finding the door by nothing more than the glint of the key in the keyhole, she finds it mysteriously difficult to get into her room. Only managing to push in with a forceful shove from her shoulder, she is shocked… her hero, Adam Carver, the greatest mystery author to ever live, was taped to a chair in her bedroom, stabbed through the chest! Next to his corpse was a wrapped present containing Death in the Walls, the first Castles in the Sky novel…

Suddenly realizing that the room was difficult to get into because the door was taped shut the realization that the killer must still be in the room dawned on Alex… only, of course, for the room to be impossible empty, save for the corpse. Unsure what to do with this real-life locked-room murder, as Alex has “never correctly guessed a mystery in her life”, she quickly goes to find Maria to help her report the murder, but instead finds the shy-in-real-life, intense-online fan artist Colin West, alias “DaVinciCorpse”. Only, of course, when she tells him Carver’s been murdered, he returns to her room and… nothing is there. No corpse, no blood, no tape. The entire crime scene has vanished in the mere 60 seconds since she left the room.

Knowing that nobody will believe her, Alex Corby is forced to play out the rest of the day with her fellow forum-goers until something happens that helps her corroborate her experiences! And soon, such an event occurs, as Maria, the literary agent, also winds up murdered, tapped to a drawbridge, and stabbed by a sword tapped to the top of a gatehouse with the raising of the drawbridge. Only, of course, the murder happened that morning, on the other side of the only exit to the building, a door taped shut from the inside making it impossible for the killer to leave, with the controls to the gate on the other side of a patch of snow with no footprints to account for the killer’s walking across it to close the drawbridge. The only clue? A copy of the second Castles in the Sky mystery, Hand at the Threshold.

Another impossible murder that brings her into contact with CorvusCrown, a genius who could solve all of the Adam Carver novels from mere excerpts — or, in more extreme cases, even just the synopsis on the back of the book! The ultimate reader of mystery novels with an encyclopedic knowledge of every mystery every read! And, as it so happens, Alex’s mystery-reading great-aunt Cornelia… who takes it upon herself to lead the group in solving the murder before the worst could come to happen…

The Author is Dead is clearly written by a lover of Golden Age mysteries. Similar to Peter Lovesey’s Bloodhounds, the group is filled with different stripes of mystery-lover who namecheck many famous authors and sleuths both in the text and on the book’s Amazon page. The book has not one, not two, not three… but four Challenges to the Reader. The first occurs immediately after the murder of Adam Carver, reassuring you that the book you are holding is, in fact, a puzzle true and proper, and “The Author” promises to give you all of the clues you need to solve the mystery. The second introduces Knox’s Ten Commandments, and promises to abide by them entirely. The third is a minor lecture on the three kinds of deceptions in locked-room mysteries, and swears that all three are used. The fourth, immediately before the denouement, reminds you that the book has given you all the same clues as the detectives and tells you that before flipping to the next chapter you have an opportunity to solve the mystery ahead of time. The enthusiasm is evident!

And, not only that, but in addition to the two impossible crimes I described above, there are two more, all of which clearly inspired by the taped-rooms of Clayton Rawson’s “From Another World” and John Dickson Carr’s He Wouldn’t Kill Patience. One of which involves a taped room in a solarium behind four locked doors, and one which involves a victim found stabbed in a ribbon-tied Iron Maiden.

To answer the book’s Challenges to the Reader, I am sorry to report that I did in fact solve each of the four mysteries — as far back as Chapter 5 of 24, I pieced together the principle locked-room murder and identified the culprit in one fell swoop. The first impossible crime is a rather old dodge I’ve seen (and even written!) a few times in the past, and when you identify a few tell-tale mistakes Alex makes upon discovering the crime scene the trick employed by the killer becomes crystal-clear.

Sadly, the remaining three locked-room mysteries don’t employ classical misdirection, instead relying on tricks that are mechanical without being ambitious, and are as a consequence similarly easy to solve. Even the detective identifies the murder method employed in the second crime as something of an old hat, and these all rely on a tired sort of artifice, played entirely traditionally.

Well, that is all to say, I found the locked-room mysteries not totally inspired, and was able to identify the who and the how. What I didn’t quite as easily piece together was the why…

On that point, I want to address the elephant in the room: Adam Carver’s self-insert.

The Adam Carver character is actually a very smart piece of writing. What may seem from the synopsis, and indeed during most of the book, a very self-indulgent, bordering on self-fellating, portrait of an author who believes himself a second-coming of every Golden Age mystery author wrapped together in a trench coat actually evolves into a very neat piece of meta-misdirection I can only compare to Anthony Horowitz’s The Magpie Murders. Indeed, it’s a piece of misdirection that defies the barriers of the text — when this piece of the narrative snaps into place, not only does it retroactively make the self-insert make a lot of sense, but it also shows how the misdirection extends itself to the covers of the novel and even the Amazon store-page! It’s a kind of ambitious, almost self-destructive piece of writing that could literally only appear in the self-published novel of a first-time writer. And while I did piece this part together as well, it was a consequence of some very fair (if somewhat heavy-handed) cluing at the true nature of the author Adam Carver that dovetails into a neat motive for a killer that totally recontextualizes the entire book, blurring the lines between perpetrator and culprit in an incredibly smart way, as well as offering a neat reflection of the nature of detective fiction, and the attraction of intimate versus forensic investigation…

This neat conceit is the element of the novel I took the most from after reading it. Without it, The Author is Dead might’ve only ended up being a bogstandard, average locked-room mystery novel that I’d quickly forget about. But this clever twist of writing revealed a brilliant underside to the novel on which I’ll think back fondly. No, it doesn’t quite elevate The Author is Dead to the level of being a hidden gem of self-published locked-room mysteries — as I said above, the locked-rooms themselves are middling affairs — but it does show the extent of a burgeoning author’s plotting cleverness that makes me excited to see how his plotting evolves and matures with time. I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes on A. Carver!

Question for the Author

I actually wonder if A. Carver has any history with Japanese detective fiction? The in-universe Adam Carver’s Castles in the Sky series, turning on complex castle-like architecture, reminded me a lot of Ayatsuji Yukito’s Weird House series. Alex Corby is also a charmingly self-effacing protagonist, and her role as “the mundane, self-conscious dork among geniuses” was a trope used in the post-modern mystery series Zaregoto, which also inspired Danganronpa, in which Makoto Naegi, similar to Alex Corby, is at a school for geniuses merely because of the luck of a student-selecting lottery… I enjoyed Alex Corby’s role as an outsider, which is used well in The Author is Dead, especially with her being self-reportedly out of her depths.

Detective Conan Volume 15 (1996-1997) by Gosho Aoyama

October 19, 2022October 19, 2022l. Stump13 Comments

(*Note, although this is the fifteenth in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)

When I initially set out to review and rank every single mystery in the vast multimedia Detective Conan franchise (of which there are nearly, or more than, 1000), I declared it’d only take me a few months. That was eight months ago. I repeat, there are around 1000 individual mystery stories in the Detective Conan franchise, and in eight months I’ve only managed to cover, starting with this post, a little over 40 of them. Initially, the project was blowing by at a breakneck pace, and I released ten of these posts in a single night, but somehow (I couldn’t imagine how) I’ve already started to burn-out on the series a little.

If I were only reading the stories, I could probably have completed the whole franchise by now. But I have to read the stories, manage my spreadsheet, do two write-ups on each series, compare my feelings on the stories to every other story in the franchise (an increasingly impossible task as I have to keep my opinions on 40, 50, 60, 100, 200, 500, 1000 different, individual stories sorted at all times), and then write these reviews! Somehow I thought that ranking 1000 stories would be an easy and relatively quick task…

But then I also have the curse of having my reactions to stories laid out before me, neatly enumerated and color-coded, and it makes me worry… For those of you who aren’t familiar with the rest of the review series, I rank every Detective Conan story (with the intent of giving new-comers a guided to-read list for the good mysteries) and sort them into categories “Great”, “Good”, “Average”, “Mediocre”, and “Bad”. I’ve noticed that a lot of stories have gone into Average and Good lately, but a lot less are going into Great than previously. Were my early reviews biased by the surrounding stories not being very good? Or are my new reviews biased by me tiring on the franchise? Is the series getting worse or is my ability to enjoy the stories whittling away? At some point, in a project like this, it’s hard to separate where my issues begin and the series’ issues end.

…I’m not sure what my point in all this is, but that all being said, I do want to clarify that I do enjoy the series and I want for people to be able to start reading it in the western mystery community. This project to create the World’s First and Most Comprehensive Detective Conan Reading Guide for Lovers of Mysteries will persist, as I do enjoy having it as a recurring feature of my blog. I hope that the few of you who keep up with my adventures in Detective Conan enjoy this as well, and I hope I can help some people get into this franchise and other Japanese mystery series as well.

Onto the volume!

Casebook 40 – TWO-MIX Kidnapping Case (Chapters 4-6) sees the Junior Detective League at a concert for the famous musical duo TWO-MIX. Though honored to meet half of the duo they love so much, the team being kidnapped ruins the festivities. The kidnappers hold TWO-MIX for a very bizarre ransom: if they don’t get a cassette tape, they will murder the musicians!

Though the question of “why would kidnappers bother holding a musical duo to ransom a cassette tape” is really interesting, at a certain point in the story the implications of the cassette tape and a song’s lyrics become fairly obvious. In a lot of ways, this resembles a typical Junior Detective League code-cracker, but it’s pretty simple and not too obtuse while still being fairly clever. Also the best of the kidnapping stories we’ve gotten so far, not at all a bad story to open with.

