ボクの事件簿

I really should stop doing announcements of upcoming announcements, because it always leaves me with next to nothing to say with the actual announcement...

So yeah, I have little to add to my previous post, but to say that Takemaru ABIKO's The 8 Mansion Murders (original Japanese title: 8 no Satsujin) is now finally available as both a trade paperback and e-book, translated by me and published by Locked Room International. The previous shin honkaku mystery novels brought by LRI were obviously inspired by Agatha Christie (The Decagon House Murders) and Ellery Queen (The Moai Island Puzzle), while also having their own, distinct voice: The 8 Mansion Murders continues that trend of building on the context of Golden Age mystery fiction, but within a modern, setting as the impossible murders committed with a crossbow within a curious 8-shaped house invoke clearly the spirit of John Dickson Carr, which is even emphasized with a genuine Locked Room Lecture. The 8 Mansion Murders is also by far the funniest novel I've translated until now, but don't let the comedy fool ya! Publishers Weekly said in its starrred review the book is "one of the funniest and cleverest novels of its type to hit the English-language market in years."

ABIKO was the third author to debut from the Kyoto University Mystery Club, after Yukito AYATSUJI (The Decagon House Murders) and Rintaro NORIZUKI ('The Lure of the Green Door') (ARISUGAWA Alice was also a student in Kyoto, but he was at Doshisha University). ABIKO's career in the mystery genre expands beyond novels, as he was also the mastermind behind the epoch-making Kamaitachi no Yoru videogame for the Super Famicomin the mid-90s, changing the form of mystery games (an English-language localized version titled Banshee's Last Cry is available on iOS/Android). TheStarship Damrey (3DS) and 428 - Shibuya Scramble (first English release in 2018) are some other games he worked on that are available in English, but The 8 Mansion Murders will be the first time one of his novels is published in English translation.

For those who have read LRI's earlier releases of (shin) honkaku mystery novels: you probably know what you can expect, so why wait? For those who haven't yet: I actually think this is the most accessible one until now. Like with the other novels, there are a lot of references to classic mystery fiction, but the banter of the characters in The 8 Mansion Murders is really funny to read and the main impossible mysteries are a blast.

And that's it for today's service announcement. I hope you'll enjoy The 8 Mansion Murders!

"In a few minutes, this famous cartoonist will be dead. Who killed him? Was it the ambitious lettering man? The layout expert? The background artist? The figure specialist? His disillusioned secretary? Or was it someone else? Match wits with Ellery Queen, and see if you can guess who done it!"

"The Comic Book Crusader"

My own earliest experiences with the mystery genre were through visual media. Series and direct-to-TV films like Scooby Doo! Where Are You?, Agatha Christie's Poirot and the four animated adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes novels are some of my earliest memories of the mystery genre. And while I did read mystery novels by writers like Christie and LeBlanc before, I only really started reading mystery fiction after I started with mystery manga like Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo. So for me, there has always been a very intimate link between mystery fiction and the visual format, and I absolutely love it when mystery fiction makes full use of its medium. Mystery fiction in the form of comics (manga) and animation for example are fantastic in bringing certain clues, like colors or intricate floorplans, or insane murder tricks that are difficult to reproduce in real life, with the amazing Detective Conan episode Noroi no Kamen wa Tsumetaku Warau as a good example. It's for this reason that I have always kept a good eye on various puzzle plot mystery comics, as I am quite aware of the possibilities they offer over the written word in regards to our favorite genre. In fact, I think of the regular mystery bloggers around here, I'm probably the one who looks at these things the most often.

For people interested in mystery manga however, an amazing book and absolute must-read has been released recently. Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi ("Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar", 2018) collects a series of very informative columns by mystery critic Fukui Kenta, originally written for publisher Tokyo Sogensha's Web Mysteries! web magazine. The columns have been edited and updated for this book release, so even those who have read them will find this book very informative. In the two-hundred or so pages of this volume, Fukui presents an incredibly comprehensive history of mystery manga published in Japan, spanning the period from after World War II until the present. As for the question of how comprehensive this book is: Fukui introduces over 800 different titles within this volume, so you are absolutely sure to come across a manga title you never heard of.

Fukui's "seminar" on mystery comics traces a chronological line of mystery manga in Japan, focusing on publishing history. The book is roughly divided in two halves, each comprising of two sections. The first half focuses on comic adaptations of mystery fiction both domestic and foreign. Fukui's story starts with the earliest comic adaptations of Edogawa Rampo's Shounen Tantei Dan series in the fifties, of which there were quite a lot. The many Rampo titles mentioned here not only show the popularity of Rampo's series among the younger public, they are also the first in a long line of novel adaptations. Of particular interest is the part on the comic adaptations of Yokomizo Seishi's work, in particular the novel Yatsu Haka Mura. While I was already quite aware of a "Yokomizo Boom" in the 1970s, when his work's popularity suddenly exploded with pocket re-releases and the live-action film adaptations by Ichikawa Kon, I had no idea that the Yokomizo Boom started with comics! Apparently, the immense popularity of comic adaptations of Yokomizo's work was what convinced publisher Kadokawa Haruki to publish pocket re-releases of Yokomizo's novels in the first place, and what led to Inugamike no Ichizoku becoming the first theatrical film produced by the then brand-new Kadokawa Pictures, which is still one of the four major film studios to this day. Fukui continues tracing the release history of various authors and titles, domestic and foreign, from these earliest successes to the present. Interesting notes of interest include for example the TOMO Comics Masterpiece Mystery series, which included adaptations of books like Crispin's The Moving Toyshop or Futrelle's The Thinking Machine, the part on popular adaptations of contemporary works like Yonezawa Honobu's Classic Literature Club (Hyouka) series and the part solely devoted to Sherlock Holmes and Lupinadaptations. Note however that few of these were monster hits though. The 70s ~ early 90s in particular saw many releases that... just were.

The second half of Fukui's seminar focuses on original mystery manga, and is roughly divided in two parts: the period before the mega-hit series Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo, Detective Conan and QED, and after. The section on original mystery manga before the 70s does not provide many surprises: I already knew that many series back then weren't really about solving a mystery, but more like spy stories, with the "detective" acting as an agent fighting crime. Examples cited are for example Tezuka's work (like Chief Detective Ken-1). The period from the 70s until the mega-hits is interesting though, and it makes so much sense in hindsight. Apparently, mystery manga series with longer runtimes started mostly in the magazines aimed at female readership, with for example Puzzle Game☆ High School as one of the longest running mystery manga ever (with the original series running from 1983 until 2001, and spin-offs/sequels still being published today). These female-oriented magazines also published many one-shot mystery stories. As I mentioned, this makes quite a lot of sense in hindsight, as the 70s and 80s were also the time when horror manga genre for girls really exploded, and the horror and mystery genres have always been very close. For those interested in the history of mystery manga, I think this pre-Kindaichi Shounen/Conan/QED period holds many interesting titles, and I definitely dotted down some titles I want to read.

While the other "lectures" (chapters) in Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi are all focused on either time periods or themes, Fukui dedicates three chapters to three specific titles. As mentioned, Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo, Detective Conan and QED together symbolize the watershed moment for mystery manga in the early 1990s (some years after the shin honkaku movement started in literary world). Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo was the first classically-styled mystery manga series with a built-in Challenge to the Reader, which also became a big hit with live-action adaptations (the first drama series starring KinKi Kids' Doumoto Tsuyoshi and Tomosaka Rie was a big hit on TV). Detective Conan was created as a direct answer to the success of Kindaichi Shounen and became even bigger, reaching incredible audience numbers (Detective Conan: The Crimson Love-Letterwas 2017's best grossing Japanese film. Not just animated or mystery: the best grossing domestic film in general). Personally, I never really got into QED and its spin-offs, though I'm aware of its popularity (you don't run for as long as QED if it were just an average series). Even so Fukui manages to point out interesting points for someone like me, like how author Katou studied architecture in college and how he uses that in his plotting. Spin-offs and related titles are also discussed in their respective chapters by the way, so series like Tantei Gakuen Q, Magic Kaito and CMB are also discussed.

The remaining lectures focus on original mystery manga after the watershed moment. Not all of these were big success of course: magazine Shounen Jump's direct reaction to Shounen Magazine's Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo& QED and Shounen Sunday's Detective Conan's immense successes as mystery manga was the short-lived Karakurizoushi Ayatsuri Sakon, but that never really made a lasting impression. An interesting point made is how in the late 2000s and early 2010s, we saw the uprise of mystery manga with detectives with very specific fields of specialty, like Kuitan (food) orReizouko Tantei (refrigerators). Fukui also looks at mystery manga with specific themes or audiences, like mystery manga aimed a younger public, or those that mix science-fiction with the mystery genre. Of particular interest are the lectures on "logic game" mystery manga and manga created by mystery authors. The latter is obvious, as we have many authors who write novels who nowadays also write for comics (like Ayatsuji Yukito and Sasaki Noriko's Tsukidate no Satsujin). The 'logic game' mystery genre is one that has really boomed the last decade or so, with Death Note and LiarGame being excellent examples: mystery manga that focus on characters trying to outsmart each other using clearly defined 'game' rules.Mahjong and gambling manga also fall within this genre, as these series too often revolve around surprising use of game rules to outwit the opponent.

If I had to voice a complaint about Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi, it'd be that the book focuses very closely on publication history, meaning that most titles mentioned in this book are really only mentioned (and perhaps followed by one short sentence saying whether it's good or not). Many sections of this book are just lists of titles, so those who want to learn more about certain titles will have to do some digging themselves too. As Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi is about publication history, it does help if the reader has some rudimentary knowledge about manga publication history in general, because some trends and connections are more easily recognized. The book itself doesn't provide much context if you're not familiar with that. Don't expect this book to explain what kashihon are for example and what they meant for the Japanese manga market in general, as it assumes you know. The Japanese comic industry also has some major differences in terms of serialization and publication practices if compared to for example the European or the US comic industry, and being aware of the characteristics of the Japanese industry naturally helps when reading Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi.

That said though, it is undeniable that Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi is a seminal work for this genre. An amazing amount of titles have been researched for this book, and by categorizing these titles by release year and original publication magazines/lines, Fukui manages to point out trends in the development of the mystery manga genre in Japan, with the genre responding to both internal and external stimuli. The indexes are a godsend too, as they are divided in both titles and authors. The comprehensive framework sketched in Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemimakes this a must-read for anyone who wants to seriously write about the topic of mystery manga and I myself can't wait to read new, exciting research on this topic built on the foundation laid out in Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi.

Original Japanese title(s): 福井健太『本格ミステリ漫画ゼミ』

運命のルーレット廻して

アレコレ深く考えるのはMystery

「運命のルーレット廻して」（Zard）

Turn the roulette of destiny

It's a mystery why I think so deeply about everything

"Turn the Roulette of Destiny" (Zard)

In my review of the very amusing 3DS mystery game Detective Pikachu, I talked about the trend of episodic videogames: a videogame that is like a single episode of a longer series. An episodic game is considerably shorter than the usual videogame (and also cheaper, of course), but also a part of a larger, contineous series. These games are therefore released in a more frequent schedule than conventional videogames. This format is somewhat similar to the serialization of novels as an ongoing service with a limited schedule, but with key differences: episodic videogames can stand on their own for the most part, while installments in serializations are usually not standalone and simply excerpts from a longer story. An episodic videogame is ideally both vital part to the whole series, but should also feature its own storyline that is mostly resolved within that particular episode.

Buddy Collection is an episodic mystery videogame developed by Narutorikku. At the time of writing this review, the first two episodes of five have been released on PC, iOS and Android (for free!), but last month, an enhanced version of the first episode was also released on the Nintendo Switch (not free!), with the new extended title Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- ("Buddy Collection If -The Red String of Fate-", 2018). The game starts with the female protagonist awakening in the hospital, suffering from amnesia. The girl, Nagisa, is told she's a student at a special high school for detectives, with the curriculum not only including theory classes on various topics of use for detectives, but also practice classes where the students get to work on real cases (you need to earn credits to be able to take on real cases). Nagisa lost her memory while investigating a case, but that was not the only thing she lost, as she also lost her "buddy": the school works with a buddy system, where two students have to work together on cases, but her buddy has disappeared now. While Nagisa belongs in the Special A Class, she is now moved to the E Class so she can recover from her ordeal. Her first school assignment is a three-day "camp" to practice on closed circle murders: she and three other E Class students are locked up in a special underground complex made for these classes, and they are to role-play a closed circle murder situation, with their teacher playing the victim in what appears to be an impossible murder. The students are assigned roles and have to deduce who the murderer is and how it was done, while the teacher plays the game master when not playing dead. However, the next morning the students find their teacher has really been murdered, hanging high up in the sky from red threads from the ceiling of the underground complex, precisely like the scenario in their role-playing game. With the doors to the surface being locked, the player has to take up the role of Nagisa, wisely pick out a new buddy and find out who the murderer is.

Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- is marketed as a lite-otome& mystery novel game, which probably needs some explaining for some readers here. First of all: a novel game (also known as sound novel or visual novel) is basically a digital Choose-Your-Own-Adventure: you are mostly reading a linear story, but once in a while, you'll be presented with choices, which lead to branching storylines. In order to reach the end of the game, you need to find the correct route (combination of choices), as a wrong choice/branch storyline usually leads to a game over screen. The novel game genre has a long history with mystery games and I have reviewed a few of them here on the blog (for example Kamaitachi no Yoru, 428, Machi and Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P). In Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito-, you'll be solving the case through these CYOA-esque choices, with some choices/branching storylines leading to vital clues or evidence (or you missing them by making the wrong choice) and sometimes you have to decide on your next step. While it sometimes can feel a bit like random guessing, as you never really know where a certain choice will lead you until you actually select one, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- actually does a good job of giving the player a good chance of making it through the game alive in one go if they pay attention. The correct choices are quite logical, and it never feels like you need to make a random choice that surprisingly turns out to be the good one.

I also said this game is a lite-otome game: otome games are story-driven videogames targeted towards women, that usually focus on a protagonist developing a romantic relationship with one of the eligable characters (within the context of the story). These games usually take hints from various game genres, like simulation games (gotta level up those parameters to impress the guy you want!) or novel games (making certain choices to develop the relationship). Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- is very lite-otome, as early on in the story, Nagisa has to choose a new buddy from one of the three other E Class students. This leads to three Buddy Routes, where you mostly interact with your chosen buddy and where you learn a bit more about their personalities and background stories. These three buddies also each have their own working styles, so the mystery plot also changes slightly depending on which buddy you choose, though all three routes will eventually bring you to the same conclusion. Basically think of it of having to choose between Watson, Hastings or Goodwin at the start of the story, with the ending being the same, but the way towards the conclusion being slightly different because of the different personalities. It bring some replayability to the game, as once you have chosen a particular Buddy Route, you won't learn much about the others, inviting you to try the other routes too.

As a mystery game, Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- is a short, but ultimately fairly satisfying experience. The mystery plot is a bit simple perhaps, especially as some of the choices you have to make to proceed in the story are bit obvious (Choice 1: Expected. Choice 2: Not Surprising. Choice 3: OBVIOUSLY SIGNIFICANT CHOICE), but the story is adequately clewed and due to some of the characters' personalities, things become far more exciting that you'd first expect. But as this is an episodic game, there are also quite some issues that aren't resolved within this episode, as they'll be addressed in subsequent episodes (for example, the mystery of how Nagisa lost her memories in the first place is left unanswered, and even the motive for the culprit in this first episode is still rather ambiguous, suggesting it will be explained later).

This enhanced version on the Switch added the word If to the title, indicating it was more than a simple port from the original (free) version on PC/iOS/Android. Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- adds a new short storyline, with two new buddies. This storyline titled Detectives VS Culprits is a parallel world to the main storyline (it happens instead of the main storyline) and has the students participate in a variation of the Werewolf/Mafia party game, with two students playing the "Culprits" who have to kill a detective each night, and each day, the Detectives, including the Culprits who pretend to be Detectives too, have to execute someone they suspect is a Culprit. The Culprits win when they outnumber the Detectives, and the Detectives win if they execute all the Culprits. It's a short and entertaining story that shows some of the characters from the main storyline in new ways, but it's also a really mean storyline, in the sense that unlike the main storyline, it is intentionally designed to trip the player up at every corner. The game actually warns you before you begin, but it's basically throwing many, many choices at you that almost all lead to a game over screen, so it's quite difficult to find the correct route here (especially as I encountered a recurring game bug that either froze the game or booted me back to the title screen at a certain point in the story).

While those bugs late in the game were quite annoying, I did have fun Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- though, even if it was a very short-lived experience (two, three hours?). The mystery plot, while simple, betrays the love of the creators for the mystery fiction genre, and this first episode hits just the right notes of both providing a story that can stand on its own, but that also invites you to play the other episodes to find out more about the overall storyline. I for one hope the other episodes will be released soon too.

Original Japanese titles(s): 『Buddy Collection if -宿命の赤い糸-』

As I peruse the mystery blogs and the comments on the posts, I have noticed a trend among both bloggers and commenters that seems to suggest that most people seem to prefer the full-length novel over the short story. For me, it is quite the opposite. If I had to choose between the two forms, I'd definitely go with the short form. We're not talking about specific novels or short stories here by the way, I am merely talking about the format, so yeah, I might miss out on reading specific titles, I find that in general, I enjoy the brief form better when it comes to mystery fiction.

If I had to word my motivation, which is probably what I should do on a blog, I'd say it's because as a consumer of mystery fiction, I usually focus mostly on the core mystery plot: what is the mystery, what is the solution, and what is the logical thinking process behind the route from mystery to solution? If you read the reviews on this blog, you will notice that most of the time, I will be talking about the core plot. What were the dynamics behind that locked room mystery? Was the solution a complete original, an original variation on something familiar, or perhaps an uninspired rehash? Was the perfect alibi trick really possible done like that? Was the everyday life mystery alluring enough without being too out-of-the-ordinary? Was the clewing adequate enough for the reader to have a fair chance, or was there perhaps an incredibly subtly hidden, original clue? Was the logical process leading to the solution doable, and adequately clewed, or was it only possible if you had knowledge of a super-obscure piece of trivia, or was the jump from the clues to the solution too big? It's these things that I look for when consuming a mystery story in whatever medium it may be, and my memories of stories also tend to focus on that: "Oh yeah, that was that story where the murderer, victim, detective and witness all turned out to be the same person!" or something like that. Characterization and atmosphere are elements that can add to my enjoyment of a mystery story, but there are relatively low on my priority list.

Short stories, due to their limited format, usually excel at focusing at the core mystery plot. They need to be word-efficient, and there is no time for the plot to be moseying around for philosophic moments, scenery-chewing or over-endulging in side-plots. There has to be a mystery, there need to be clues, there needs to be a solution. By the time that's all in, a short story is usually already almost done, and then it's up to the author to carefully add in some salt and pepper, or perhaps remove a bit of the garnish to finish up their dish. So for someone like, the short story is ideal, as its priorities are the same as mine as a reader.

There are of course mystery plots that don't do well in short story form, as they need the extended runtime to perform best. To be as cheeky as to refer to a work I translated: The Decagon House Murders's core plot wouldn't have worked in a short story form, as the misdirection that is set-up in this novel really needs the runtime to have full effect. But in general, I think that if we reduce a mystery novel to its core mystery plot, you'd find that most of them would work as well, or even better in short form, if we're talking solely about presenting a mystery story. Many novels have a core mystery plot, like some trick or a concept, that would also be wonderful for a short story, but which are then extended with subplots, or uninspired red herrings and misdirection. You might have a locked room mystery for example, and that one suspect who acts all suspicious and whom the police investigates thorougly until they find out he not only had a grudge with the victim, but that he's also a stage magician and after a chase and a shoot-out and more, we find out at the end that this suspect had nothing whatsoever to do with the locked room mystery and that nothing of his subplot mattered to the core plot. In these cases, the core plot really doesn't need all the subplots to work properly, and could perhaps fit in a short story.

Another thing that happens often is that there's a second or a third murder, and that usually wouldn't fit in a short story naturally. But these subsequent mysteries are seldom really connected to the core mystery plot, when seen abstractly. To get back to my hypothetical locked room mystery, perhaps it is followed by a second locked room murder, with the victim being someone who happened to witness the murderer doing something suspicious. In this case, the two murders might connected at a story-level (motive), but they aren't necessarily at a mystery-plot level. Unless the first locked room murder trick must produce a witness for it to work for example, the two locked room murders could work independently, in different stories. Earlier, I reviewed Mitsuda Shinzou's Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Monoand the Detective Conan episodes titled Koureikai W Misshitsu Jiken, and praised them as fantastic examples of synergy in mystery stories: both stories consisted of multiple impossible murders, but what made them exceptional was that in both stories, these were not discrete events at the mystery plot level: each seperate mystery was intertwined with the other, and they needed each other to actually work. Seperating them was impossible, as they were connected at the core. Nikaidou Reito's monsterous lengthy novel Jinroujou no Kyoufu has quite some fluff, as it's four-times-seven-hundred pages long, but now I think about, a large number of the impossible murders that occur there also only work because of the existence of the other murders. This concept of synergy however is not common in mystery fiction. Usually, you only have seperate modules placed one after another, that can easily be disconnected as there's no real link between the previous mystery or the next mystery. So often when I read a novel, I feel the core mystery plot (in this case, the locked room mystery) could've been reduced in short story form (perhaps spread across several stories) just as well.

Ironically though, I feel that the type of mystery stories that I like best don't do as well in short story form. I know prefer locked room mysteries (and other impossible mysteries),but I often think those often work better in short story form. In comparison, I usually consider the Queen-esque, ratiocination-based whodunit stories the pinnacle of the genre, but they usually don't fare as well in short form. As I explained in a post on clues in mystery fiction, these type of mysteries usually want you to identify a large number of characteristics of the culprit, and then have you scavenge the text to see which suspects answer the description. Such mysteries have you for example deduce that the murderer was right-handed, that they had to know about a certain fact before a certain moment and they had to have access to the murder weapon, and then you search for clues that show what the dominant hand is for each suspect, and whether there's a part that proves they knew about the fact or not, etcetera. As these stories are not as focused on mechanics like locked room mysteries, but more on contextual clues, these stories thrive by having longer texts, as they help the misdirection and possibilities for clewing. There are of course also short stories that focus on ratiocination in this style (like for example Aosaki Yuugo's shorts), but in general, I think the real masterpieces of this style work better in novel form. An interesting example of both these points might be The Moai Island Puzzle (yes, shameless self-promotion here): I can easily imagine the locked room mystery of this novel as a short story, but the other mystery core (which is solved through a long deduction chain based on characteristics and actions) works because all the clues are spread across a long text.

The second point of irony here is of course that this post on short stories has become far longer than I had planned. There's still some more I'd want to talk about, like the interlinked short story collections (where the short stories are linked by an overall storyline) as seen in videogames like Gyakuten Saiban /Ace Attorney or in the works by writers like Awasaka or Yamada, but perhaps that's something for in the comments. Anyway, I'd love to hear some thoughts on the short VS long form for mystery fiction!

「オレは今、オレ自身の２つの問題で精いっぱいさ。コーヒーはなぜ、黒いのか？そして‥‥なぜ、ニガいのか‥‥？」

『逆転裁判3』

"Right now, I have my hands full with my own two questions. Why is coffee black? And why... is it so bitter...?"

"Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations"

Coffee is something I don't see as much as a tasteful beverage, but more like a practical drink for its caffeine. Ice coffee however is a completely different story, as I love that.

Famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is asked by the famous scientist Sir Claud Amory to come by his house as he is facing a problem he himself can not solve. Amory had created a formula for a new explosive, but then he discovers that someone in his house has stolen it, probably to sell to a foreign agent willing to pay much for it and he needs Poirot's grey cells to figure out who did it. By the time Poirot and Hastings arrive at stately Amory manor though, it's been too late: Sir Claud had been poisoned through his black coffee. Was it the thief of the formula who murdered the man, or was there another person intent at taking the inventor's life? Hoping to at least help Sir Claud in his death, Poirot decides to investigate the manner of Sir Claud's demise, as well as of the theft of the explosive formula in Charles Osborne's Black Coffee (1998).

Black Coffee was originally a play written by Agatha Christie herself in 1930 featuring her famous creation Poirot. The play was not very well-known among Poirot fans, but in 1998, Charles Osborn wrote a novelization of the play, giving Black Coffee new life. When I first heard about this book, I have to admit I was not very interested, as it was "just" a novelization by someone else, and even though the source material was by Christie herself, I have to admit I was never that much a fan of the other plays by her I knew (like The Mousetrap or the other Poirot plays). Of course, now we're several years later and as I know all the other Poirot stories now, I thought that perhaps trying Black Coffee out could not hurt (yes, I know, I didn't exactly go in with really high expectations).