In Casebook 41 – The Loan Shark Murder Case (Chapters 7-9), Richard invites a loan shark for a game of mahjong, but when he doesn’t arrive for thirty minutes the group gets concerned! They soon walk to his office building to bring him over to the game, but upon investigating his offices, the group finds the loan shark poisoned to death! Worse yet, he’s inside of his personal office room, with his doors and windows locked from the inside and no clear way for the poison to get into the room! Once they find that the victim momentarily left the locked-room, they investigate the rest of the building but could still find no possible way for the poison to have gotten on his hands, making this an entirely impossible crime…

TomCat over at Beneath the Stains of Time called this one of his favorite Detective Conan impossible crimes. For me, it certainly had that potential, but the story does one little thing that ruins the impact of the solution and renders it only about half of what I think it could’ve been. Immediately expanding the scope of the impossible crime to “the victim touched something in the WHOLE OFFICE BUILDING to get poisoned, but how?” ends up reducing the solution to nothing more than “what predictable trait can the killer exploit to transfer poison to the victim’s hand” in a way that closely resembles an earlier impossible poisoning with a similar set-up and solution. In my opinion, the fact that the killer left the central locked-room is something that should’ve been saved for the denouement — it’s too clever an inversion of the problem of a locked-room murder to be squandered on being the set-up, instead of the trick. The mechanics of this one are good enough, but to call it an out-and-out locked-room mystery classic? I’m not so sure…

The volume rounds out with the feature-length story, Casebook 42 – Bonds of Fire Murder Case (Volumes 15-16, Chapters 10-3), in which Dosan Nagato, head of a financial consulting company, invites the Moore and Hartwell detective families to his home under the pretenses of requesting that they search for and discover his elementary school sweetheart. Among the family is Hideomi, the bandaged son of Dosan who is engaged to a young woman named Miyuki — Miyuki reveals that Hideomi was burned long ago, and the two of them are connected by “a destiny made of fire…”, as Hideomi saved her from the very same fire!

A celebration is held! Afterwards, as the gang is getting ready to retire for the night, Dosan’s other son Mitsuaki calls his father’s room, screaming that Hideomi is going to stab him and that he’s now walking towards the balcony! The party all run to the balcony to see the bandaged Hideomi covered in blood and holding a knife in his mouth.

This shocking sight spurs the family — except for Miyuiki, staying behind to protect her sleeping father — into action! By the time they were able to burst into the locked room, however, Hideomi had already climbed down from the balcony by a hook-rope… and Mitsuaki was pushed from the balcony, impaled on the spike-topped fence below.

More evidence lines up clearly implicating Hideomi in the murder. However, not entirely convinced, Harley and Conan start to investigate together. Finally, Harley reveals to Conan that the real reason Harley was summoned to the house that night was to investigate the sounds of running footsteps and thuds that Dosan had been hearing every night for quite some time. This leads the two to realize that this murder was premeditated, as the killer was clearly rehearsing his crime!

During further investigation, Miyuki gets into a fight with Nobuko, the eldest child and daughter of the Nagato fight. Nobuko slaps Miyuki, causing her to drop her pen into the fountain, which leads to the discover of the corpse of Hideomi, with rocks in his pockets along with a suicide note…

While initially the suspects reject the possibility of Hideomi committing suicide, his time of death is discovered to have been shortly after the murder of Mitsuaki… when every single character’s location was perfectly accounted for… Furthermore, the suicide note in Hideomi’s pocket was clearly written by his own hand, and there was no time to force him to write a fake! The only reasonable assumption with all of this evidence is that, after committing the murder of Mitsuaki, Hideomi took to the fountain whereupon he drowned himself…

This is a great story! While certain parts of the scheme are a tad obvious, the eventual resolution still makes this one of the best-hidden killers of Detective Conan so far! This story is loaded with lots of neat misdirection, and very smart clues. An aspect of Detective Conan — and, broadly, Japanese detective fiction — that is unique to itself is the killer rehearsing their own murder plot, thereby turning the rehearsal itself into a meaningful clues within the story. Not only does it make the unlikeliness of the killer’s plan working out easier to digest, it also creates new, novel types of clues that are unique to a story where the killer had to practice their crime.

The killer’s motive and the backstory of the case is also one of the better-foreshadowed in the franchise, being touching and melodramatic. The ending references one of the most well-regarded classic cases of Detective Conan as a source of trauma for Conan, who considers himself worse than a murderer for using his deductions to bully a culprit into committing suicide, making this a moving as well as neat piece of continuity and character development…

If this story is just a little less brilliant or inspired than some other stories, it makes up for it with a genuinely surprising and well-handled killer and a beautiful ending…

I gave some thought to my earlier dilemma I laid out at the beginning of the post. Where do my issues end and Detective Conan‘s begin? I wondered if maybe there weren’t any issues at all… I only paid attention to how infrequently stories ended up being “great” compared to a little earlier in the franchise, but something I neglected to pay attention to was how infrequently stories also ended up in “bad” compared to earlier in the franchise as well. As the stories go on, it’s more common for the cases to end up in “mediocre”, “average”, or “good”. It isn’t that the series has unilaterally gotten worse, it’s just that I’m seeing a statistical inevitability — the average story will be closer to average quality, and it is by necessity that there will be less extremes in quality going both ways.

Another great volume on the heels of a few less-than-great-ones made me realize that to expect across-the-board consistently good stories, even in a series I like, when there’s simply so much content, is unreasonable — there will be fluctuations, but also there will always be a home for Detective Conan in my heart as we return to these positive experiences. The inconsistency is the very point of this series — there will be occasional dips, rises, plateaus, stutters, nosedives, and up-shoots in quality. I’m putting up with the nightmare of the unpredictability of hundreds of stories so you don’t have to. I’m happy to say I’ve found my spark to keep working on the project again after a minor dilemma forced a hiatus.

Enough of the melodrama, though, onwards and upwards, and on to the updated ranking!

————THE GREAT————
Moonlight Sonata (CB#18 V7 C2-7)
Tengu Murder (CB#30 V11 C8-10)
Art Collector (CB#15 V6 C2-5)
Tenkaichi Festival (CB#17 V6-7 C9-1)
TV Station (CB$28 V11 C2-4)
Bandaged Man (CB#12 V5 C1-5)
Night Baron (CB#20 V8 C2-7)
Wealthy Daughter (CB#24 V9-10 C7-1)
Bonds of Fire (CB#42 V15-16, C10-3)
————THE GOOD————
Poisoned Bride (CB#21 V8 C8-10)
Art Museum Owner (CB#9 V4 C1-3)
Elementary School Teacher (CB#39 V14-15 C9-3)
Gomera (CB#36 V13 C8-10)
TWO-MIX (CV#40 V15 C4-6)
Library Employee Murder Case (CB#26 V10 C6-8)
————THE DECENT————
~~Kogoro~~ Richard’s Reunion (CB#23 V9 C4-6)
Strange Shadow (CB#4 V2 C1-3)
Loan Shark (CB#41 V15 C7-9)
LEX Vocalist (CB#13 V6 C6-9)
Diplomat Murder Case (CB#25 V10 C 2-6)
Holmes Enthusiast (CB#33 V12-13 C 7-1)
Suspicious Uncle (CB#38 V14 C4-8)
Illustrator’s Assistant (CB#35 V13 C 5-7)
Mantendo Bombing (CB#32 V7 C4-6)
Hatamoto Murder (CB#7 V3 C1-6)
————THE MEDIOCRE————
Triplets (CB#34 V13 C2-4)
Shinkansen Bombing (CB#10 V4, C4-6)
Conan Kidnapping (CB#14 V5-6 C10-1)
Medical Professor (CB#27 V10-11 C9-1)
Haunted Mansion Case (CB#6 V2, C8-10)
Idol Locked-Room (CB#3 V1, C6-9)
Roller Coaster (CB#1 V1 C1)
————THE BAD————
Magician’s Suicide (CB#37 V14 C1-3)
Moon, Star, Sun (CB#31 V12 C1-3)
Soccer Brother (CB#19 V7-8 C8-1)
Monthly Presents (CB#8 V3 C7-10)
Twin Brothers (CB#16 V6 C6-8)
President’s Daughter (CB#2 V1, C2-5)
Billion Yen (CB#5 V2 C4-7)
Coffee Shop (CB#29 V11 C5-7)
ORO (CB#11 V4 C7-9)
Ayumi Kidnapping (CB#22 V9 C-13)

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) by Sōji Shimada (trans. 2015 by Ross and Shika Mackenzie)

October 14, 2022November 8, 2022l. Stump13 Comments

For 43 years, the vicious and gruesome massacre of the Umezawa family has puzzled Japan… Through multiple other mass killings, and a World War, the bizarre and incomprehensible horrors of this mysterious crime had arrested the attention of amateur sleuths all the nation over. Sensational books have been written about the crimes (dubbed “The Tokyo Zodiac Murders”), theories have been published in newspapers and preached on television. And yet, for 43 years, the truth has eluded even the most brilliant, attentive, and dedicated of would-be Sherlocks…

Heikichi Umezawa was an astrologer, alchemist, and artist who, in his last moments of sanity, sought to create “Azoth”, the ultimate and perfect beauty , a Goddess of a human, based on his understanding of astrology. Every person’s birth sign correlated with a part of their body — their head, chest, abdomen, hips, thighs, and legs — and therefore that part of their body was granted strength by their ruling planet. To his immense pleasure, thanks to his massive extended family and his multiple romantic partners, Heikichi has seven daughters, step-daughters, and nieces who, between them, all represent six different birth signs which themselves also have domain over each of the six different body parts. Therefore, before killing himself, Heikcihi intended to murder six of his daughters and nieces, take their “ruling” body part, bury their corpses in astrologically and alchemically significant parts of Japan (correlating to minerals, for example), and then, in “the very center of Japan”, he would bring the collected body parts to construct Azoth. Details of his plans are contained within his last and will testament. Six perfect body parts assembled to create the singular perfect woman…

However, before he could conduct this plan to construct his Goddess-on-Earth, Heikichi was murdered in his locked-and-sealed studio. It was only after his death that, shocking everyone, some unknown force had begun to enact the Azoth murders according to his specifications. Nobody could understand how — or why — Heikcihi’s plan leaked to the public, or why this mysterious new party would begin to commit these disgusting murders…

One day, the six daughters, step-daughters, and nieces of the Umezawa household simply vanished… And over the course of nine months, each of the six girls’ corpses was discovered, each missing the body part mentioned in the late Heikichi’s notes, each buried near a mine with a significant mineral deposit corresponding to their ruling element, and each buried at a different depth.