That said though, there is very little to say about Black Coffee, as it is an incredibly simple story, and even in novel-form you feel it was made for the theater. The whole set-up (Poirot being called to find a thief/murderer among a small household) reminds a lot of the Poirot short stories The Under Dog and The Incredible Theft, and Black Coffee is basically simply another variation on that theme. In terms of scale, Black Coffee is also barely a short story worth of plot, so that strengthens the similarities between these stories. As a mystery story, Black Coffee is nothing special at all, which is once again something this story shares with the Poirot stories mentioned, as I suspect few view them as the highlights of the Poirot short stories. Christie for example makes use of a device in regards to the whereabouts of the formula that was probably already old and over-used when this story was written and most of the rest of the tale consists of Poirot asking people questions that don't seem to lead anywhere. Black Coffee is definitely not Christie gold.

I can't compare the novelization to the original play, but you definitely can tell that this story was originally a play. Most of the story takes place inside the room where the murder took place, with all the characters moving in and out of the room to suit the plot. Of course, every time a person is all alone in the room, they'll act suspiciously for no apparent reader but to show the reader they're suspicious, I guess the novelization is probably faithful to the play in this regard, and it shows it respects the source material, but I had definitely preferred some more variety. This is a novel, so you don't need to incorporate every element of the play, especially if it's something that probably only exists because of the limitations of a medium. One might say that the final solution with Poirot works better if the whole story is set in the same room, but I don't think the effect is weakened that much if we'd see even a bit more of the outside world, and in any case, the prologue is in fact set outside the room (in Poirot's apartment to be exact), so I don't think it would've hurt that much.

I had hoped I'd be able to write something more substantial about Black Coffee, but there's so little I can say about it. Black Coffee is a full novel, but the core plot mystery is just barely enough for a short story in truth, as it's quite simple and nothing special, and certainly not something I'd consider a Christie classic (and she has written some great short stories!). The novelization is also, I suspect, quite faithful to the original play in being mainly set in one location, but this again strengthens the feeling of this being a short story being dragged out to a full novel. had this been a short story, Black Coffee would've been a mediocre effort of a mystery story. As a full novel, it's simply tedious and nothing special, and not even Poirot and Hastings can save it.

I will well and faithfully serve Her Majesty and Her Heirs and Successors according to law as a police officer, I will obey, uphold and maintain the laws of the Colony of Hong Kong, I will execute the powers and duties of my office honestly, faithfully and diligently without fear or favour to any person and with malice or ill will towards none, and I will obey without question any lawful orders of those set in authority over me.

"Hong Kong Police Oath"

I myself have also worked on books with titles that aren't straight translations from the original source title, but with slightly different titles, but sometimes, the change in titles of translated versions seems rather... extreme, and there's not even a hint of the original title left. What's even more vexing is when the original title can't even be found on the copyright page....

In the five decades of his life that Superintendent Kwan Chun-dok had dedicated to the Hong Kong Police Force, the man had acquired the reputation of having the best mind in the whole force, with his colleagues referring to him with nicknames like the "Crime-solving machine", "Eye of Heaven" or "Genius Detective". Kwan had seen it all: from the 1967 leftist riots of those who opposed British colonial rule, to the showdown with the two Shek brothers, the most wanted criminals in the late eighties and the uprise of technology and information as weapons used by the underworld in the new millenium. Even after the official end of his career, Kwan Chun-dok remained retained by the Hong Kong Police Force as a consultant, as his analytical gifts were too precious to give up. And even on his death bed, Kwan seems to be invaluable to the Hong Kong Police Force. As Inspector Lok seeks the help of his mentor one last time in what seems to be an unsolvable case, we also turn back in time to see some of Kwan's past exploits in Chan Ho-Kei's 2014 novel 13.67, which has been released in English as The Borrowed.

How susceptible are you for hype? Chan Ho-Kei's 13.67 from Taiwan was published last year in Japanese, and it was extremely well received with both mystery readers and authors, and saw loads of authors like Ayatsuji Yukito heap praise upon the novel. Seeing the title pop up all the time of course piqued my interest, and I learned the book had already been available in English for about two years with the completely different title The Borrowed, while it was also available in various European languages (often with the title Hongkong Noir). It was also then that I realized that I actually already had a book lying around by Chan Ho-Kei, the Hong Kong-born, but Taiwan-located author who also goes by the English name Simon Chan. The Man Who Sold The World (2011) had won the second Soji Shimada Award and my own take on the book was that it was an okay, but not exceptional mystery novel that did had an interesting, not-often seen setting with Hong Kong, so while I was not completely sold on Chan's mysteries, I was still planning to read 13.67/The Borrowed some time. And some time is now.

And to start with the conclusion: this is indeed a great interlinked short story collection! The original title 13.67 refers to the five decades worth of Kwan's adventures the reader is presented with: the first story is set in the year 2013, and each subsequent story jumps back in time, to an earlier period in Kwan's long career, until it ends back in 1967, in the formative years of Kwan as a detective. This plot device of the reverse chronology really gives this book its flavor: the first time we see Kwan, he's in his dying days, but we do learn about his reputation. Each following story jumps back in time and in his career, telling us more about him and his working methods. It's also neat to see characters or references pop up as we go back in time: in the 2013 story for example, we see Inspector Lok as a capable detective who would make his mentor proud, but as we return back in time we see how he was in his rookie days. Or what at first seems to be an off-hand reference to some exploit in Kwan's past career suddenly turns out to be the subject of the next story in real time. As we jump back in time, we also see Hong Kong change of course, and technological advancements are also rewinded, resulting in interesting, differing conditions per story.

What makes The Borrowed really a satisfying read is how it really succeeds in marrying the social school of mystery fiction with the classic puzzle plot. The reverse chronology is a way for Chan to show the tumultuous history of Hong Kong: sociopolitical issues like (Western) British citizens living in Hong Kong, the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong and the aforementioned 1967 Leftist Riots play an integral part in the stories, and they provide unique backgrounds and motives. But while Chan does delve into these unique socio-historical issues to Hong Kong, he doesn't forget to actually plot and clew a proper mystery. While the presentation of these stories are definitely set in the social school's distinct realism, the actual core mystery plots are what you'd expect from classic puzzle plot stories, with ingenious tricks used by criminal masterminds and a great police detective in the form of Kwan who calmly analyzes all the clues available and reasons his way to the solution.

The Borrowed is brimming with variation, as Chan skilfully uses the changing time periods of his stories to write different type of mystery stories. The opening story for example, The Truth Between Black and White, has Superintendent Kwan bed-ridden and in a coma when Inspector Lok gathers all the suspects of what seems to be an-inside-job-made-to-look-like-robbery inside Kwan's hospital room. As Kwan himself can't directly communicate anymore, a special device that can read brain waves is attached to his head, allowing the man to move a cursor to either YES or NO on a display. What follows is a unique kind of armchair detective story, as Kwan has to lead Inspector Lok's investigation while only being able to indicate YES or NO. While the scale of the conclusion of this murder case is a bit big for an opening story I think, it serves as an interesting introduction to the character of Kwan.

And as I said, one thing this book definitely offers is diversity. Prisoner's Honour (set in 2003) for example deals with what might become a gang war between two rivaling triads and the attack on a female pop singer enjoying the patronage of one of the triad bosses. While this might sound like some hardboiled gangster movie story with the police desperately trying to keep things in control, the conclusion provides a surprisingly logical solution to the problem. The fifth story, Borrowed Place (set in 1977) on the other hand deals with the kidnapping of a British child for ransom money, while the finale story deals with some bomb terrorists in the 1967 Leftist Riots. Both stories too are good examples of stories that you wouldn't immediately connect to a properly clewed puzzle plot mystery based on the premise alone, but that do manage to scrath that itchy craving for logical puzzle plots perfectly.

The best stories are the two in the middle: The Longest Day (1997) starts with the escape of the convicted Shek Boon-tim during a hospital visit. It was Kwan who got him in prison years ago, but it seems Shek was intent on sullying Kwan's last day before his retirement. While the Hong Kong Police Force is busy looking for the feared criminal, Kwan's disciple Lok is also busy working on a series of acid attacks in Hong Kong, with an unknown person throwing acid at unsuspecting shoppers from flat building roofs. The deductions of Kwan of how Shek managed to escape his guards and then elude the police chasers are properly clewed, while he also manages to make sense out of Lok's case. The Balance of Themis is set in 1989 and also involves the Shek brothers. In 1989, the (then Royal) Hong Kong Police Force was staking out the Ka Fai Mansions, as they knew younger brother Shek Boon-sing was hiding in a room there with two other accomplices, awaiting the arrival and orders of the gang's mastermind Shek Boon-tim. But somehow the gang found out they were being observed, and in the subsequent shoutout in the building, not only all three criminals were shot dead, but also six innocent bystanders, and policemen were also injured. Not only had the stake-out turned into a total failure, it appears there was a mole within the police, as in the following investigation, a handwritten note was found in the gang's hang-out that warned the criminals to flee at once, turning this into an Internal Affairs matter. The story has some neat "historical" touches (the uses of pagers by the criminals!) and the way Kwan deduces who the mole was and how they were involved with the whole plot is great, leading to more than a few surprises.

So I'm happy to say 13.67/The Borrowed turned out to be a very satisfying read. Chan manages to provide a lot of variety within this volume, both by using the unique setting of Hong Kong throughout various periods to present a stage that probably feels fresh to a lot of people, but also by writing clever puzzle plot mysteries that are firmly set within these changing time periods: the mystery plots not only utilize the time period both as a 'background' for flavor, but also by addressing issues that are unique to the time. The result is a novel that keeps on surprising the reader until the very end. I think the book's also very accessible for a variety of readers: I myself really focused on the puzzle plots, but with its focus on the police force and the Hong Kong underworld, there's also plenty here for people who like police procedural or hardboiled mystery fiction, and the unique background of Hong Kong is certain to entertain people who enjoy the socio-cultural aspects of mystery fiction.

Original Taiwanese title: "13.67"

"Wait a minute, let me get this straight: Twice came in and shot the teller and Jim Fell."

- "No, he only shot the teller, Jim Johnson. Fell is ill."

"Okay, then after he shot the teller, you shot Twice"

- "No, I only shot once"

"Twice is the hold up man"

- "Then I guess I did shoot Twice."

"Police Squad!"

Though the uprise of e-books is certainly noticable in Japan, it's always been a strong place for physical book releases, which is why it's not that uncommon for publishers to go just a bit further than a standard book release. For example, it's not that rare for manga (which are usually printed in greytones) to include one or two pages printed in color on better quality paper. Or for us mystery-readers: the fold-out map! Sometimes, when a diagram for a mystery story is just too large to be printed on one page, or too detailed to for a normal two-page spread (because it's hard to tell what's on the inside margins), publishers will print the diagram on a double-sized page with a fold. Other neat little things I've seen with physical releases is for example the use of different fonts for different narratives within a novel (something not possible with a lot of e-books as usually you can't have different fonts for different sections within one e-book), or even the use of different-colored paper for different narratives (the Japanese deluxe edition of the fantastic horror-manga The Drifting Classroom uses different colored pages depending on whether the part's about Earth, or the other world). The latter is of course something that no e-book can even hope to replicate, and while my experience with them is fairly limited to standard releases, I don't think many publishers working with a print-on-demand model can really pull something similar off.

One of the more interesting things I've seen Japanese publishers pull off are the 'sealed pages': in these releases, two pages are left uncut during the printing process, resulting in a sort of envelope which "seals" all the pages between those two pages. So it's up to the reader themselves to unseal them by cutting the pages open. I've seen this used in two novels in Higashino Keigo's Kaga Kyouchirou series for example (though technically, the sealed pages for both Dochiraka Ga Kanojo wo Koroshita and Watashi ga Kare wo Koroshitaare for the post-novel commentary and not part of the novel itself), but also in the gamebook Famicom Tantei Club: Kieta Koukeisha for example. There's something really exciting about these sealed pages: the act of actually cutting open these pages to reveal what's inside feels special. Are you really ready to do this? Once you've cut them, you can't go back! It gives a book a once-in-a-lifetime experience and obviously, buying the same book used (and cut) won't give you the same sensation as cutting the pages yourself.

Ashibe Taku's Double Mystery (2016) is an interesting novel that also makes use of the sealed pages, but in an even more alluring way. As the title suggests, Double Mystery is about two mysteries, told in two distinct stories. The gimmick behind this book is that you can start from either side of the book: if you start from the normal side (that is, from right to left), you'll start with the whodunnit Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel. Should you however choose to start from the 'back' (from the left side), then you'll start with the suspense story Non-serial Killer. Anyway, you can start at either side, but both tales end in the middle of the book, where you'll find the solution to both stories within a set of sealed pages, which you of course are invited to cut open and read once you have read both stories.

Books and literature are a prevalent theme throughout Ashibe's work: sometimes it's a bibliomystery, sometimes it's a parody or pastiche of some Golden Age detective, and at other times his stories feature countless of references to literature or historical events and facts, but "texts" are something you always have to keep in mind when reading Ashibe's work, and as a fellow bibliophile, I certainly am often very much entertained by his stories. So the concept of Double Mystery, a mystery novel that actually makes use of its own medium as a physical book, allowing you read from either end and with sealed pages in the middle, is something that makes me very excited. I can imagine someone less into "books" as a medium might simply shrug and consider it's a mere gimmick, but I absolutely love mystery tales that actually make use of the unique characteristics of the medium, be it books, audio dramas, videogames or basically anything. In that regard, I'd give Double Mystery full points, as you simply don't see these kind of attractive ideas often anymore in today's market.

As the two stories come together in the middle, and the solution to both stories are sealed within the same set of pages, it doesn't take a genius to realize that the two narratives are indeed connected to each other, but arriving at the precise relation between the two stories might prove quite tricky. The recommended reading order by the way is to start with Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel and then continue to Non-serial Killer before you go to the ending, though the reverse order is also possible if you want a more tricker reading order, the book says, so that's what I did. The two sides are both fairly short by the way, more novelettes than full-fledged novels.

Non-serial Killer is touted as a suspense story and consists of the (private) online diary entries by "Bluewildpear", a freelance journalist for Independent News Agency. When the father of the baby she was carrying died in a car accident after being overworked, Bluewildpear was naturally sad, but still: she had already broken up with him because she didn't think he'd be any good as a father, so it wasn't as dramatic as some might've thought. Kenta might've been a nice man and he might've been sincere when he said he was going to do better now, but the work he did at the film production company Fantascope Co. showed all she needed to know about his future prospects. But Bluewildpear's interests are piqued when she learns that more people working at Fantascope had died in accidents recently from what appeared to be overwork, from a gifted animator to a producer. She starts to think that these might not be simply accidents after all and starts digging, and slowly she figures out there's something connecting all these people. What's funny by the way is that the text here is printed horizontally, from left to right (Western convention) like you'd normally see on a Japanese website, while the other story is printed with the lines vertically from top to bottom, like most Japanese fiction is written.

In Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel, attorney Morie Shunsaku is invited to a private viewing of a film that was thought to have been lost. The show will be held at the Chinese Lute Hotel, located on a tidal island, similar to Mont Saint-Michel. When Morie arrives at the hotel however, he learns that four other people were invited here too, but all for different reasons. By the time they realize they have been lured to the island, it's already too late: high tide has swallowed the road that connected the place to the mainland, making it into a true island (technically a car might make it through, but the salt of the sea water will ruin the car, so nobody wants to try it out). The one employee of the hotel has also disappeared, but in their stead the five guests find a sixth, unwanted guest: Judge Chidi'iwa. Morie knew the judge from the Nanase Incident, in which he as defense attorney more than sufficiently made it clear there was insufficient proof to convict his client, but where the judge still ruled a guilty verdict, all just to protect the 99.9% conviction rate of Japan's prosecutors. The judge's narrow-minded rulings had also ruined the lives of the loved-ones of the other four guests, and it's then that Morie realizes what is going on: in And Then There Were None ten people were lured to an island to be killed one by one, but here, five potential murderers were lured to an island to kill one and the same hated potential victim. And while Morie at first thinks it's impossible that normal people would suddenly resort to murder, he finds he's wrong when the judge is found hanged, and what's more, it appears that only Morie himself could've committed the murder!

So when you're done, you're clear to cut the sealed pages open and find out who the murderers are in both Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel and Non-serialKiller. While both stories are actually fairly simple (and Non-serial Killer isn't even a real whodunnit, but a suspense story)and there's no mindblowing trick performed here, I do have to say that Double Mystery does something neat with the double narrative structure. The two stories are obviously connected, by finding out how is done pretty interestingly, and the narrative of Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel in particular manages to pull of something that would've been impossible to in a normal, straightforward narrative, but works wonderfully in a split-up narrative. Could this only have been pulled off with two narratives that work towards the middle, instead of for example the two narratives one after another or with alternating chapters? I do not think so, but I do think the idea works better by having the actual physical seperation of the two narratives, so the way Double Mystery was printed is definitely the best way for this idea to work. The clewing in Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel is a bit lacking, in the sense that the jump from one admittedly good clue to the deduction of the decisive attribute of the murderer is rather big, but one the whole, I think that Double Mystery was quite enjoyable, that managed to elevate an okay, but short and simple mystery story to a higher level by making excellent use of the medium.

Double Mystery was thus an enjoyable read: while the core mystery plot might be not as grand as one might expect from the concept of this book, it's still a solid mystery that still makes meaningful use of the idea of having two seperate narratives and a sealed section. I can't deny that I had hoped for something even bigger, as the idea behind the book is absolutely fantastic, but I guess my expectations might've been unreasonably high. Still, the book itself managed to turn a mystery story that otherwise might've been less impressive into something bigger, and in the end, that for this story, this form might be the best and I can't deny it was a fun experience. I'd love to read more mystery stories that make use of the format!

Original Japanese title(s): 芦辺拓　『ダブル・ミステリ』

So in my review of Ashibe Taku's Double Mystery, I noted how it used the format of a physical book to bring an interesting experience: you could start from either side of the book, and it had a sealed section, which required you to cut the pages open yourself to reveal what was inside. With the ever-rising popularity of e-books, I really appreciated how the novel made use of certain qualities of the physical book which e-books couldn't imitate easily, and I mentioned a few other examples of neat ideas I had seen in physical mystery books in the introduction to the review that weren't likely to be seen in e-books soon.

The e-book as a format however is of course unlikely to disappear from our lives, as it has also brought mystery readers a lot of good. E-books, and modern print-on-demand services, have allowed rare out-of-print stories to come back alive for prices lower than a human sacrifice and your soul, and with issues like stock out of the picture, the price of e-books in general have also gone down. A handy e-book reader will allow you take a lot of books with you without actually having to carry the physical weight of each individual book, and handy features like being able to change font sizes, or to use dictionaries and set bookmarkers help the overall reading experience too. There are some other things an e-reader can't do of course (like easy borrowing and lending), and I do think that cover art has worsened a lot since the uprise of e-books, but that is a matter for another day.

For many I think portability is also a factor, as not only can an e-book reader carry more books, it is usually a bit smaller than a physical book too. As I mostly read Japanese books however, I find that Japanese pockets are usually even easier to take with me. Most Japanese novels I purchase are in the bunko format (A6), and that's a format that can easily fit in my coat jacket, and even when packed in the train or metro like a can of sardines, I can read with one hand and hold a hanging strap with my other.

I still do most of my reading in the physical format, with occassionally an e-book in between, but lately, I have noticed that my reading when dealing with e-books is less than ideal, and I wonder whether more people feel the same. While this is not exclusively something that has to do with mystery fiction, it does influence my reading of the genre. My biggest problem is that I simply remember less of what I've read when read something in e-book format. I simply don't absorb the text as good as when read from actual paper. I miss details, I seem less engaged when reading from my e-reader. When I read a physical book, I find it much easier to remember what I read, and also where/when. When you have an actual book, with pages you have to turn around, you have all kinds of things that help you remember story details and the flow of a story: from page number to the 'feel' of how many pages are left, to how many pages away you were from the chapter opening or the next chapter, or whether you read it on the left or right page (and where) and other physical markings like that one crease in the page. "Oh yeah, that happened on the right page, about halfway through the book" or "That was one or two pages after the chapter opening, right?". But when I read an e-book, it all becomes one big mess of indiscrete, nondescript words projected on a display, and I just can't read a book as well as I can with a physical book. As all "pages" on a e-book reader are projected on the same display, each page just... becomes one muddy image in my head and this extends to my memory of the story itself. With a proper mystery story, with proper foreshadowing and clewing, this is of course something less than ideal, and in general, I find myself less immersed in actually solving a mystery when in e-book form. Especially as times passes by, I notice that the memories of books I read on an e-reader some months ago, are less vivid and detailed than those of the physical books I read in the same period.

I also really miss being able to easily page through a book. I find myself going back and forth in mystery novels more often than in other books, as you'll often want to check on previous statements (which again, I can more easily remember where those passages are in the first place in physical books), but also diagrams and other useful pages. And yes, you can place bookmarkers in an e-book, but I find just placing my fingers between the two pages and flipping back and forth much more convenient than calling up a digital page one at a time, also e-books don't really allow you to check and compare two (or more) pages as quickly as in a physical book. I'll do some super-sneaky stealth-marketing here and mention The Decagon House Murders, The Moai Island Puzzle and The 8 Mansion Murders here. While I obviously worked on the translation of those books on my computer, on a screen, my own first reading experience with these books was in physical form. All three novel feature a number of floorplans and other diagrams and personally, I can't imagine myself actually checking the plans in detail and flipping back and forth if I had read these books as e-books, even though I most definitely did when I first read them as physical books and consider it part of the reading experience of these mystery stories. I've been reading the Toujou Genya novels by Mitsuda Shinzou lately, and there too I found myself constantly going back to the pages with the family trees ('cause Mitsuda has some CRAZY family trees in his book), but I might not even have bothered in e-book form because it's just not as convenient. The same with character name lists by the way: many books I read have such handy list, and I have to check them regularly as I am horrible with names, but again, I hate doing that in e-books. And you can imagine how I feel about foot and endnotes!

By the way, and this has nothing to do with the readability of e-books, but as I already mentioned The Decagon House Murders: people who have read the novel, will know there's one single sentence that turns everything around. In the Japanese version (which reads from right to left), this sentence was printed as the sole sentence on the right-hand page, so you needed to flip the previous (left-hand) page over to read that one sentence (it was the last sentence of the chapter, so the rest of the page was blank). It had a really crazy effect. I was sadly enough not able to reproduce this effect in the English translation due factors like word count and text mark-up, so I had to settle by placing that sentence at the very end of the left-hand page, which made sure the reader wouldn't see that sentence until the very last moment, as they were unlikely to see the sentence while flipping the previous right-hand page over. These games with the page layout to place certain sentences at certain spots on the page are of course also something an e-book can't really reproduce perfectly, due to the ability to change the number of words on a page and the font size.

So in general, I find myself only using my e-book reader for mystery stories if I have no other (reasonable) choice. I mean, if I can get a book for cheap digitally while a physical copy runs into the three digits, sure, I'm not going to complain, but I do notice that reading mystery stories on an e-book reader is significantly less enjoyable to me than in physical form, and I really do think it's a shame. I wonder if more people have trouble with reading e-books, or perhaps whether they find reading from an e-reader actually preferable (in terms of pure reading experience)?

「劇場でいちいち蘭ぁん！て言うのやめてくれる？」

林原めぐみ -『名探偵コナンラジオ　第6回』

"Could you stop yelling 'Raaaaan!' all the time in the movies?"

Hayashibara Megumi (voice actress of Haibara Ai) in "Detective Conan Radio - Episode 6"

I'm kinda bummed that the cover of the short story collection discussed today doesn't match the covers of the previous short story collections in this series (this one and this one) at all, on the other hand: this cover is definitely much better-looking.