Six corpses, of six girls, buried in six different locations…

In modern-day Japan, a young woman going by the name of Iida has come forward with an unusual declaration: her father had played a very central role in the Umezawa murder case… involving another, seemingly unrelated case dealing with the killing and subsequent rape of the seventh Umezawa child, situated nicely between Heikichi’s death and the Azoth killings. Desperate to have her father’s reputation cleared, she commissions astrologer Kiyoko Mitarai (who receives details of the case from his closest friend) to finally solve this decades-old murder once and for all, and find the real mastermind..! And thus, Kiyoko does as he promises, playing armchair sleuth, attempting to succeed where the police and millions other have failed…

…and there we have the framework for The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, the landmark impossible crime debut of Sōji Shimada. The novel was written at a time in the genre’s history when the “social” school of plotting dominated — no more were the tedious honkaku puzzles of old! Usher in a new age of socially intelligent plots concerned with psychology and human interests! Naturally, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders represented a rejection of this genre-wide shift away from tricky murder plots, and therefore did incredibly poorly when it was first published. However, in reality, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was an inspiration for many younger crime writers who also thirsted for the orthodox crime puzzles to return. It may have been Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders that finally allowed the crime genre to sprout into the shin-honkaku movement of neo-puzzle plots, but it was The Tokyo Zodiac Murders that planted the seed and Shimada’s own subsequent efforts in bringing up prospective shin-honkaku writers that nurtured it. It is for this reason that The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has become regarded as not only a landmark novel in the development of the genre, but also the reason why shin-honkaku even exists at all in its current form, making it possibly the single most important modern Japanese crime novel ever written, bar none.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has actually already received a mention on this blog, on my zeroth revision of my Top 15 Impossible Crimes list. However, it only appeared in a passing mention under Shimada’s actual full entry, his sophomore novel, Murder in the Crooked House. This is not because I consider The Tokyo Zodiac Murders an inferior mystery, but it’s a very complicated sort of comparison Shimada has created for us here.

To begin with, as a novel on its own? The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is not great. As the crimes take place over 40 years before the events of the novel, the entire tale is told thrice-removed from the perspective of anyone actually concerned with the murders. Therefore, instead of being a novel about the story of a murder, it instead becomes a novel about the story of a guy listening to a story about a story of a murder. On top of depriving the novel of any human interest, it makes the storytelling and prose bone-dry.

The first third of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is incredibly dense, with the story wasting not a single word on anything that isn’t telling you every single thing you need to know about the three disparate murder cases. You get every floorplan for every conceivable floor, the blood-types, astrological signs, and birth dates of every named character in the story, full details of decades of investigation, including every possible theory and counter-theory and counter-counter-theory for every last clue, red herring, and event to occur within this telling. A full detective novel’s worth of plot, and then some, is dumped into your lap in one of the most purely cerebral murder mystery narratives ever written.

What then follows is another significant portion of the book, concerned entirely with Kiyoko’s investigation in the modern day. If the first third of the novel is the single densest piece of crime plotting ever penned to paper, the subsequent portion is one of the thinnest, most irrelevant, and positively nothing pieces of writing in the genre. Protracted history lessons, discussions on literature, and arguments about the failures of Sherlock Holmes eat up so much of the novel during this section and lead positively nowhere, but the book’s worst sin is that a full six chapters are dedicated to the narrator attempting to have a single conversation, which itself only creates a weak red herring that, on top of being discredited immediately, was by the book’s own admission a perfect waste of time. (By the book’s own admission through the first of its two Challenges to the Reader, the mystery can be solved very early into the narrative, with much of the ensuing story being included pretty much arbitrarily).

The issue isn’t really so much the amount of padding — all detective novels have a lot of it, frankly — but rather the fact that the novel frontloaded the entire, extremely dense plot in the first third and had nowhere else to go, meandering along for no better reason than the story was too long to be a novella but too short to be a good novel. It then unloaded a typical novel’s worth of filler into your lap, instead of dispersing it evenly throughout the story. This makes it an extremely engaging (even if purely cerebral) read for the first third, and then a very mindless slog for the second third. To go from every word contributing something meaningful to six chapters being dedicated to an empty deadend is, frankly, the kind of pacing whiplash I’ve never seen before.

Worse yet, the locked-room murder itself is incredibly pedestrian (hence why it didn’t appear on the favorite impossible crimes list), and the implications of the murder/rape are pretty obvious.

Keeping all of this in mind, do I think The Tokyo Zodiac Murders deserves its monumental reputation?

…Yes!

It may sound insane to say so, but during the long denouement, the novel had done an exceptional job at making me forget every gripe or quibble I had with its storytelling or structure. Because the Azoth murders — the actual titular Tokyo Zodiac Murders serial killing — presents what is one of the most, if not the single most brilliant piece of trickery in the entire crime fiction genre, and I wish I was exaggerating. In my mind, no novel could be so boring, could be so dry, could be so poorly-paced as to ruin the impact of the book’s denouement. For what was 100-odd pages of info-dumping followed by 100-odd pages of Shimada pretending to plot, the final 30 pages of this tale offer a bloody, twisted, macabre stunner of an explanation for the serial killings that bursts forth from the pages like fireworks with ingenuity, creativity, and deviousness unparalleled by, to my mind, almost anything else the genre has to offer. Not only are the mechanics of the crime incredibly unique — something that has never been written before, nor anything even similar to it before this novel — it’s also uniquely Japanese, having all of the thumbprints of shin-honkaku in a way that no English mystery from the early 1900s would ever have managed, making it not only is a tour de force of ingenuity, but also one that perfectly showcases another culture’s unique approach to the genre we all know and love. Even after re-reading the novel, I know that every time I look back on The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, I will not be thinking about the wastes of time in the modern day’s investigation — I will only be able to look back on the jaw-dropping sucker-punch the novel delivers that stunned me into shocked frustrated reverence.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is a landmark impossible crime, but that reputation is a bit unfair to it — the impossible crime is minor, and uninspired in the extreme. It’s also a very poorly constructed, unpleasantly-written novel. But for all that, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders contains what has to be one of the most baffling and brilliantly-conceived serial killings in all of mystery-writing fiction (if you think you can name me one better, I dare you to try…), and one of the most deviously-hidden culprits of all time. I’ll never be able to look back on this novel negatively — it’ll be a hard read for those who favor their mysteries on the literary side, but for those like me who appreciate the mystery story as a vehicle for a puzzle I’ll only be able to remember it as one of Japan’s plotting tours de force…

With all of its flaws as a novel, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders ends on a triumph — it’ll never be a favorite novel of anybody’s, but I’m perfectly comfortable calling it one of my favorite mysteries ever plotted.

The Key to the Case (1992) by Roger Ormeord

October 1, 2022October 1, 2022l. Stump2 Comments

Roger Ormerod’s retro-classical mystery novels have received repeated mention on this blog for their seamless splicing of the DNA of classical Golden Age-styled puzzle plots and the grit-and-grime of contemporary police thrillers. Time to Kill, Roger Ormerod’s debut featuring his first series sleuth private eye David Mallin, was an entry on my first list of my 15 favorite impossible crimes for its inspired spin on the “impossible alibi” problem, a post on which also earning a mention of the novel. A later novel in the same series, the more straightforwardly classical locked-room mystery More Dead Than Alive, was also fantastic. This novel, The Key to the Case is therefore the third novel of Ormerod’s to be covered — this one however, instead of David Mallin, features Roger Ormerod’s crime-solving husband-and-wife duo of retired police detective inspector Richard Patton and his wife Amelia, being the ninth book in the series about their exploits.

After solving “the affair of the clocks” (likely a reference to an earlier novel), Richard Patton finds himself spending most of his post-retirement life dealing with miscellaneous personal affairs like hunting for missing pets or handling property disputes. Following in this trend is Ronnie, an ex-convict and purportedly reformed petty burglar known to Richard, who claims to be innocent of an aggravated burglary that, unfortunately, the police want to pin on him. He begs Richard for an alibi, but he’s disinterested in the contract.

Unfortunately, later, a friend of Amelia’s introduces Richard to another purportedly reformed crook named Milo who also needs help from Richard. Milo’s son, Bryan, has just killed himself — or so the police claim. After all, Bryan was murdered inside of a locked-sealed-and-bolted house with all of the locks, seals, and bolts shot from the inside. Milo on the other hand believes that Bryan was murdered, and he needs Richard to figure out how. Although Richard claims to not be interested in this contract either, it slowly nags at him to investigate both problems.

In soon comes to Richard’s attention that Bryan had a lot of people out to get him — he is in actuality a serial rapist, responsible for the assaults of three women and having served and been released from prison. Only a month after his release, a fourth women is sexually assaulted and subsequently murdered in the same place he committed the other attacks, leading to a barrage of death threats. Knowing that his wife’s daughter from a previous relationship was murdered by a rapist, the revelation leads to complicated questions of whether it’s even worth finding Bryan’s murderer to begin with…

An element of Ormerod’s writing that has always appealed him to me is his ability to combine the contemporary police thriller with the classical puzzle plots. Ormerod is a smart creator and destroyer of alibis, and equally skilled at impossible crimes. Although his writing was always dense with personal and interpersonal dramas, at the end of it all he usually revealed how he had deftly laid clues in places you never would’ve thought to see. And, as with all of Ormerod’s writing, the story moves briskly and is defined by snappy, accessible, unfussy writing that makes for easy and quick reading. However, I think it’s possible that The Key to the Case might lean a little too heavily on the side of the contemporary crime story, to its detriment…

The Key to the Case is hurt majorly by its looseness and pacing with building-up the solution. Many plot points that, in a classical detective novel, would be reserved for the denouement, are either heavily suggested as possible or explicitly revealed during the course of the narrative. Strictly speaking, the full picture of the locked-room mystery and its solution is revealed in every part either by confession, implication, or explicit deduction by the middle-point of the novel (only being christened as the solution at the end) — adding to that, it isn’t a very compelling explanation. By the 70% point of the novel, essentially everything had been revealed except for the identity of the culprit in the rape-and-murder, and the Bryan murder cases. However, at this stage, I feel like the information is present that, rather than shocking, renders the solution merely perfectly natural and easily intuited. It’s particularly a shame, because there is a particularly brilliant clue a la Chesterton or “The Purloined Letter” that goes wasted because its intended meaning is easily inferred while bypassing Ormerod’s intended logic.

This is an element I’ve always associated with modern crime thrillers, where a clue leads to a conclusion leads to more investigation — conclusions are dolled out freely in order to maintain audience interest in the plot, rather than reserved for the sake of the puzzle. It’s something that I felt wasn’t present in the other Ormerods I’ve read, where Ormerod was much more tactful with handling little revelations throughout the narrative. Unfortunately, The Key to the Case spoils so much of the solution by the mid-late portion of the narrative that the eventual resolution is the most intuitive given the provided information. The motive, method, and all surrounding details are perfectly organic, all things considered, so that I’d be surprised if the novel has any surprises to spare the reader come the denouement.

The subject matter that defines the police thriller half of the novel’s identity is also troubling and uncomfortable. The matter of rape is by no means treated lightly; however, the resolution Ormerod eventually reaches on why Bryan’s death matters is at best tone-deaf and naive on the impacts of rape, and at worst deeply cynical towards women, suggesting that “the modern woman” is simply no longer impacted by rape because “morality is shifting”. He goes so far as to nearly suggest that Bryan’s rapes are permissible morally because they were “gentle”, depicting women as “grateful” to raise his progeny, and even having one of his victims offer to teach him how to perform sex better during the rape. Worse yet, Ormerod has all of his male characters standing around, being deeply upset about the matter, and has his rape-victim deuteragonist scold them, implying that their outrage at the sexual assaults are misplaced and irrational. It reaches a point where it feels like genuine, honest-to-God rape apologia that I don’t believe can be written off as “a product of its time”, and it’s the kind of thing I hadn’t seen in any other Ormerod novel. I firmly believe that if Ormerod had gotten a single female opinion on any part of this novel, The Key to the Case would be a very different novel than we’d got today.

Unfortunately, I cannot agree with TomCat’s review of The Key to the Case, in which he calls it “Ormerod’s best-plotted novel”. I found the plotting to be damaged by loosely-handled revelations that all but spoil the solution by nearly the halfway point, leaving the plot with nowhere to go but the obvious ending. While there’s one particularly clever clue, both scenario and resolution betray no trace of the imaginative, baroque plotting I saw in Time to Kill or More Dead than Alive. Worse yet, the story reveals a very dark, cynical perspective on rape that permeates throughout the entire novel that makes The Key to the Case obviously a product of having never spoken to a single woman during the course of writing it. As a mystery plot in a void, The Key to the Case is perfectly good on the level that all of the disparate pieces come together cleanly and neatly, but as a plot that harks back to the Golden Age it is flawed and uninspired in a way I’ve never seen from Ormerod.

On My Shin-Honkaku Bookshelf – 12 Japanese Mysteries I’d Kill To Be Able To Read

September 8, 2022September 8, 2022l. Stump6 Comments

It’s an open secret that I am deeply fascinated with Japanese mystery fiction. My passion for mystery fiction was fostered from a young age by (still genuinely fantastic) mystery video games like the Ace Attorney franchise. I was weened on the style and standard of plotting of shin-honkaku mysteries before I even knew what the term meant!

For a few years strong now, I’ve actually been studying Japanese with the explicit intention of becoming a professional translator of shin-honkaku mysteries — or, failing that, at least being able to read them myself. Over time, as I’ve collected novels to attempt to force my way through, my fascination with shin-honkaku mysteries has slowly become defined less by the translated novels I’ve already read, and more by the untranslated novels I will one day soon be able to read.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a few big discussion posts for my blog, since I haven’t done any big genre-spanning posts since On a Defense of Impossible Alibis and “Doylist” Impossibilites. These projects include a defense of modern pastiches of classical detectives in response to the negative pre-release reception of the new Marple anthology, a discussion on the genre of hybrid mysteries and why they’re an essential sub-style of mysteries to embrace, and a post on video games and why they’re uniquely capable of capturing the spirit of Golden Age Detection better than GAD itself — when done well, that is. These posts are eating up a lot of my time, and between them and school and reading Japanese novels, I haven’t had a lot of material to throw up on the blog lately! So, I decided to channel my languages studies into my blog and make this top ten list of every shin-honkaku mystery I desperately want to read, not only to remind myself of why I’m learning the language but to perhaps coax some of you into studying the language yourselves.

I set out to make this list with the following guidelines for myself:

Entries may only be:
- novels
- short-story collections written by a single author or consistent group of authors
- individual short-stories
- I will not include anthologies written by multiple authors, but I may select individual stories from these anthologies — with one exception being if multiple authors contributed to a single holistic project, such as a round-robin novel in the style of The Floating Admiral.
  - However, I may only pick one story from any given anthology.
The intention of this post is to highlight the sheer creative variety of shin-honkaku mysteries. Therefore, stories with unconventional premises were prioritized over more well-known mysteries or mysteries by reputed authors. These may still appear, but I didn’t want to make a whole post just talking about untranslated works from famous authors already covered by Pushkin Vertigo or Locked-Room International.
- Furthermore, there is no works-per-author limit, but in accordance with this guideline I will prioritize authors with novel premises. The more traditional an author, the less likely you’ll see multiple books from them represented on this list.
- If a series is defined by a shared premise, only one book from that series may appear on the list.
These works may not have translations in any capacity — this includes even bad translations by first-year Japanese students posted to Reddit. If it has an official or unofficial translation at all, it isn’t applicable, as the intention is to create motivation to study Japanese.
Video games, television shows, comics, movies, radio shows, podcasts, musicals, plays, etc. are not applicable. There are many, many, many good mysteries in every medium, but I did not want to dilute this post. Video games are already getting their own post, anyway, as the medium deserves it.
- However, novel spin-offs of multimedia franchises are applicable. They must be original stories, and may not be adaptations of existing plots in the series.
Synopses will be written from a combination of reviews and book descriptions. I may accidentally extrapolate incorrect details, but I will do my best to keep it to strictly what I know for a matter of fact.

And, one fair warning… I tried to find a lot of these on my own, but quite a few of these are inspired by my reading Ho-Ling no Jikenbo, the blog of Ho-Ling, preeminent translator of Japanese mysteries. Even the few I did manage to find on my own I later discovered were covered on Ho-Ling’s blog well before I got to them — the man’s got all of his bases covered! If any of these stories sound interesting you, or you want to read more about Japanese detection, absolutely do check out Ho-Ling’s fantastic and informative blog for reviews.

With that all out of the way, let’s get to the 12 shin-honkaku mysteries I’d kill to be able to read… And perhaps, so would you!

The Cinderella Castle Murder (シンデレラ城の殺人) by Konno Tenryū (紺野天龍)

First up is actually the novel I’m reading at this very moment, The Cinderella Castle Murder, a murder mystery reimagining of the ever-popular Cinderella fairytale. Reading Masahiro Imamura’s zombie apocalypse-infused locked-room mystery Death Among the Undead has awoken a deep fascination with Japan’s breadth of “hybrid mysteries” — mysteries that combine elements from non-mystery genres — so expect this to be a minor trend in this list.

The Cinderella fairytale is hijacked by a murder mystery! When Cinderella is locked-and-sealed inside of a room, whose sole entrance is guarded, with the Prince at his ball, there is no way he should’ve wound up dead… And yet, he does; murdered, in fact! Being the only person inside of a room that was locked in three difference ways means that Cinderella is immediately brought to court and tried for the murder…

With nobody to defend her, the fast-talking and sharp-tongued Cinderella is forced to represent herself as a defense attorney, picking apart contradictions in the seemingly airtight testimony of the array of quirky witnesses who all seem to know for a definitive fact that Cinderella is guilty! Worse yet, her magic will wear off at midnight, revealing her true identity, proving inconvenient not only for herself but also her evil stepmother and cruel step-sisters… So the race is on for Cinderella to prove herself innocent before midnight, not only for herself, but also for the people who don’t really deserve it…!

This novel’s structure of picking apart witness testimony in a fantastical court has earned comparisons to my pet mystery franchise Ace Attorney/Gyakuten Saiban, so that is immediately fascinating for me! Konno Tenryū is not a famous author in the slightest, but well-regarded by a few of my Japanese friends who have read their works as a writer of fantastic magic-infused mysteries — including Ho-Ling, whose blog brought my attention to this particular novel.

The Locked-Room of the Alchemist (錬金術師の密室) by Konno Tenryū (紺野天龍)

Another magic-infused hybrid locked-room mystery by Konno Tenryū!? It’s more likely than you think…

In a world where magic works as a science of give-and-take, spells instead functioning by transmuting physical matter, the renowned alchemist Ferdinand is murdered inside of his lab, which is locked behind three steel doors which themselves require the palm-prints of Ferdinand and key members of his organization to open. Not only is it almost unthinkable that a magical being like an alchemist, who can transform any matter within his grasp into a weapon, could be killed by someone un-magical… it’s further unthinkable that any random person could bypass all of these security precautions… Therefore, the blame is immediately placed on the shoulders of Theresa Paracelsus, the only remaining Alchemist in the organization and the only one capable of using her alchemy to commit this murder! Emilia, our protagonist, doesn’t believe Theresa could be the killer, and sets out to solve this murder that, if not committed by Theresa, is utterly impossible…

It’s must easier to see how magic plays into the plot of The Locked-Room of the Alchemist than The Cinderella Castle Murder, which instantly makes it sound so much more promising as a showcase of Japanese hybrid mysteries and the unique way in which fantasy can inform a brilliant murder plot… This is the first in a series of ongoing series, and the sequel sounds even more fascinating than this one!

Locked-Room Murder Game – The Fool’s Mate (密室殺人ゲーム王手飛車取り) by Utano Shōgo (歌野晶午)

A fringe community of online mystery fans have grown tired of their immense powers of deduction and intellect on fictional murders… and have turned to committing perfect crimes in the real world! Using masks and voice-changers, these real-world murder masterminds share details of their exploits, and challenge each other to solve their crimes in this locked-room mystery short story collection…

A community of murderers who challenge each other to solve their crimes sounds like a natural evolution of the format of the “armchair detective club” popularized in Miss Marple’s The Tuesday Club Murders. Using the internet as the medium for these stories is even more interesting. It’s unclear to me how much the internet really matters in these crimes, but given that I’ve heard the stories are semi-serialized, it’s possible that some cross-story misdirection could occur with these crimes and the internet overlapping…

This is the first of two-and-a-half novels in the series, and is deeply fascinating, if only daunting because its first story is the longest by a sizable amount…

The Adventures of Rintarō Norizuki (法月林太郎の冒険) by Rintarō Norizuki (法月林太郎)

Rintarō Norizuki is, as can be divined from his detective and himself sharing a name, a disciple of the Queenian school of mystery writing. The few Rintarō Norizuki short stories that have been published in English are utterly brilliant, so to see more of the Eastern Second Coming of Ellery Queen would be a dream!

Unfortunately, I know very little about the stories in this collection, but there’s some interesting titles including “The Cutting Monster”, “The Cannibal’s Puzzle”, and “The Death-Row Puzzle”. Fascinating stuff, and I’m only sad I can’t say more about this one!

There is a New Adventures of Rintarō Norizuki, which has much less evocative titles, but nonetheless I’d be interested in reading! It seems like Japanese mysteries favor locked-room mysteries and impossible crimes, so if nothing else I’d love to see more of Japan’s take on non-impossible puzzle mysteries!