Nikaidou Ranko series
Jigoku no Kijutsushi ("The Magician from Hell") (1992)
Kyuuketsu no Ie ("House of Bloodsuckers") (1992)
Sei Ursula Shuudouin no Sangeki ("The Tragedy at the Saint Ursula Convent") (1993)
Akuryou no Yakata ("Palace of Evil Spirits") (1994)
Yuri Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Lillies") (1995)
Bara Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Roses") (1997)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Deutsch Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Germany") (1996)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - France Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - France") (1997)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Tantei Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Detective") (1998)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Kanketsu Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Conclusion") (1998)
Akuma no Labyrinth ("The Devil Labyrinth") (2001)
Majutsuou Jiken ("The Case of the Sorcery King") (2004)
Soumenjuu Jiken ("The Case of the Two-Faced Beasts") (2007)
Haou no Shi ("Death of the Ruler") (2012)
Ran Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Orchids") (2014)
Kyodai Yuurei Mammoth Jiken ("The Case of the Giant Ghost Mammoth", 2017)

Ranko is a young woman who has made a name for herself as a brilliant private detective, having solved countless of horrifying murder cases. Her powers of reasoning are not only appreciated by the wider public and the Japanese police force, but occasionally even foreign governments rely on her mind. She first honed her deductive skills as a high school student, when she and her brother-by-adoption Reito (Ranko was adopted into the Nikaidou family) solved the murder case involving the Magician from Hell. Reito has chronicled many of their adventures, among which Ranko's long-standing fight with the superhuman criminal Labyrinth, but also her exploits in solving the baffling case that happened in the Werewolf Castle on the French-German border. Nikaidou Reito's Ran Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Orchids", 2014), collects three novellas/short stories with smaller for problems for Ranko to solve, like a five-layered locked room murder mystery and a mystery that lies in the faraway past.

It's been a while since I last read a book featuring Ranko! I absolutely devoured the Ranko novels in the early days of this blog, despite the sizes of those bricks (most Japanese paperback pockets I read end up somewhere around 350~500 pages long. Nikaidou's books on the other hand usually start at 600, and can go up to 900) and I think I read almost all of them (the ones I'm still missing are either brand new, or not very well received). The books have a distinct old-fashioned atmosphere: they are set in the 70s, but the many (MANY) locked room murders and other impossibilities committed in creepy mansions evoked a Carr-ish world, especially as the Ranko stories more often than not also involved themes like family curses, Western esotericism and medievalism. There was a significant change in story style though halfway through the series. What I described mostly applies in the books up until Jinroujou no Kyoufu (probably still the longest locked room mystery around). Ranko would disappear in Europe for three years at the end of that story, so the books jumped a few years back in time, to chronicle Ranko's intellectual battles against the master criminal Labyrinth, who was basically an artificial human created during World War II who had genetically engineered monsters at their disposal or something like that. And while Ranko still solved some impossible crimes in those Labyrinth novels, they were never as impressive as the ones seen in the earlier books, and her encounters with Labyrinth were often more like science-fiction horror novels with slight elements of the mystery genre, like you'd expect from mid-period Edogawa Rampo, rather than the you-aren't-going-to-get-more-classic-than-this, conventional mystery tales published before Labyrinth's first appearance. The three stories collected in the short story collection Ran Meikyuu are all set in different periods in Ranko's life, and thus also have a different tone to them.

The first story, Dorogune Hakase no Akumu ("The Nightmare of Professor Dorogune"), is set before the events in Jinroujou no Kyoufu, when Ranko was still a university student, but already a famed detective. The police wants her help in an absolutely puzzling case: Professor Dorogune, who had used his fortune to research supernatural phenomena in search of a way to revive his dear dead wife, had been found murdered inside a building, behind four locked doors, with only the victim's own footprints on the snowy path leading to the building in question! Fuyuki Mayako claimed she could teleport and control objects with her psychic powers, so the professor had the building especially designed to test her powers of teleportation, promising to bestow upon her a fortune if she was the goods. The building was basically designed like four squares laid within each other, each one smaller than the next, like four Matryoshka dolls. You'd need to go through four doors, each door leading deeper into the next square (and deeper inside the building), to reach the center square (room), which was where the professor was found dead one morning, with a knife in his back. But as all four doors were locked from the inside (with even the keyholes blocked by handkerchiefs stuffed inside), and only the footprints of the victim himself were found on the only path leading to the building, it seems that only Mayako, with her powers of teleportation and psychokinesis, could've committed the murder!

Okay, let's get the obvious out of the way first: YES, the premise of this story is absolutely amazing. A four-layered locked room mystery, plus missing footprints in the snow? So basically a five-layered locked room mystery? This is what I want to see in a Ranko story! And now you're expecting me to say how disappointing the solution was and how it didn't live up to the set-up, right? You'd be right, but only partially. What Nikaidou does here is use tricks and solutions that are in no way new or original on their own: even beginning readers of the genre might have come across these ideas. But Nikaidou does show his craftsmanship in the way in which he uses those familiar ideas, as he combines very basic trick with confidence and expertise to create this five-layered impossible murder situation. The result however is a story that fails to truly surprise at the conclusion, as almost all of the crucial parts of the solution are so recognizable. On the other hand, one have to admit that Nikaidou certainly showed skill in how he used these familiar elements to craft a locked room mystery that's still absolutely a stunning in terms of premise, and far more than average in turns of clewing. I would have of course preferred a completely original solution, but at least this story manages to solve this five-layered locked room in a plausible manner, and doesn't resort to really bad solutions.

Ran no Ie no Satsujin ("The Murder In The House of Orchids") is set after the events in Jinroujou no Kyoufu and Haou no Shi, when Ranko has returned from Europe back to Japan, as a single mother raising her son Aran. She runs an art gallery in Karuizawa together with Reito, now a married man and also a news journalist. Ranko had stopped her work as a private detective so she could focus on raising Aran, but with Aran two years old now and her sister-in-law Noriko around, Ranko is starting to feel the need for mystery solving again. It's Noriko who has a mystery for Ranko: her friend Kaori is engaged with Karai Shinji, son of the famous artist Karai Leonard. Leonard was a true prodigy, but also very loose in his relations with women, often fooling around with his models. Twelve years ago, when Shinji was still a child, Leonard died due to cyanide poisoning, though it was deemed suicide. Some days later, Shinji's mother called her sister saying she had killed Leonard, and she too took her own life with cyanide, inside a locked room within the orchard house in the garden. While the scandal had been suppressed, the deaths (and possible murders) of his parents has weighed heavily on Shinji's mind, preventing him from taking the next step in his relation with Kaori. Kaori wants Ranko to find out what happened twelve years ago to ease Shinji's mind, and as Ranko is also asked to sell Leonard's remaining work through her gallery, she and Reito make their way to the House of Orchids and start digging in the past.

The story itself mentions it already, but Ran no Ie no Satsujin is very much inspired by Christie's Five Little Pigs: the plot of an investigation into the suspicious death of a womanizing artist a decade or so ago by asking the witnesses to recall the day of the death is basically the same. Unlike Christie's story though, that focused on the psychology of the suspects, Nikaidou's story is built on a core involving a locked room mystery (the death of Shinji's mother inside the locked orchid house), combined with a poisoining plot (of Leonard). I find it difficult to judge this story. My main gripe is that the story is very, very long and as the basic structure mirrors Five Little Pigs fairly closely, leaving little surprises there, and as the narrative's mostly talking about events that happened many years ago, things move very slowly. The locked room mystery is workable and very cleverly clewed, but has trouble standing out amidst the constant talking about the past, and has trouble actually leaving any impression because it's snowed in between the boring parts. The poisoning part of the story however is basically impossible for anybody to solve, at least, not with a chain of reasoning with a solid foundation, as no way anybody is going to connect those dots. There are some good points to it, but I wouldn't call it fair.

Aoi Mamono ("The Blue Monster") too is also set after Ranko's return from Europe, but while Ran no Ie no Satsujin was still mostly a story that relied on classic mystery tropes like the locked room mystery, Aoi Mamono is much closer to the Labyrinth stories, with a rudimentary mystery plot mixed with grotesque science-fiction/horror elements in the tradition of the Sherlock Holmes' story The Creeping Man. Ranko is working on a case involving wild dogs attacking and killing two Caucasian men in Kamakura. Meanwhile, two children adopted by Doctor Moroo plead for help with the police, claiming the doctor, known throughout the town for his ecccentric behavior and strange experiments, has gone mad and tried to kill them. While Ranko does use some kind of logic to explain the strange events portrayed in this story and it's arguably based on hints in the text, one can best read this as some horror story, as it's nothing special as a mystery story. The weakest link of the collection.

As a short story (novella) collection, Ran Meikyuu actually manages to give a fairly good idea of the sort of stories one can expect to find in the Nikaidou Ranko series. The opening story, while quite smaller in scale and not as impressive in terms of originality, does remind of the earlier Ranko stories, with her working on fairly baffling impossible crimes that you'd expect from the Golden Age. The second story in turn fits the scale of the other short stories in this series, while the final story is very reminiscent of the weird horror-science-fiction-mixed-with-detective-plots later in the series. The first story is by far the best, and while I'd consider none of them timeless classics, I have to admit I enjoyed reading about Ranko again, so I might go after the couple of books I haven't read yet in the near future.

Original Japanese title(s): 二階堂黎人　『ラン迷宮』: 「泥具根博士の悪夢」 / 「蘭の家の殺人」 / 「青い魔物」

「おい！一人多いぞ！」

『11人いる！』

"Hey! We have one person too many!"

"They Were Eleven!"

A few weeks back, I reviewed Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar, a seminal work on the history of the mystery manga genre in Japan, clearly showing how the genre evolved through an incredibly extensive look at mystery manga publications from the post-war period until the present. With over 800 different titles mentioned in the book, there were a lot I had never ever heard of, and want-to-read lists were quickly made of course. While the book obviously focused on mystery manga, as is: mystery fiction in the form of manga, the book also name-dropped some titles that aren't mainly mystery fiction, but that were still closely related to either the genre, or the development of the genre. It shouldn't surprise the reader very much that there were also thriller and horror titles dropped here and there that also had an influence on artists or series.

Still, I have to admit that there were still a few titles that were mentioned that I certainly hadn't expected in a book on mystery manga. 11-nin Iru! ("They Were Eleven!") was perhaps the title that surprised me the most. Fans of classic manga and anime might have heard of this title, and even if not, no manga-reading fan with an ounce of self-respect would ever dare admit to not have heard of its creator: Hagio Moto. Hagio is considered one of the most influential female mangaka, being a pioneer in shojo (girls) manga, the Boys' Love genre and science-fiction manga in the 70s and 80s. It's not even an exaggeration to state that modern manga as an art form would've looked quite differently if not for Hagio's work. My knowledge of her was perhaps why I was so surprised to see 11-nin Iru! mentioned in Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar. I knew Hagio had also worked on series like Poe no Ichizoku ("The Poe Clan"), which incorporates horror and mystery genre elements, but in my mind, she was especially the pioneer on shojo and science-fiction manga, and I knew that 11-nin Iru! was one of her most well-appreciated science-fiction series. The three-part manga mini-series won her the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1976 and is widely seen as a science-fiction classic. Turns out that it was also built on a classic mystery structure.

A theatrical animated movie adaptation titled 11-nin Iru! ("They Were Eleven!") was released in 1986, which is mostly faithful to the source material. Warp travelling has become possible in the future, expanding the world of the humans. In mere 200 years, humans colonized over 50 planets, but they also came in contact with other civilizations in outer space. Earth, or Terra, is now part of a space alliance with three other allies, which is also head of the prestigious Space Academy. Becoming a cadet there means a glorious future and also prestige back home, so many, many try, but only a miniscule fraction of the candidates is accepted in the school. As the final test in the entrance exam, ten candidates are sent to a decommisioned spaceship: if they can survive for 53 days on that ship all on their own, they will be accepted as new cadets of the Academy. Any problems they come across they will have to solve together, with no contact with the outside world. If overcome by an obstacle they can not solve themselves, it is possible for them to contact the academy for help, but that also means forfeiting the exam. For the ten candidates who have been dreaming all their life about getting into the academy, spending not even three months on a spaceship seems doable, but there is one little problem: when the candidates left for the spaceship all donned in face-hiding spacesuits, there were definitely only ten of them, but when they arrived in the spaceship, they were eleven! Who is the eleventh candidate and what are they doing on the ship?

As I mentioned earlier, I already knew about 11-nin Iru!, at least, I knew it existed and that it was critically very well received, but I had always thought it was a science-fiction story that focused on human drama, a mode that is strongly associated with Hagio. And in a way that's right. 11-nin Iru! is precisely that, but it utilizes a rather alluring mystery story structure to tell its story. The idea of suddenly having an eleventh crew member along is incredibly creepy, and as the ten (eleven) candidates never got a good look at each other until their arrival inside the spaceship, there is no way for any of them to know who is the eleventh wheel. Because the candidates don't want to give up on their exam, they don't want to contact the school, leaving them in a self-inflicted closed circle situation, cooped up in an abandoned spaceship with one person who shouldn't be there of whom the motives are unknown. Unlike something like And Then There Were None, the candidates aren't killed one by one, though accidents that might not be accidents do happen a few times and we also learn that not everyone is exactly who they appear to be at first, with hidden pasts for several characters, so as the story progresses, everybody does start to grow suspicious of each other, until it reaches boiling point.