The Murder of Alice (アリス殺し) by Kobayashi Yasumi (小林泰三)

Ari Kurisugawa is haunted by dreams of a surreal land ruled by a Queen of Hearts. She dreams of nothing but this Wonderland and going on adventures with White Rabbits and Mad Hatters. One day, though, she is shocked by a dream in which Humpty Dumpty has a great fall… only, it wasn’t an accident. This is greatly distressing, but it only gets worse when she awakes and discovers that a student in her school has similarly died by falling off of the roof of the faculty building!

Once the suspicion of murder arises and Ari becomes the prime suspect in both worlds, investigating the deaths reveal that Ari’s not the only one to dream of Wonderland. In fact, as it happens, these “dreams” are a very real, shared world in which her and multiple classmates have met each other in the form of avatars! When it’s discovered that not only do real people correspond to people in Wonderland, but so do the events of the murder, Ari/Alice teams up with intelligent Imori/dim-witted Bill the Lizard to solve this cross-worlds murder mystery and prove her innocence!

This is the third hybrid fantasy-mystery on this list in which a woman is falsely accused of murder and must prove herself innocent, but somehow in spite of the three stories having this basic similarity they all feel like three dramatically different tales when they’re all laid out. As you can tell, this mystery is a reimagining of the children’s story Alice in Wonderland and is the first in a series of novels that utilize the same premise with difference stories such as The Wizard of Oz or The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. A mystery involving the interplay between two parallel stories set in different worlds is deeply fascinating, and the possibilities send my brain running!

“Whodunit Reception” (フーダニット・リセプション) by Morikawa Tomoki (森川智喜)
collected in Honkaku King 2022 (本格王２０２２)

Honkaku King is an annual best-of short story anthology series of all of the best detective stories published in a given year, as decided by members of the Honkaku Mystery Writers of Japan club. Ho-Ling’s review of this volume contained many fascinating stories, but the one that stood out the most to me was “Whodunit Reception” by Morikawa Tomoki.

The narrator and their friend accidentally destroy the unpublished manuscript for the last and final chapter of a mystery-story that is being serialized right now. In order to avoid getting into serious trouble, the two have to try and repair the manuscript. Fortunately, they’re able to save almost all of it… except for the parts of the story where the detective explains whodunit! By using the context clues of the surrounding text, the two have to fill in 17 blank spots to complete the story (keeping in mind, of course, that the only context they have is the final chapter and none of the rest of the novel).

This sounds like a puzzle/riddle-lover’s dream! I myself make it a rule to complete at least 10 puzzles a day purely for fun, so this bizarre little story in which the solution to a mystery story is itself the mystery story sounds compelling! A novel little meta-mystery I’d absolutely love to sit down with one of these days, with a fun concept, even if it’s not as far-out as some of the fantasy mysteries we’ve looked at! Every single other story in this anthology sounds fantastic though…

The Locked-Room Collector (密室蒐集家) by Ōyama Seīchirō (大山誠一郎)

My interest in this one has Ho-Ling’s fingerprints all over it. I first discovered Ōyama Seīchirō’s works through アリバイ崩し承ります (Alibi Cracking, At Your Service), a television drama adaptation of one the author’s other mystery collections of the same name. Alibi Cracking, At Your Service deals predominantly with “impossible alibi problems“, but other variations on alibi plots also appear, and the average quality of the episodes and tricks is quite high. Ho-Ling’s review of Alibi Cracking, At Your Service ended up directing me to his review of The Locked-Room Collector by the same author, and he speaks very highly of this one! The main defining quality of The Locked-Room Collector is that unlike the lateral thinking puzzle that many locked-room mysteries tend to be, all of the mysteries in this one are impossible crimes solved through pure Queenian chains of deduction.

While on a conceptual level this collection doesn’t seem all too interesting, I am previously acquainted with Ōyama Seīchirō’s work and already think highly of him as a plotter and can attest to his abilities!

Ace Attorney: Turnabout Airport (逆転裁判-逆転空港) by Mie Takase (高瀬美恵)

The Ace Attorney, with all of its bumps and warts, is my favorite mystery series ever. It is partially nostalgia, as this video game franchise is the thing that got me invested in Golden Age/(shin-)honkaku mysteries to begin with. But even then, going back and revisiting the series, where it works Ace Attorney has some of the absolute best-plotted mysteries ever written. The series’ gameplay cycle of being given testimony, and using evidence to find contradictions, explaining the contradictions, and then moving onto more testimony gives the reasoning an air of Queenian deduction chains. As a game series based entirely around the logic of statements vs evidence, the quality of cluing is quite high, and Ace Attorney boasts some of the most unique, imaginative clues I’ve ever seen in the genre! But this series is something special in Golden Age detection in a way that’s impossible to summarize in a few paragraphs, and deserves a post all to itself…

Truth be told, this entry is kind of cheat. I don’t care about Turnabout Airport specifically. The novel I’m more interested in is its immediate prequel, Turnabout Idol, but a fan has already translated the novel and posted it online, disqualifying it from this list… Nonetheless, Turnabout Airport is a standard Ace Attorney case, featuring defense attorney Phoenix Wright as he defends his subordinary Apollo Justice, who is accused of murdering a politician at an international airport! As a fan of the series who has been thirsted for fresh (good) content for nearly a decade now, these two novels are an oasis!

Word to the wise, the novels seem allergic to creating any more new characters than they absolutely have to, as both Turnabout Airport and Turnabout Idol feature exclusively recurring characters as defendants and prosecuting attorneys, which means the novels probably assume you have prior connection to these characters for the stories to work, so… Take this as my obligatory recommendation to go play Ace Attorney.

The 46th Locked-Room (４６番目の密室) by Arisugawa Arisu (有栖川有栖)

I promise it’s a coincidence that I’ve gone of a tour of all of the Queenian authors…

Arisugawa Arisu is another author in the “Ellery Queen”-school of mystery writing, but his series have a bit of an odd gimmick: there are two Alice series. The Student Alice series and the Writer Alice series. Both Student Alice and Writer Alice are different people, and each are detective novelists. Student Alice writes novels about Writer Alice, and Writer Alice writes novels about Student Alice, while the real world Arisu writes about both of these men writing about each other…

I’m not confused, you’re confused!

I don’t have any particular interest in specifically The 46th Locked-Room, but more broadly I am interested in all of the Writer Alice series. The Moai Island Puzzle, which was translated by Ho-Ling for Locked-Room International, is the second novel in the Student Alice series. The 46th Locked-Room is the first novel in the Writer Alice. My main interest with this novel is not in its plot, but merely to compare the two series side-to-side and hope to understand why there are two Alice franchises…

Makabe is a detective fiction author known as “The Japanese John Dickson Carr” due to his output of 45 locked-room mysteries. The 46th Locked-Room therefore refers to his final novel, as he has produced multiple mediocre mystery novels back-to-back and intends to soon expand beyond the confines of the detection genre. Only, of course, he winds up murdered in a locked room himself!

Admittedly, of all the stories on this list, this is the one I have the lowest expectations for. Every meta-mystery where detective novels are a plot point seem to have the same annoying quirk I complain about in my reviews of Death Invites You and The Honjin Murders: fake evidence is produced with no meaningful explanations just to muddy the waters for no better reason than it’s a mystery novel! We gotta! I’ve never liked this type of red herring, and it seems to be the territory of meta-mysteries like this… But, nonetheless, I go into it with an open mind!

“Amulet Hotel” (アミュレット・ホテル) by Hōjō Kie (方丈貴恵)
collected in Honkaku King 2021 (本格王２０２１)

We return to last year’s Honkaku King anthology, in which “Amulet Hotel” by Houjou Kie sounds the most promising, in no small part because of Ho-Ling’s review of the anthology… In fact, Ho-Ling’s summary of the story is brilliant, and knowing almost nothing of my story myself I couldn’t do better if I tried, so here’s an excerpt from his review:

When a guest of the Amulet Hotel’s annex complains that the door to his room can’t be opened and it turns out even the owner’s master key can’t open the door, they break the door down: the door had been blocked by a serving cart jammed beneath the door handle. Inside the room, they find a murdered man and an unconscious employee of the hotel. Normally, this is time to call the police, but not in the Amulet Hotel: the annex of the Amulet Hotel serves a very special kind of guest, the kind of guest who likes their privacy very much, who doesn’t like the police and who will make use of the special hotel services like having guns delivered to their rooms. Everyone is a criminal here, so whenever anything happens here, the Amulet Hotel will “clean up” themselves. But while the Amulet Hotel does cater to the criminals, there are still rules they expect their guests to obey to, and the most important one is that they should never ever inconvenience the hotel. Hotel detective Kiryuu is asked to figure out whether the unconscious employee in the hotel room killed the guest, or whether someone else did and if so, how the locked room was created and once they know what happened, they will deal with things properly.

Ho-Ling’s review is glowing and this mystery sounds utterly brilliant and conceptually novel! Every story sounds like quality goods, though!

RPG School (RPGスクール) by Hayasaka Yabusaka (早坂吝)

This is the first anything I ever tried to read in Japanese that wasn’t a news article or a social media post. I still haven’t actually committed to finishing it, so it’s on this list purely because I feel like it the first novel I’ve ever tried to read in Japanese means I should get around to finishing it sooner rather than later…

In a school where everything functions under the rules of fantasy role-playing video games like Dragon Quest, the Dark Lord has taken control of the school and filled it to the brim with monsters! Only, of course, with all of this chaos going on with needing to save the world from a great Godly evil, people have found the opportunity to commit impossible murders like the murder of a student in an un-tainted coat of snow.

This book is another hybrid mystery, and in this one the puzzle is informed by the fact the entire world operates under the rules of a video game! As someone who loves RPGs, seeing a murder mystery somehow be derived from the format is exciting and fascinating!

“When the Snow of Dried Leaves Melts” (かれ草の雪とけたれば) by Kaburagi Ren (鏑木連)
collected in New Orthodox Detective Special – Banquet of Impossible Crimes (新・本格推理特別編―不可能犯罪の饗宴)

This is one I was really proud of discovering on my own, only to just now find out while trying to find a synopsis that, yes, Ho-Ling already covered it… Sigh… I was already interested in the story from the title alone, but Ho-Ling’s review puts it over the top.

“When the Snow of Dried Leaves Melts” is an impossible crime story (one of many in this anthology) in which a man is murdered on the fourth floor of a real world government building. The only way out of the room was a ladder, which a man was climbing down and soon apprehended from. Naturally, his guilt is debated, therefore the question of how someone can commit this impossible murder comes into play, especially when this suspect helped create the impossibility himself…

Admittedly the premise sounds pretty standard for what the title was offering, but I’m actually glad Ho-Ling covered this one because it let me write this synopsis at all. His review is that the story is simultaneously brilliant and also bullshit, so I’m sure I’m in for a hell of a ride!

And there we have it, the 12 shin-honkaku stories I’d kill to read! I tried to capture a wide variety of stories, form, and genre without relying too much on just mentioning the big names, and I think I’ve done a fairly good job at creating a to-read list of Japanese detective stories, for myself and hopefully other would-be students of the language!

Already, I was fascinated with Japanese mysteries, but the more I learn the language and therefore the more I become acquainted with shin-honkaku mysteries the more deeply my fascination runs! I can only study day-in-day-out and hope one day I can become fluent enough to read all of these brilliant-sounding mysteries!

The Kindaichi Case Files (File Series) File 3 – The Snow Yashka Murder Case (1993) by Yōzaburō Kanari

August 28, 2022August 28, 2022l. Stump4 Comments

(Note: Although this is the second of this review series, I only encourage you to read the first post in the series in order to understand the premise of the series and the intent of the review series)

The Kindaichi Case Files is to this day one of the leading names in Japanese detection, and for the longest time has been one of the only ways many people experienced anything shin-honkaku — and many of those people didn’t even know the meaning of the term! Despite this, I actually never really read much of The Kindaichi Case Files. No, it wasn’t because of some anti-manga prejudice; it was actually because I’d read two stories… and didn’t really care so much for them! The first of the stories I read was The Opera House Murder Case, and my feelings didn’t change much from my first exposure and my second exposure (as I reviewed above…). The second of these stories was The Snow Yashka Murder Case, which I read skipping Western Village Murder Case on recommendation from a friend who warned me it spoiled a famous detective novel that I hadn’t read at the time…

The Snow Yashka Murder Case was where I ended my first attempts to read the Kindaichi Case Files franchise, simply because I wasn’t impressed with the resolution of the story’s chief impossible crime. As I had twice been disappointed with the impossibilities of this locked-room mystery series, I ended up refusing to return to the series for quite some time… It wasn’t until my Detective Conan review series that people in the Golden Age Detection group started asking me for my opinions on The Kindaichi Case Files fairly regularly… It’s only fair, then, that I put any preconceived biases aside and delve headfirst into this gallery of impossible crimes and locked-rooms… Seeing as my opinions on The Opera House Murder Case hadn’t changed a bit, how has my negative impressions of The Snow Yaksha Murder Case mutated with time..?

Kindaichi, a young teen detective, has been brought along with police inspector Isami Kenmochi to do the leg-work and be an extra in the latest installment of Shock! TV, a prank show that seeks to scare celebrities with fake deaths and gruesome tricks… The episode is being filmed in the mountain villa of reclusive artist Issei Himuro, who was generous enough to offer his home for the shooting. The main target of Shock! TV is Rie Kano, a woman well-known for being snotty and difficult to work with.

After Kindaichi fakes being poisoned and dying, he and the rest of the Shock! TV crew retreat to the annex house which, although facing the main house, is a 20 minute drive around a massive ravine to reach. There, the crew begins to use a remote control to scare Rie with exploding vases and terrifying sounds! However, when their pranks appear to reach a zenith, a person wearing clothes and the mask of a legendary snow demon appears in the shot, and, to the shock of everyone present, murders Rie with an axe before walking away into the snowy night!

But, everyone realizes… this murder is an open-and-shut case! Everyone except for a few people had been together in the annex house! The only people missing were Marina Ayatsuji, who had taken the only car to go to the main house but hadn’t been gone long enough to reach the main house, and the cameraman Michio Akashi, who had been missing for a significantly long period of time. Therefore, the only person who could commit the murder is Michio Akashi!

The murder is investigated by Kengo Akechi, a crime-solving prodigy who spent much time in America. When Kindaichi tries to get involved, Akechi initially admonishes him as just an amateur who got lucky twice. But when the body of Michio Akashi appears, and it becomes obvious he’s been murdered for well over 12 hours, the murder becomes an impossible crime in which every suspect has an alibi! Kenmochi vouches for Kindaichi’s talents, so Akechi allows Kindaichi to investigate on the condition that Kenmochi and Akechi both put their careers on the line… loser must retire from the police, forever.

And so, the hunt is on for this mysterious murderer who appears by snowstorm…

As a Kindaichi Case Files story, The Snow Yashka Murder Case is nothing special — to my understanding, even the best of the stories in this series are “nothing special” in terms of set-up and presentation. The well-documented tropes of the series are there, with isolated locales, impossible serial killings, and masked villains.

What immediately struck me about this story though, is that I believe it’s the first to really justify its use of masked killers beyond just being a fun little visual gimmick or a flimsy means of trying to convince us the killer isn’t part of the closed cast — it’s also a practical tool for misdirection and cluing, as it allows the killer to operate in full-view of the other characters, and as a consequence the killer’s behaviors are there for us to analyze as a clue!

When the murder is committed on the Shock! TV monitor, the masked killer appears, murders Rie with an axe, turns around, walks for a few seconds, turns back around, and then destroys the hidden camera left behind by the film crew. What this creates is actually an incredibly smart clue that, come the denouement, is part of an impressive Ellery Queen-esque deduction chain that not only tears down a false solution provided by Akechi, but also points irreparably in the direction of the killer by establishing knowledge which they must’ve had, as proven by them overplaying their hand and misinterpreting misinterpretations.

Don’t get me wrong, the killer’s identity is obvious from the moment the murder is committed, but the actual in-universe clues that lead Kindaichi to the conclusion are smart and well-realized.

This part of the story, while impressive in its cluing, represents a part of the killer’s plan that when I first read it was utterly unbelievable, and I thought it essentially suffered from all of the same issues as a “dying message” story. It is part of an elongated form of misdirection that almost entirely relies on the assumption that the detective will clue into small nuances and starts to make it unrealistic how well the killer is able to predict what other characters will think.

However, on a second reading, I actually think that this trap is much more believable than I had given it credit for, especially since it seems as if an immediately-proven-false confession from a certain character was manufactured specifically to spell this clue out in the contingency that the detective doesn’t follow the reasoning the killer expected him to. The intended conclusion is also much less esoteric than many “dying message” riddles, as it’s hidden under a simple, single layer of logic.

But, for the impossibility itself, the solution is shocking, original, daring, deceptively simply… and entirely not good. Now, I understand that’s something of a paradox for locked-room mysteries, as shocking and simple solutions are often seen as the standard to strive for, but the solution to the impossibility is original in the way that it was very obviously not created for a mystery story. Instead, it’s original in the sense that the author obviously had this esoteric real-world knowledge in the back of his head, and wanted to apply it in a murder mystery, but struggled to find a clever way to utilize it. Instead it’s just a dry, straight regurgitation of this esoteric information that’s only “well-hidden” because it relies on a fact that the audience absolutely could not be expected to know. There are a few clues that make a vague attempt at suggesting the solution, but they do very poorly, and this is ultimately not a clever or smart trick, and more just a cheap flouting of obscure knowledge.

Throughout the story, Akechi frequently provides false solutions which Kindaichi easily shoot down. However, in these, only once do we, the audience, have the information needed to disprove the theory as the theory is presented to us. Once, the information is outright hidden from us, and another time the clue is hidden until just a little before Kindaichi disproves his theory. While I understand that these false solutions need to seem intelligent and convincing, I do believe that disproving them should be part of the “puzzle”. We shouldn’t just be able to write them off because “the real solution wouldn’t be presented this early into the story” — I do believe that we should, more often than not, have the information needed to contradict faulty theories brought up in opposition to our detective, especially when the information in question is so easy to slip into a panel at any point before the theories are presented…

However, inversely, Akechi’s theories are themselves also produced from information which we the audience don’t have! This is very frustrating, because it doesn’t matter which side the reasoning is coming from in these debates between Akechi and Kindaichi… the audience will always feel left out. Only one of these three false solutions is actually intended by the killer and advances the plot, the other two, beyond being misunderstandings, don’t actually contribute any information that meaningfully helps us understand the crime. In other words, it’s a lot of frustratingly poorly-handled time-fillers.

Ultimately, my opinion of The Snow Yashka Murder Case did not improve by strides. I did end up lightening up on one small portion of the case, but ultimately The Snow Yashka Murder Case is a deeply flawed impossible crime, with a cheap solution that only really functions because it draws on a boring application of esoteric real-world knowledge, an obvious killer, and a very badly executed “conflict of the detectives”. While there is a very smart clue and an impressive Queenian logic chain that launches off of one of the series’ main tropes, it’s a very minor boon in an otherwise not-very-good story.

The Opera House Murder Case (File Series/S.1, Case 1)
The Snow Yashka Murder Case (File Series/S.1, Case 3)

Minor note: Ho-Ling corrected me in the comments of The Opera House Murder Case. He explained that the first two series being written by Kanari and the later series being written by Seimaru Amagi is a misunderstanding, as Amagi had always been present and responsible for the tricks in the Kindaichi franchise. I wrote the correction here, instead of editing the previous blog post, as I felt like more people would see it as they continued reading the series.

The Kindaichi Case Files (File Series) File 1 – The Opera House Murders (1993) by Yōzaburō Kanari

August 27, 2022August 27, 2022l. Stump10 Comments

The Golden Age mystery in Japan has never discriminated by age. In the English-speaking world, there’s a very clear distinction drawn between the sophisticated and authentic Golden Age mysteries that adults read, and those pretenders that borrow the stylings and trappings of detective fiction despite being intended for children — your Nancy Drews, your Hardy Boys — and the understanding has always been that the former had a higher standard of plotting over the latter. However, in Japan, not only does no such stereotyping really exist, with “children’s” mysteries being regarded on the same level of plotting and expertise as any “adult” mystery, it’d actually also be fair to say that a huge portion of Japanese detective fiction has been guided, and even seen its best works come from the so-called “children” mystery series.

One of Japan’s greatest regarded printed exports of honkaku mystery is Detective Conan, a comic-book series about a teenager who is transformed into a young child and forced to solve crimes in order to find the antidote. Despite being marketed for “young boys”, Detective Conan is today one of the longest-running media franchises in the world, maintaining the popularity of classically-plotted detective stories.