Or to be precise: 40 degrees Celcius. It also happens that a poisonous plant has grown throughout the ship, which releases its toxic pollens at the temperature of 40 degrees Celcius. The climate inside the ship can normally be controlled of course, but bombs set off the moment the crew arrived at the ship not only messed the computers up, but also sent the ship in an orbit moving them closer to the nearby blue sun, edging the inside temperature slowly but surely towards 40 degrees. This combined with the growing tension surrounding the identity of the eleventh crew member makes 11-nin Iru! a rather thrilling view from start to finish.

But I have to reiterate that 11-nin Iru! isn't formally a mystery story, or at least, not a fair one. For those who want to have a fair shake at figuring out who the eleventh crew member is: you'll be disappointed as there's no proper logical process behind this story, complete with hints and clues, that allow you to deduce who the extra person is. At the end, the eleventh person more or less simply confesses to being it. The motive for the presence of the eleventh crew member is better, but again, not really telegraphed in a fair way towards the viewer. How the parallel storyline regarding the poisonous plants is eventually resolved is funnily enough telegraphed much better than the storyline of the eleventh passenger, and reminds of the climax scenes of the Detective Conan films, where Conan usually has to figure some way of escape, in a way that is always properly hinted at. Of course, I could've guessed that 11-nin Iru! wasn't likely to be a full out original mystery puzzler with clues and stuff, as they were quite rare back then, as shown in Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar.

11-nin Iru! is overall a science-fiction story that uses a mystery story structure to portray an interesting cast, who have all entered the Space Academy entrance exams for their own reasons. The varied casts allows for the story to take on human drama, romance and comedy themes with ease, as well as the aforementioned mystery element, and 11-nin Iru! manages to present an amusing and diverse story through its shifting tone, yet it always feels as one consistent tale. As a not particularly long story (about 90 minutes), 11-nin Iru! is a neatly concise story that does most of what it wants to do in an adequate way, resulting in a good science-fiction movie that leans on the mystery genre.

I haven't read the original three-part manga, so I don't know whether the mystery element is stronger in that format or not, but overall, I enjoyed 11-nin Iru!, even if it was not precisely what I had expected. The really alluring premise had me hoping for a true closed circle mystery, and with a bit of better hinting, 11-nin Iru! could've become that, I think, but as it is now, I'd say that 11-Nin Iru! is a good science-fiction thriller that comes very close to also being a good mystery film, but just doesn't quite manage to do it. I'd love to see a new movie adaptation of this story that would try to sell it more as a puzzle plot mystery!

Original Japanese title(s): 『11人いる！』

"I perceive from the strawberry-mark on your shirt-front that you had strawberries for dessert. Holmes, you astonish me. Tut, tut, you know my methods. Where is the tobacco? The tobacco is in the Persian slipper. Can I leave my practice for a week? I can."

"The Red House Mystery"

Oh, poor review, I usually line up my reviews chronologically, but sometimes I have to shuffle, and sometimes things get pushed back, so I think this review was written nearly a year before its publication...

Antony Gillingham spends his time wandering the world to admire all the layers of society, helped by the fact that he is in fact quite well provided for. One day, he finds himself in the English countryside when he learns that nearby lies the Red House. House owner Mark Ablett is having a house party, and one of the guest being entertained there is Bill, an old friend of Athony's. Hoping to find Bill there, Antony makes his way to the Red House, but what he finds there is more than just a friend. A murder has just occured in Mark's office, and the victim is identified as Robert Ablett, brother of Mark and the black sheep of the family, who had only arrived at the Red House moments ago after spending fifteen years in Australia. Mark however has disappeared, and suspicions are soon aimed at the master of the Red House. Antony, assisted by his Watson Bill, however suspect that there might be more than meets the eye, and the duo decide to find out for themselves what happened in Mark's office in A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922).

A.A. Milne is of course best known as the author behind beloved children's book series Winnie-the-Pooh. To be honest, I've never read the books, and I am more familiar with Disney's take on it. The Red House Mystery is Milne's only foray into the mystery genre, and dedicated to his father. I had heard good things about it, though I knew basically nothing about this novel when I first started on it besides the educated guess that it was unlikely we'd see Winnie here.

What made an impression at once was the overall pleasant writing style of Milne. The Red House Mystery is on the whole a pretty funny novel to read. Antony and Bill fulfill their respective roles as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson quite admirably and the chats they have as they try to figure out what's going in the Red House form a very strong backbone to the novel, that spur the reader to continue on. I had only planned to read a chapter or two before going to sleep, but by the time I noticed it, I had already finished the book in one go. Their dialogues and adventures are definitely the star of the novel.

As a straight mystery novel, The Red House Mystery is actually quite different from what I had expected. At the start of the novel, we're presented with the stereotypical English country house that is stately Ablett Manor: the Red House. We're also told about a house party with diverse guests who like to play golf and have tea and whatever people do at fancy English house parties. So what'd you expect to see is the Stereotypical English Countryhouse Murder Mystery right? What you think of whenever you think of Christie even though she didn't really write that many of those novels? In truth however, The Red House Mystery readsmore like a novel released ten, twenty years earlier, as it is much closer in form to the Gothic novel than anything else. For example, the titular Red House plays a large role in the story, and Antony and Bill spend a lot of time figuring out the dark secrets it holds. The biggest secret they uncover is straight out of the Gothic novel, and while some people (Van Dine) wouldn't be too accepting of it, I'd say that the trope works well for The Red House Mystery, especially as it isn't the one-and-only-answer to every question.

There's also the matter of the incredibly small cast. The members of the house party are dangled in front of us at the start of the novel, but they are all sent away within a chapter of two, leaving us with the two detectives Antony and Bill, and one (1) suspect. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out whodunit. Most of the novel is more about Antony and Bill poking around and looking for clues without giving the game away to their one suspect, and again, this device to create tension, combined with the country house setting, makes the novel feel more like a Gothic thriller than post-1920s mystery fiction. Not that that's a bad thing (My first review of last year was about Edogawa's Yuureitou for example, and I loved that!), but it's perhaps not what some readers might be expecting. Note that despite the Gothic thriller mode, it's still a reasonably lighthearted story to read thanks to Antony and Bill's talks, as mentioned earlier.

As a mystery novel, The Red House Mystery is not particularly exciting. Perhaps the plot just aged badly, but most of the nefarious scheme of the culprit can already be guessed by the time the corpse is discovered, which is in the third chapter of twenty-two. The questions of who- and howdunit are thus not extremely exciting forces of propulsion for the plot. The hinting on the other hand is adequate, though early on, Milne uses a fairly cheap device: Antony apparently has a photographic memory, which allows him to remember insane details, but only when the plot wants him to. Tantei Gakuen Q showed how to use a character with photographic memory in a detective story in a much more natural way, without reducing it to a handy plot device that is only used when the writer doesn't know how to further the plot in a different manner.

The Wikipedia entry for The Red House Mystery refers to it as a "locked room whodunnit mystery" by the way, which it definitely is not. And no, I'm not saying it's not a whodunit because it is fairly obvious who is it. The murder in The Red House Mystery is simply not a locked room mystery and never once presented as such in the narrative itself. For some reason, collective memory seem to refer to it as one though. Ellery Queen's The Chinese Orange Mystery has the same problem by the way: it really isn't one, and if you do refer to it as one, you're actually creating a lot of problems for future readers, by creating certain expectations.

Soooo, A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery. All-time classic of mystery fiction? Nosirree. Looked purely at the mystery plot, it's simply too simple, too obvious. It does fit well with the Gothic thriller mode the story has adapted. But The Red House Mystery does provide an entertaining narrative though, not the least thanks to the duo of Athony and Bill, who play a splendid Holmes and Watson.

「もう謎は解きたくないんだあああ～！！」

『金田一37歳の事件簿』

"I don't wanna solve mysteries anymore!!"

"The Case Files of the 37-year old Kindaichi"

The adventures of Kindaichi Hajime, grandson of the famous detective Kindaichi Kousuke, and his childhood friend/not-quite-girlfriend Miyuki as chronicled in the comic series Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo ("The Young Kindaichi Case Files") originally started serialization in 1992, but the series is still going strong in 2018. After the initial series, consisting of the original Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo, the CASE series and a series of short stories, the series went on a hiatus (during whih the creators worked on Tantei Gakuen Q). Hajime and Miyuki then returned in 2004 for a "second season" with several series: a more-or-less annual series ran between 2004-2011, which was followed by the 20th Anniversary limited series (2011-2013) and then Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (2013-2017). Save for some select stories set in the past, these series were all about Hajime and Miyuki as 17-year old students at Fudou High, the high school with a rather alarming rate of students and teachers who either end up as a murderer or a victim.

So people were quite surprised when late last year, it was announced that Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R would stop serialization in the weekly Shonen Magazine (a magazine aimed at children and teenagers that has always been the home of the series) and that a new series would start in the bi-weekly Evening (aimed at a teenage/adult audience). But the most shocking news was the title: Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo ("The Case Files of the 37-year old Kindaichi). The first volume collecting the first 8 chapters was released in June 2018, and as the title suggests, this new series is about a 37-year old Kindaichi Hajime, who is not a slacker in high school anymore, but a single, lowly ranked employee of the firm Otowa Black PR. It's been twenty years since we last saw Hajime, and while we know of all his detecting exploits in his past, it seems that he has had more than enough of his share of gruesome deaths, as the 37-year old Hajime really doesn't want to solve any mysteries anymore. Fate however has different plans for him. Hajime is given the task to supervise a new dating tour organized by his firm: five eligible men and five eligible women who have had no luck in love are to spend a few days in a resort hotel on a faraway, small island, where they'll get to know each other and hopefully find a partner. The problem? Said faraway island happens to be Utashima, the place where Hajime solved no less than three seperate murder cases, which were all connected to The Phantom of the Opera. The original Opera House where all those murders took place was destroyed the last time Hajime went to Utashima, so he hopes nothing goes wrong this time, but his wishes are of course not heard. While Hajime tries to do a good job of conducting the perfect dating tour by organizing games for the participants etc., the curse of the Phantom appears to be too strong, as it doesn't take long for one of the bachelorettes to be killed on the island, but the body disappears without a trace. And that's only the start of this fourth appearance of the Phantom...

This won't be a full review of this fourth Phantom story, as it continues into the next volume which won't be released until October, so I'll only give my first impressions of this new series. Note that the series is about a twenty years older Hajime, but that it's not set "twenty years in the future". The series is set in contemporary times (of time of writing), as has always been in the case in this series (like how The Kindaichi Fumi Kidnapping Murder Case how had everyone using smartphones and GPS functions, even though in Kindaichi The Killer pagers were like the pinnacle of consumer communication technology, even though there should only be one (1) summer vacation between those two cases). Anyway, as Evening has a slightly older audience, we see bit more graphic nudity (although for jokes) here compared to the older series, but this is still mostly the Kindaichi Shounen we know, even if Hajime's far less eager to throw himself in the mystery solving now. Which isn't actually too strange if you realize how many deaths he's seen in his younger days. It's pretty interesting to see a Hajime who doesn't want to solve the mystery himself anymore, who simply wants to do his job in a good way and who even calls Akechi for official police assistance in the case. A reluctant Hajime isn't a new concept: the third live-action drama series (starring Arashi's Matsumoto Jun as Hajime) started out like that, and the live-action drama special of The Vampire Legend Murder Case (with KAT-TUN's Kamenashi Kazuya) had a Hajime who absolutely hated being reminded of the fact he was the grandson of Kindaichi Kousuke, but I think the reluctant Hajime works best in this new series, as unlike those live-action Hajimes, this Hajime seems to be simply tired of all that excessive mystery solving, rather than just being a teenager rebelling against his talents or blood. For long time readers, we also have quite a few of cameos of familiar faces in this first volume (phew, Souta wasn't murdered in those twenty years).