However, video games predominantly seen in the west as “for children or teens” have themselves also had immense influence on Japanese detective fiction. Ace Attorney, a video game series featuring a fledgling lawyer defending people falsely accused of murder, is one of the most famous honkaku mystery franchises in Japan and, in my opinion, it has no less than five of the best mysteries I’ve ever read. A video game series inspired by Ace Attorney is Danganronpa, in which 15 students are locked inside of a prestigious high school, and forced to murder each other and get away with it without discovery in a “Class Trial” in order to escape!

Incidentally, despite both series being categorized as “kids’ games” by many people in the west, they’ve both had palpable influence on mystery-writing in Japan. A Great Detective Never Lies (名探偵は嘘をつかない) by Atsukawa Tatsumi is inspired by one of the cases of Ace Attorney. In this book, many famous detective novels are mentioned by name in the chapter titles, and among references to such prestigious authors as Anthony Berkeley and John Dickson Carr, Ace Attorney is listed as an equal. Daganronpa is itself the subject of great fascination by one of Japan’s most famous locked-room mystery novelists, Takekuni Kitayama, a winner of the prestigious 24th Mephisto Prize for his debut novel, The “Clock Castle” Murders. So enamored with the video game was Kitayama that he begged the creators to allow him to write novels set in the Danganronpa universe. What followed was a 6-book long prequel series which were so successful and well-regarded that this Japanese novelist was commissioned as the head writer of the mystery plots in the third Danganronpa game.

“Kid” mysteries and “adult” mysteries do not have the same division in Japan as they do in the west. “Kid” mysteries are respected, not out of nostalgia, but for the genuine quality and inventiveness they bring the genre. Kids and adults alike flock to these franchises, and even famous mystery novelists find enjoyment in these video game and comic book detective plots. They represent some of the best and most highly-regarded mysteries ever conceived, with the only fundamental difference really being complexity of dialogue and the ages of the protagonists.

This generally high standard of quality that supposed “kid” stories have set in the world of Japanese detection is something I’ve already discussed at length in my post On Some of the Best Mysteries Ever Written and the Puzzle of Why You’ve Never Read Them when building up to my Detective Conan reviews but it felt equally worth reinforcing that idea now. Detective Conan and Ace Attorney were not flukes, they are the standard. And they were far from the only “young adult” mysteries that are long-running, award-winning, and influential…

The Kindaichi Case Files, originally written by Yōzaburō Kanari before being taken by Seimaru Amagi, features Hajime Kindaichi. Hajime is your average problem student, failing all of his classes and often getting up to mischief. Everyone thinks he’s the world’s biggest loser, and there’s not a single person in the world who likes him except for his childhood friend Miyuki Nanase. However, he harbors a great secret that only one teacher manages to see through: with a 180 IQ, and a masterful eye for details, Hajime is in reality the grandson of famous supersleuth Kōsuke Kindaichi… Although he never intended to, Hajime gets roped into many different mystery cases, most of which are impossible crime/serial killings by masked murderers, and begins to develop a reputation for himself as a genius crimesolver, just like his grandfather!

The Kindaichi Case Files stands with Detective Conan as one of the greats in Japanese comic-book form detection in the style of honkaku mysteries. It’s interesting, therefore, to note that the two series are in almost every other way stark opposites of each other.

Detective Conan is a much more versatile series, with short story-length cases compiled on average three-to-a-book, and it doesn’t particularly hold any fidelity to form or style. Detective Conan has everything from alibi problems to serial killings to code-cracking riddles to locked-room mysteries to inverted mysteries to traditional whodunits to race-against-the-clock action-thrillers to psychological thrillers to heist stories and inverted heist stories, and even a couple horror tales!

Contrarily, The Kindaichi Case Files are all novel-length cases with most stories being roughly the length of an entire volume, give or take only a few chapters. The individual cases of Kindaichi Case Files are much more uniform, with the tropes of the franchise being well-documented. Almost every case is a serial killing that contains at least one impossible crime or locked-room mystery, and owing to inspiration from the Kōsuke Kindaichi series, often takes place in isolated locations with classical closed-circle casts. Almost always, the killer, in Scooby-Doo fashion, has a masked alias that they used to avoid detection, such as dressing up as a mountain demon or a mummy. And, a mutation from Kōsuke Kindaichi, the motives tend to be born from twisted and misguided emotions.

While more formulaic, The Kindaichi Case Files is comforting in that you always know what you’re going to get: Carrian impossible crimes. It also has the benefit of spending more time with each individual plotline, giving it more time to develop — though, this is of course a double-edged sword, as it also means inferior stories are also longer. It’s hard to pick one and say it’s demonstrably better, but what’s true for both series is that they are major parts of the mystery-plotting landscape in Japan, and if I’m going to be discussing the bite-size short-stories of Detective Conan, then I also need to review the full-length macabre impossible tales of Kindaichi Case Files.

As with Detective Conan, I’ll be reading, reviewing, and subsequently ranking each individual story in the Kindaichi Case Files franchise. Just like before, the intention of this series is to give people a comprehensive “reading list” for this massive franchise so that the more hesitant of manga-readers among us can pick a select few stories that appeal to them, and read them, instead of pushing through all of these stories in a medium they’re uncomfortable with and just… hope they strike gold. This is part of my extended mission to proselytize on the merits of the so-called “kid” detection of Japan and introduce our western friends to these franchises with so much to offer!

The Opera House Murders opens with Hajime Kindaichi being invited by his best friend Miyuki on a Drama Club trip to an island-bound hotel called the Opera House Mansion. The hotel was chosen for its privacy as well as its unused theater, allowing the kids to freely rehearse for their upcoming production of The Phantom of the Opera!

The rehearsal goes well, until diva Ryoko Saotome gets into a fight with her co-star Orie, insisting that her inferior acting will make her look bad in front of the talent coach that’s coming to their debut night! Amidst the flaring tensions, old wounds surrounding the death of the club’s greatest star Fuyuko Tsukishima begin to reopen, revealing to Kindaichi that Fuyuko had committed suicide just a month ago after having her face burnt to hideous remains by acid. Only moments before jumping to her death from the roof of the hospital, Fuyuko, quoting The Phantom of the Opera, had soliloquized…

“I am the Phantom of the Opera! I am the ugliest creature on Earth! And even while the fires of Hell burn this ugly creature… I’ll still dream of a place in Heaven!”

Although at lunch it seemed as if tensions had subsided, the clubmates realized that Orie hadn’t come to the table! Before they can even think about looking for her, the sounds of her scream summon them to the theater to find her crushed by a stage-light! When Kindaichi realizes that everyone had been together in the dining room at the time the murder was committed, making the crime impossible, the proprietor of the hotel informed them all that a bandaged man known only as “Kagetsu” had checked into the hotel the night before…

Although they tried to escape, they found the boat that took them to the island adrift at sea, freed from its place at the dock! From this moment, the masked Kagetsu is haunting the grounds of the hotel while committing increasingly mysterious crimes, such as hanging clubmate Harumi Kiryu in a tree without leaving his footprints in the mud in the grounds…

When Kindaichi realizes that the murders are paralleling the deaths that occurred in The Phantom of the Opera, he’s forced to reconsider that Kagetsu might actually be a fabrication… a member of their club, out for bloody vengeance..! And it’s onto him to solve these baffling impossibilities!

I always thought it was interesting how The Kindaichi Case Files, despite being a series about locked-room murders and impossible crimes, opened with a story that didn’t really have a locked-room mystery. The initial murder of Orie is an impossible alibi problem, as every suspect is together in the same room when the murder occurs, and the hanging of Harumi is a footprints-in-the-mud problem. There are a handful of other deaths, but none of them “locked-room mysteries”.

The Opera House Murders is a fairly inauspicious beginning to a series as esteemed as The Kindaichi Case Files. The story does contain all of the quintessential elements of a Kindaichi case, but despite the inspired trappings of the Phantom of the Opera-themed murders, the case is in every way a fairly standard, average mystery of this sort.

The Phantom of the Opera motif for the murders, while initially intriguing, is arbitrary. It’s window dressing, nothing more and nothing less. The murders themselves aren’t extremely convoluted, nor extremely simple, and they aren’t extremely silly or extremely clever.

The alibi problem suffers from the same kind of problem all impossible alibi problems like this do, where the type of solution that must’ve been used is fairly obvious from the set-up alone. And while there are some decent clues pointing towards the exact application of this trick, they’re reserved until the latter half of the story and resolved immediately, when they would’ve been more potent as more… omnipresent aspects of the setting and case.

The footprints-in-the-mud problem is pretty much exactly the kind of solution you know it’d have to be, and there’s almost nothing particularly impressive about the solution worth noting. It’s notable that Kindaichi reasons from essentially nothing in this murder, and just easily deduces what kind of solution must have been at play based on the situation itself and zero external clues.

Although the whole mystery plot is itself fairly average, The Opera House Murders excels in its art! Although black-and-white, the artist does a fantastic job at using grey-tones to create a salient, tense atmosphere. Kindaichi expertly puts to paper what a John Dickson Carr novel always looks like inside of my head, and it can’t be overstated enough how good the art in Kindaichi Case Files is at capturing atmosphere and mood. The panels with Kagetsu peering into Miyuki’s window always get me, as seeing a face looking into my window is an irrational fear of mine… It’s a shame, then, that from my limited experience the series seems to utilize visual clues much less often than Detective Conan and doesn’t put the art to as good use…

So, all-told, a lukewarm introduction to the franchise. It’s a perfectly average, standard locked-room mystery with not much going on to set it apart from the competition. I don’t particularly hate it, but I can’t imagine I’ll remember it months in the future… At the very least, it gives us room to go up with this esteemed series!

A few things to note are that TomCat over at Beneath the Stains of Time has very strong opinions about Kindaichi Case Files. It’s his belief that the first two runs of the series (called the File Series, and the Case Series, spanning about 26 stories) are on average worse than the many other runs of the franchise. This is because File and Case are primarily written by Yōzaburō Kanari, to whom TomCat refers as “a hack”. Every other story in the series is written by Seimaru Amagi, whom TomCat praises as “the Sōji Shimada of manga”. Part of this animosity, I believe, stems from Kindaichi Case Files‘s second ever story, The Western Village Murder Case, being a direct 1:1 plagiarism of Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Sōji Shimada, with this copying being the subject of a lawsuit in which Kindaichi Case Files had to print spoiler warnings for Shimada’s book in this story… It’s my understanding that TomCat was spoiled by Western Village Murder Case, and that this might contribute to his strong feelings towards the Kanari stories!