I'll write a review of the actual mystery plot when the second volume's out, but I'll leave a picture here now with the goodies included with the Special Edition of this first volume: a postcard with the cover art of the very first volume from 1992, a memo pad, three clear folders with Hajime, Akechi and the Phantom, and an "invitation" to become a suspect in a future story (someone is chosen from those who send in their invitation to the publisher). I don't have much merchandise of mystery series actually, and this is the first time I got anything of the Kindaichi Shounen series (though I do have the OVA DVDs...). Anyway, as for now, Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo is still the mystery series we have known for so long, only with more responsible Hajime and I'm having a good time.

But to flesh out this post a bit more, let's go back to the past: Kindaichi-kun no Bouken 2: Dokurozakura no Noroi ("The Kid Kindaichi Adventues 2: The Curse of the Skull Cherry Blossom Tree") was released a few days before Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo. Kindaichi-kun no Bouken is a new series of children's novels in the Kodansha Aoi Tori Bunko label, which started earlier this year (I have a review of the first volume here). This series is about the adventures Hajime and Miyuki had as sixth graders, as members of the Adventure Club of Fudou Elementary. The club is supervised by their HR teacher Kanae, and the club activities include investigating and reporting on strange events. Whereas their first adventure was set on an island, this second adventure takes place at their own school. One October morning, the children of Fudou Elementary find some mysteries words written on the blackboard in the class. Hajime quickly realizes this is only part of a message, and checks out the blackboards in the other 6th grade classes to find the complete warning: "Stay away from the Skull Cherry Blossom Tree". The Skull Cherry Blossom Tree is a cherry blossom tree that stands in the corner of the playground, which when in full bloom, resembles like a skull due to some lesser-grown parts in its foliage. Lately, the school's been thinking about cutting the tree to place new playground equipment there, but this message seems to be warning the school against that. The message also reminds of one of the seven mysteries of Fudou High, the ghost story of the Skull Teacher, who was based on the teacher who planted the cherry blossom. Is it his ghost who wants to protect the tree?

Like the first volume, this is a rather mediocre mystery story, even if you consider it's for a younger audience. There is little focus, with some smaller mysteries which aren't really interesting. The idea is that the mystery should be about who the Skull Teacher is and why he's doing what he's doing, but most of the time, the novel feels like a random collection of ideas. The mystery of a Skull Teacher who suddenly appears in the corridor is okay, with good clewing, but the mystery of the children being locked up in the school basement is incredibly simple and not really well-thought out: the moment a certain observation is made by Hajime, it becomes painfully clear what has happened, making any attempts of misdirection completely useless. The motive of the culprit for doing all this is also incredibly convoluted, considering there are far easier ways to do what they set out to do. I think I compared the previous volume to the two children's novels based on the Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney games, released in 2016 and 2017 and written by Takase Mie, in my last review too, but there's a good reason for that. As children's novels spin-offs of established franchises originally aimed at an older audience, they have a lot of common ground, but it's clear that the Gyakuten Saiban children's novels were so much better as mystery stories, even when considering they're for children. The two volumes of the Kindaichi-kun no Bouken series up until now however are far less inspired.

Though it's kinda fun to see how the Kindaichi-kun no Bouken series does try to flesh out the setting of the series. In the review of the first volume, I already remarked it was a nice touch having semi-regular Souta as one of the members of the Adventure Club (as we knew from the main series Souta had been friends with Hajime and Miyuki since they were kids). In this second volume, we even have Senke appear as a semi-rival to Hajime (Senke's a semi-regular of the early stories who first appeared in The Hanging Academy Murder Case). I mean, come on, Senke of all people!

Anyway, Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo is one series I'll definitely continue to read, as it's the official continuation of the series, and it's pretty interesting to see Hajime acting differently this time. Not sure about the Kindaichi-kun no Bouken series though: the two volumes up until now were rather disappointing as mystery stories and while I like how it incorporates little things from the main series, I can't say that's enough to keep me hooked. We'll see how that ends up. Anyway, the next volume of the 37-old Hajime is scheduled for October, so until then, I guess.

Original Japanese title(s): 天樹征丸（原）、さとうふみや（画）『金田一37歳の事件簿』第1巻
天樹征丸（文）、さとうふみや（画）　『金田一くんの冒険2　どくろ桜の呪い』

どこか未だに知らない場所へ迷い込みたくない？　

君といたらもっといいのにな

痛みさえも老いてゆくよう

「涙のイエスタデー」（Garnet Crow）

Don't you feel like getting lost in some unknown place?

It'd be more fun if I'd be with you

Even my pain would eventually go away

"A Yesterday Made Of Tears" (Garnet Crow)

I think the only time I set foot on a sail boat was when I was a kid, at a birthday party of a friend... Now I think about it, I haven't set foot on that many boats in general.

After an eleven-month trip across the seas, Uchida Youichi returned to Japan as a hero, as the first Japanese person to succeed in sailing around the world non-stop on his own. The feat earned him fame, a beautiful wife and a very lucratrive contract to promote a series of consumer yachts. So when the news was reported that Uchida had died in a car accident, people thought of James Dean: here they had a man in the prime of his life, lost in a tragic accident. The discovery by the police that the victim had consumed cyanide before his death though suggests that murder is much more likely than an accident and young police lieutenant Totsugawa is ordered to investigate. Digging into Uchida's life quickly shows that all's not well: he cheated on his wife, he cheated with his sailing record and there were more than a few "fellow" sailors who were very jealous of Uchida. But as Totsugawa dives deeper in the case, he finds that his most likely suspect is also the least likely one, as this man was participating in a sailing contest from Japan to Tahiti during the time the poison was planted on Uchida. Can Totsugawa find out the truth behind this perfect alibi in Nishimura Kyoutarou's Akai Cruiser ("The Red Cruiser", 1973)?

The last Nishimura novel I discussed (Tokkyuu Fuji Ni Notteita Onna), I decribed as precisely what you'd expect from a mass-produced novel. The book, originally published in 1989, showed exactly why Nishimura's able to churn out three, four books a month and have almost 600 books to his name as I'm writing this. It wasn't fun to read at all. It was an uninspired, by-the-numbers tale of "mystery" that really wasn't about anything engaging. I noted that Nishimura's earlier novels were, even if not perfect, at least much more entertaining than that novel. So I decided to go back in the past, to read one of Nishimura's earlier novels, before he became the king of the Japanese travel mystery subgenre, and before his books were nothing more than TheStereotypical Two-Hour Suspense Drama.

This is actually the first book featuring Totsugawa, Nishimura's long-running series about a Tokyo police inspector (and his team) whose cases often involve ingenous faked alibis using train schedules. In Akai Cruiser though, Totsugawa is still just a lieutenant, and the first case through which the readers got to know him wasn't about trains, but about boats! Well, that's almost as surprising as reading the first Perry Mason and discovering he doesn't really do much in the courtroom in that novel either!

The main problem of this book is that it's way too long. I mean, the whole first half could've been condensed in a few pages, and I think the story still would've worked. After the prologue that details how Uchida was found after his car accident, the story decides to spend a lot of time looking at the backstory of the victim and of the various suspicious characters who may or may not have a motive to kill Uchida off. This part takes ages. And is written a bit boring. But okay, all of this is of course perfectly fine if this was a conventional whodunnit. But it isn't. Around the halfway point, you'll realize that the one person who got a lot of attention in the first half, but was ignored because he had a perfect alibi is in fact the most likely candidate for murder. So why devote all that time at pretending like the other people were viable suspects? Sure, there's such a thing like fleshing out characters and backstories, but no way did it need that many pages to do that. It feels like a fake-out, and a bad one too, as when a story decides to devote a lot of attention to a suspect only to pretend he can't possibly be the murderer because his alibi is that he was out at sea competing in a race to Tahiti, of course I'm going to guess that he'll turn out to be the murderer. Had the story right from the start pointed at him as the murder, emphasizing the impossibility of the situation, that'd have made a much more enjoyable story.

You don't even have to go all Crofts by making it an inversed story, but do it like Matsumoto Seichou's Ten to Sen and Jikan no Shuuzoku, by making it clear something fishy is going on, but not revealing what did happen. That'd have been more interesting that a large part of the story turning out to be fairly obsolete.

For the impossible crime angle is, at the core, quite interesting. How was the suspect capable in murdering the victim while also sailing (with two other crew members) to Tahiti? The solution to that conundrum is... workable. It's not mindblowingly brilliant, but fairly engaging (even if based on a story by Matsumoto Seichou, as the murderer confess at the end of the tale). Though I have to say, the murderer had to do an awful lot to succeed with his crime. What he did to commit his murder was ironically overkill.

So Akai Cruiser was not a perfect novel either, but at least I felt Nishimura poured effort in this book. The plot is fleshed out (too much so, at times), the impossible crime is alluring and original and the whole setting of the yachting world is actually quite interesting. Akai Cruiser may not be the best Inspector Totsugawa novel I've read, but it's far from the worst either, luckily enough.

Original Japanese title(s): 西村京太郎　『赤い帆船(クルーザー)』

The bear went over the mountain,

To see what he could see.

And all that he could see,

Was the other side of the mountain

I love the covers of this series by the way, the characters look really creepy!

Toujou Genya has not only made a name for himself as a horror/occult novelist who travels across Japan researching local folkore, he also has a knack for running into weird crimes, and solving them. It is for this reason that sometimes letters are delivered at his publisher from people who want his help making sense out of some mysterious experience they may have had. The manuscript from one Gouki Nobuyoshi caught the attention of Genya's editor in particular, as it concerned a little mountain community Genya happened to had visited last year. Gouki Nobuyoshi is the fourth son in a prominent family in Hado, a mountain village in the faraway rural outskirts of Tokyo. Unlike his father and brothers, Nobuyoshi was not made for the rough mountain life, and after he managed to find a job as an English teacher in Tokyo, he decided never to return to Hado, but a few months ago, his grandmother pleaded with him to return to at least conduct the Rite of Adulthood, which is a local custom. The curious incident that happened to Nobuyoshi during the Rite has weighed so heavily on his mind however that he has turned neurotic since then, not able to make any sense out of it all. Genya agrees to look into the matter and find a rational explanation for the baffling and horrifying experience Nobuyoshi had during the Rite of Adulthood in Mitsuda Shinzou's Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono ("Those Who Sneer Like The Mountain Fiend", 2008)?

The Rite of Adulthood is conducted by climbing the three interlocked mountains near Hado all by yourself to pray at the three shrines there, and it usually takes the better half of a day for people used to the mountains, but when Nobuyoshi conducted his Rite, he got horribly lost in the mountain woods, leading to frightful encounters that reminded him of the old ghost stories his grandmother used to tell him about the Mountain Fiend, a monstrous being that would lure wary travellers into the depths of the woods by calling out to them pretending to be a human. Eventually Nobuyoshi realized he had gone off-course in the worst way possible, as after the sun set, he found himself on Kanayama, the "forbidden" mountain of the region that is thought to be cursed by the local people and avoided by all. Eerily enough though, he stumbles upon a little cabin on Kanayama in the night, inhabitated by old Tatsuichi and his family: Tatsuichi is the eldest son of the Kasumi family, a once prominent family of the village of Kumado, which lies on the other side of the mountains to Nobuyoshi's own Hado. Tatsuichi had left his village when he was a young man and became basically a nomad, dwelling across the mountains of Japan. A few months back, he and his family too got lost on the mountains, and he found he had returned to his home village for the first time in decades, so he decided to stay for a while before leaving again. Nobuyoshi is offered a bed, and the promise that they'll show him the way down from the mountain the following day, but when Nobuyoshi awakens in the morning, he finds the breakfast table set up completely, but strangely enough nobody else is in the cabin. And what frightens him the most is the fact that the cabin is locked from the inside, meaning that Tatsuichi and his family couldn't have left the cabin in the first place. Nobuyoshi eventually finds his way down the mountain the village of Kumado, where he confides his tale with Kajitori Rikihira, basically the head of Kumado, but also the childhood friend of Tatsuichi who gave him permission to use the cabin for the time being in the first place. Enquiries by Rikihira and Nobuyoshi make it clear that Tatsuichi and his family couldn't have made their way down from the mountain without being seen that morning, as all the paths from the mountain were under observation since the early hours, and when the two return to the cabin, they find that the set breakfast table was also cleaned! Genya thus needs to solve the Mary Celeste-esque disappearance of a whole family in a double-locked situation, but what first appears to be "just" a strange, personal experience changes in something far more sinister as the day after Genya arrives in Kumado, someone is found murdered inside the locked mountain cabin, and it appears the murder is styled after a certain nursery rhyme about Kanayama!