Nonetheless, when it comes to mysteries, TomCat’s word is as good as gold! And this word has me a little worried about a long and tedious review series, so in order to keep myself sane and you all convinced this series can be good, I’ve gotten special recommendations from friends for the best stories from the original two runs. If I ever feel like there are too many negative reviews for Kindaichi Case Files back-to-back, I’ll end up skipping ahead to these particularly good stories as a sort of… respite! If you ever see a much later story appear out-of-order, then it’s because I felt like a positive review was in order. This is so I can avoid the issue I had with Detective Conan where I had to write six negative reviews back-to-back before I finally got to the point the series started to get really good.

Also, as discussed above, Western Village Murder Case flagrantly plagiarized a famous novel, and will therefore not be covered in this blog review series as I do not wish to encourage people to read it.

Without further ado, the ranking…!

The Opera House Murders (File Series/S.1, Case 1)

Yes, The Opera House Murders is certainly the best Kindaichi we’ve covered so far! Exciting!

The Honjin Murders (1946) by Seishi Yokomizo (trans. Louise Heal Kawai 2019)

August 21, 2022August 21, 2022l. Stump7 Comments

The 1940s were as much an opening door as they were a closing one as far as classical detection is concerned. Mysteries in the ilk of Agatha Christie’s puzzlers and John Dickson Carr’s miracle murders were slowly falling out of vogue. Save for a few writers who persisted in the craft, the old-school whodunit was going into hibernation to make room for character-pieces set against grim tales of corruption… that is, as far as the English-speaking world was concerned! In reality, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr’s work was alive and well in the hearts of those people in the little island nation of Japan…

The time of World War II and beyond was a radical turning point for the direction of crime fiction in the English world, but unbeknownst to many Englishmen and Americans a parallel — and entirely opposite — movement was mobilizing in Japan, as a fascination with the puzzles of “authentic” western detection was on the rise. The honkaku mystery, a genre of crime-writing that sought to reinstate the structure and rules of western mystery fiction to emphasize a puzzle of deduction and ratiocination, was slowly beginning to finally hold of the imagination of the public…

Seishi Yokomizo is not the first mystery novelist of Japan. Edogawa Ranpo and Saburō Kōga, who were inspired predominantly by the pre-Golden Age writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, are the grandfathers of Japanese fiction and predate Yokomizo’s efforts by decades. Even the honkaku mystery existed well-before Seishi Yokomizo, with authors such as Keikichi Ōsaka also writing before the war. However, when the wartime ban on detective fiction was lifted in 1945, it was Seishi Yokomizo’s active translations and imports of American and English detective fiction, as well as the publication of his first detective novel that pioneered the honkaku mystery, giving it new life as the standard of mystery writing for decades to come.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that Seishi Yokomizo’s contributions to the crime writing of Japan has given him a reputation to rival Agatha Christie’s own. Writing 72 novels and stories featuring his most iconic of detectives, Kōsuke Kindaichi, and having the honor of Japan’s most prestigious and valuable crime writing reward named after him, it isn’t an exaggeration to say Seishi Yokomizo fundamentally is the Japanese mystery novel. And the full extent of his legacy begins with this, his debut novel, The Honjin Murders…

In The Honjin Murders, an unnamed and omniscient detective novelist is writing a report about the Ichiyanagi murders from years prior…

The Ichiyanagi family, owners of a honjin, a hotel for respectable members of the high-society, are soon to celebrate the wedding of the family’s eldest son Kenzo to his bride-to-be Katsuko. The family had always been against the matrimony, as Katsuko descended from an “inferior” lineage of mere farmers. However, Kenzo was going to hear none of his family’s objections; he was to marry Katsuko and that was that…

However, the merry of the day was soon to be interrupted, as it becomes clear that a three-fingered vagrant was stalking the Ichiyanagi home. When he leaves Kenzo with a note referring to himself as “Your Mortal Enemy” and insisting that he was soon to make good an “island agreement” from seventeen years ago, the bridegroom is greatly distressed, but nonetheless carries on with the wedding.

The rest of the ceremony goes as planned, a long-day of merrymaking and joviality, and the two lovebirds retire to the annex house to consummate their marriage… Only, in the middle of that snowy night, a scream pierces the air, along with the haunting tones of the wild plucking of koto-strings, leading to the discovery of Kenzo and Katsuko’s bodies inside of the locked-and-sealed annex house, killed viciously by countless little sword cuts and stab wounds. The murder weapon, a katana belonging to the family, was found pierced in the ground outside, surrounded by a vast expanse of snow with no footprints to be seen… A two-fold impossible crime…

As the local inspector struggles to piece together the crime, the recovering drug-addict and stuttering detective prodigy 27-year-old Kōsuke Kindaichi is called in to elucidate the crime by the uncle of the deceased Katsuko…

The Honjin Murders relishes in its almost boyish adoration for western detective novels. Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room gets name-checked multiple times throughout the story as a representative of the locked-room mystery, but a few John Dickson Carr masterpieces, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others are referenced constantly throughout the case. What becomes a central element of the story, in fact, is the victim’s own library containing a complete collection of every mystery novel ever published in or imported into Japan…

However, Seishi Yokomizo is no idle copycat. The elements that make his stories his stories and which have themselves become a trope of Japanese detective fiction are fully present and accounted for in The Honjin Murders. Settings isolated from contemporary society, showcasing a snapshot of a rural Japan that foolishly holds onto outdated and twisted ideas of tradition as the rest of the nation faces a sociopolitical shift, play heavily on the narrative. Ultimately, The Honjin Murders is a novel which only a Japanese man could have written, so entrenched is it in a very specific perspective on a nation’s culture that inform both motive and method of the murder.

This cultural density makes the first three-quarters of The Honjin Murders some of the most fun I’ve had reading the investigation portions of a detective novel in a while. In fact, The Honjin Murders is packed full with clues the sort of which I’ve never had to consider in English detective stories, questions I’ve never had to ask myself, inspired set-pieces that are literally foreign to me all lend themselves to a plot with so many different suggestive elements that, as a mystery novel should do, the theorizing was addictive and I found myself keeping bookmarks of everything that struck out to me with unnatural conciseness and attention, because I really didn’t want to miss anything. Such elements as the two different sounds of koto-playing heard at the crime scene, the grave of a cat, and Japanese notions of purity fill the narrative to the brim.

What is unfortunate, then, is that the denouement left me feeling a little deflated. The investigation offered so many compelling ideas and plot threads that the eventual solution is incredibly disappointing in how little it really sizes up to what comes before it.

As suits Seishi Yokomizo, the motive is a twisted and macabre one that is born of misshapen relationships strained by a foolhardy devotion to tradition. I found the why, and the clues pointing at the killer and their motive, compelling and brilliantly-handled. What I take umbrage with is… everything else.

As regards the locked-room mystery itself, I am of two minds. It is a kind of solution I typically do not enjoy on two-fronts. It turns fundamentally on a concept that a character in the book itself comments on being incredibly tired, with the detective name-dropping and spoiling a famous Sherlock Holmes story to make a direct comparison to the trick utilized in this novel, and it’s one I’ve always found to be incredibly underwhelming. It is also just a kind of trick I typically hate, being a very convoluted mechanism relying on (ROT13) fgevat (ROT13), and which stretches credulity in the extreme. I still do not particularly enjoy this type of trick here, but what I think makes it work more than in many other similar stories is the way the story hints at, suggests, and prepares the reader of this kind of solution, relying on elements that are omnipresent throughout the story to establish the mechanism instead of sneaking in hidden tools we as readers are never aware of. The way it relies on two certain set-pieces is very clever, and I did manage to roughly figure out the kind of trick that would be employed very early-on — though I do think the most important detail isn’t fairly-clued in the slightest, and does somewhat demand guesswork — which makes it a much more satisfying coalescence of facts instead of feeling entirely like the cheap cop-out many similar solutions usually end up being.

There’s a piece of misdirection that, befitting Agatha Christie, is tightly-woven into the structure and set-up of the story itself, and this is easily the most time-consuming part of the denouement and also simultaneously my least favorite part of the solution. This involves the identity of the three-fingered man. For something that essentially occupies eighty percent of the killer’s plan in the end, it’s bizarre that it turns entirely on multiple massive coincidences that the killer could never account for and yet worked-out perfectly for the killer and their entire scheme. This is, however, the least of my criticisms with this element of the plot.

It seems to be the curse of every mystery novel which themselves contain mystery novels as a plot point, that they must utilize the exact same plot point, in the exact same way, for the exact same reasons: a character, mimicking mystery novels, creates a bunch of fake red herrings to muddy the waters for no better reason than mystery novel. I’m of the mind that a good red herring should suggest something, but in reality mean something else. Inversely, it never fails to deflate my interest in a novel when a very compelling clue appears to suggest something, but in reality mean nothing. It’s an anti-climax of the most offensive variety, and it makes up too much of this novel’s pool of clues for my tastes, and it almost entirely centralizes around the relationship between Kenzo and his Mortal Enemy.

What I value about writers like, say, Christianna Brand is that they can hoodwink you into believing entire fake, made-up narratives that aren’t even remotely true, but the pay-off is that the actual story — the story of the truth — is equally compelling, brilliant, and intriguing. With a story like this, what you instead do is present me with a fake story, and then provide me with a truth that makes me wish the fake story was true! I was having more fun when I believed in the lies the author told me, and the story that snowballed from those lies was infinitely more compelling and investing than the eventual frank nothing.

It’s even worse that the clues suggesting that these red herrings mean nothing are almost all withheld from the reader! Things like hand-writing or visual clues suggesting something was cut up, which are entirely impossible for us to see in a printed novel and towards which there are no clues left for us to figure it out, make this element of the plot even more extremely frustrating than it usually is.

It’s a shame that it ended on such a sour and deflating note, because the first three quarters of The Honjin Murders was some of the most pleasant reading I’ve had with a mystery novel in a while. It is loaded with brilliantly-conceived, compelling, and evocative clues and set-pieces derived entirely from Japanese culture, which makes it dense with questions and theories and utterly intoxicating to theorize with. The solution left me feeling high-and-dry, but the storytelling was first-class. While I find the novel’s solution wildly disappointing, I am actually an established fan of Yokomizo’s work and I believe that what this novel does well offers up a preview of a deservedly-esteemed career of crime-writing that only goes on to become more refined from here… Yokomizo is a fantastic plotter, I only never felt he was at his best in his debut.