Early this year, I reviewed Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono, which was not only my first encounter with Mitsuda Shinzou, and his Toujou Genya series: it was also a fantastic mystery novel, easily one of the best I had read in years. So yeah, I was sure to revisit the series about the occult and folklore specialist and writer Toujou Genya. Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono is the follow-up novel to Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono not only in publishing order (this is the fourth novel in the series), it's also slightly connected to the third novel content-wise: Toujou Genya made an early, but short appearance in Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono, when he's on his way to the village where the murders of that novel occur, when he gets distracted by some stories about the folklore surrounding the Mountain Fiend local to Kumado and Hado. Not able to contain his curiosity, Genya changed his travel plans to head out for Kumado, meaning he wouldn't get involved with the murders of Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono until much later, which probably also means that that case would've been solved much earlier had he not changed plans at the start of that book! Anyway, during his stay at Kumado, Genya became friends with Kumado's Kajitori Rikihira and learned much about the Mountain Fiend from him, which explains why he became so interested in Gouki Nobuyoshi's story in this novel.

I have to admit that Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono started out incredibly slowly for me. The first one-fifth of the book (more than a hundred pages) consists of the manuscript by Gouki Nobuyoshi, where he explains the strange happenings that occured to him during his Rite of Adulthood, from his apparent run-ins with the Mountain Fiend in the mountain forests to the Mary Celeste-inspired disappearance of Tatsuichi and his family from a locked cabin. This part is mostly written as a horror novel, which isn't odd as the Toujou Genya is explicitly marked not only as a mystery series, but also a horror series, and in both novels in this series I've read now, there are also slight elements that are left unexplained and up to the imagination of the reader (though of course, the elements surrounding the core mystery plot are all explained rationally ). While the novel thus starts with an investigation into an impossible disappearance, it changes into a full-fledged serial murder investigation once Genya arrives in Kumado to investigate what happened to Nobuyoshi.

My praise for Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Monowas mostly directed at the ingenious use of a certain theme in that novel: while several murders occurred there under very different circumstances, there was a common, underlying theme that connected all these murders, that served as means, opportunity and motive for the execution of all these crimes. The synergy going on in that novel was absolutely crazy, as it managed to do so many different things with one common idea. I was pleased to learn that this concept of synergy is actually also present in Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono! For example, the disappearing family from a locked room, a man whose face was burnt off in a stove inside a locked mountain cabin and the naked man killed inside a mountain shrine are all completely different mysteries in this novel: they are committed in different ways and come about in varying ways, but there is still an underlying theme that connects these mysteries, that explains why these events happened and why certain actions were taken by the murderer. It can be debated that in this novel, the two locked room situations (impossible disappearance from the cabin and the murder inside the cabin) are not directly related to this overall theme (i.e the locked rooms were not made possible because of this theme, like it was in Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono), but still, the reason for these mysteries are still ultimately same. And Mitsuda manages to come up with wildly different applications of this theme: the reason for the Mary Celeste-esque disappearance of Tatsuichi's family from the cabin is absolutely brilliant for example, but that wouldn't work for the reason why the murdered man inside the cabin had his face burnt off, and yet it all comes down to the same theme. Whereas most mystery writers would use various ideas for one novel (a locked room murder, and a dying message, and a... ) to bring diversity, Mitsuda somehow manages to always use one single idea, but then come up with a myriad of applications that still surprise the reader. This meaningful repetition of one single theme in all kinds of different ways really makes his novels a joy to read, as there is plot consistency from start to finish and you never feel any part is unnecessary, as everything is done to strengthen the underlying theme.

While there are two reasonably simple locked room situations in this novel (one of which is solved early on), the main question driving the plot is why, and from there it becomes a who. The why is the underlying theme and I really can't praise that enough. The jump to the question of whodunit is also great. The last two chapters where Genya explains how he solved the crime are extremely long (once again about one-fifth of the fairly long novel) as he also goes into detail in some of his mistaken hypotheses about the identity of the murderer. Genya proposes several fake solutions that are actually all pretty good, but each of them are proven to be wrong by some small clue in the spirit of Queen, for example by proving suspect A knew about a certain fact, so they couldn't have been the murderer etc. These fake solutions however are never discarded completely, but elements of them always make it into the next solution, so it's a great experiment in deduction, as it shows how solution A turns into B, and C and finally, the true solution. To be honest, I had my eyes set on the right person fairly early on because of a certain somewhat obviously described clue, but I had completely missed most of the other clues that would set-up the basis for this conclusion, so I didn't feel very accomplished for figuring out whodunnit, as much as I wanted to hit myself for missing out on all those other, brilliantly placed clues (even if not all of them were directly connected to the real murderer).

The novel is incredibly atmospheric by the way, with stories about local folklore and a distinct, post-war air of rural Japan that one might recognize from Yokomizo Seishi's work. In fact, people who like Yokomizo's work should really check out this series, as there's so much in common. This novel in particular seems to be inspired by one of the better known books in Yokomizo's Kindaichi Kousuke series, though I'll refrain from title-dropping as it could work as a spoiler. A series of murders styled after a nursery rhyme is of course also very Yokomizo-esque by the way. Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono actually features a very short Nursery Rhyme Murder Lecture. Though not nearly as extensive as the Decapitation Lecture in Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono, it's still an interesting thing to read and to see how the nursery rhyme murder is used in this novel.

Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono is thus another excellent mystery novel that brings surprising variety by delving deeply in one single, certain theme of mystery fiction. While I'd argue that the previous novel is better, it's the difference between Extremely Good Mystery Novel and Extremely Good Mystery Novel That Is A Bit Better. Readers who like a bit more conventional mystery fiction might perhaps even prefer Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono, as at least in this novel, Genya appears throughout the novel and actually does detectivey stuff as opposed to his minimalist appearance in the third novel. I am someone who prefers short stories, but Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono is a good example of why some mystery stories can only work in a longer format, as it offers more room to really explore and play with ideas, in a meaningful manner.

Original Japanese title(s): 三津田信三『山魔の如き嗤うもの』

Objects are often important to a mystery story. If a murder is committed, the culprit is likely to utilize an object, that is, a murder weapon, to accomplish their goal. A button left at the crime scene could prove as evidence to the identity of the murderer. Or perhaps the disappearance of an object that should be there will become the focus of an investigation, leading the question of why a certain object was so important it had to be removed. An object is thus usually a clue, something that links it to the solution of the mystery (which could be a murder, but it could be any enigmatic happening). An object might tell you who committed a certain crime, or how it was done, or perhaps why it was done.

Today I'd like to take a short look at a very specific type of object that you might sometimes see as a physical clue in mystery fiction: glasses. Glasses are objects many of us use daily (I do too), and both due to the properties of these personal items, you see them utilized in various ways in mystery fiction. I'll take a look at some of the applications of glasses, and contact lenses, in mystery fiction as a little case study to see how objects can be used in mystery fiction (and I'll of course stay away from specific story spoilers).

The first application that comes to mind is perhaps the least interesting one, as it's not really convincing in any way. Glasses often feature as part of a disguise, because for some reason, some people are suddenly unable to recognize someone if they wear glasses. The most infamous example of this is not from a mystery story of course, but from the world of comics: for some reason people are unable to recognize that Clark Kent looks awfully a lot like Superman without his glasses. Glasses (frames) can of course change the impression of a face somewhat, but to the point of no recognition? For some reason, Conan is also able to fool the people around him with glasses in Detective Conan. After a run-in with a mysterious criminal organization, high school student detective Shinichi's body was shrunken to that of a six-year old, but he manages to fool his childhood friend Ran (and her father) by taking on the fake name of Edogawa Conan, and by wearing a pair of his father's old glasses. Ran sorta notices the similarities between Conan and the face of her best friend she has known since kindergarten, but for some reason the glasses still manage to fool her. It might be interesting to note that Conan's glasses were upgraded by Dr. Agasa with all kinds of technological gadgets, allowing him to trace a set of markers with the built-in radar in the original comics, while the movies even have Conan wearing bulletproof glasses or glasses with an infrared binocular function. Another example of a detective using glasses to change her look is Houshou Reiko from Higashigawa Tokuya's Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato deseries: Reiko is not only a rookie police detective, but unknown to her colleagues, she's also the insanely rich heiress of the Houshou Group, an economic superforce. She too wears non-prescribed glasses when she's working, as a semi-disguise, but also because she thinks it makes her look intelligent.

Contact lenses are of course more interesting as a disguise, as color contacts allow people to change the color of their eyes. The plot twist that someone was hiding their blood relation to someone else using color contacts is actually relatively common and also more believable than simply the notion of glasses changing someone's face that dramatically.

Glasses and lenses are also usable as murder weapons, though I have to admit I haven't seen much of these stories. I imagine there's a locked room murder mystery out there somewhere where a fire was mysteriously started in a locked room killing someone inside, where at the end it is revealed the sun started the fire through a pair of farsighted glasses. Glasses are also something that are handled often by their wearers, so a bit of poison smeared on the arms of a frame seems like a likely idea for a story. Lenses are of course a bit easier to imagine as murder weapons, as it's an object you stick in your eye: I have seen stories where the culprit tampered with the contact lens solution so the victim would cause a traffic accident.

Now I come to glasses and lenses as physical clues, and it is in this role you usually see these items appear in mystery stories. To start with the simplest example: leaving your reading glasses behind at the crime scene is probably something you want to avoid as a murderer. This can of course also be extended into a deeper clue by turning the notion around: the simple version is saying the murderer was at the crime scene because their reading glasses were found there. Say the murderer did retrieve their reading glasses later, one could build a story that revolves around proving the reading glasses were at the crime scene, and thus proving the murderer was there. I can think of an episode of a certain mystery show for example that used this idea. In this case, the clue is rather direct, as it revolves around the physical presence of personal glasses. Lenses are the same story of course: a struggle might lead to a fallen lens, which can be traced directly to the wearer because of the prescription and other forensic clues. I'd say that fingerprints of the victim left on the glasses of the culprit, or the other way around, would also fall under this first category.

Another simple application is the absence of glasses/lenses: if the culprit lost their glasses or lenses during the crime, it could render them unable to perform certain actions, say for example driving a car or reading the small print. This too is a basic clue based on glasses/lenses, and one you see often.

If one goes one step further however, you arrive at what I find the most interesting application of the object "glasses" in a mystery story. Here it is not clear at first that glasses (or lenses) are in any connected to the crime: in fact these stories are about the culprit actively hiding the fact glasses were involved. An example: the body lies on the rough wooden floor of the room, with all the drinkware and bottles removed from the bar and broken on the carpet. What has happened is that the culprit broke their glasses during their struggle with the victim, with fragments scattered all over the floor. Prescribed glasses are of course very personal items, as one could check out the strength of the glasses, so the culprit wouldn't want to leave the fragments lying around. Because the flooring is so rough, some of the fragments have even fallen between the cracks. Unable to get them, the culprit decided to hide their glass fragments among other glass fragments: hence the broken glassware and bottles. This is just a basic example and a simple variation would be a culprit who decided to use the vacuum cleaner to clean a certain spot in an otherwise dirty room. But this core plot thus invites the reader to 1) pay attention to the oddities of the crime scene (the broken glassware/clean spot), 2) deduce the motive why this action was taken (to hide glass fragments) and 3) connect the glasses to the culprit.

This notion of wanting to hide the glasses making it necessary to take another action is something I often see in glasses/lenses-related mystery story. With lenses, I can think of stories where the culprit had to take certain actions to find the lenses they dropped, which is course easier said than done. Imagine a murder taking place inside a sandbox. If later in the story the reader discovers a strainer was stolen from a nearby home with an open kitchen window, one could come to the conclusion it was used to find the lens. Lenses are perhaps even more difficult to locate than glass fragments,so culprits wanting to hide/find their lenses usually lead to interesting crime scenes, where the action taken to find them usually leads to a very enigmatic crime scene. These kind of stories are the most fun to read/watch, as they go one step further, having you first deduce what the actions were the culprit took, why they were taken, what the implications of those reasons are and finally, to what clue they directly connect.

I have only looked at a few basic applications of glasses and lenses as clues in mystery fiction, but the basic ideas behind these applications also work for other physical clues of course. Glasses and lenses however are items many of us use every single day, without giving them much thought, and that is what makes them interesting props for a mystery story, especially if their role is hidden at first, challenging the reader to first arrive at the idea that that thing on their face might actually be important. I can think of a few other, specific usages of glasses in mystery fiction, but I'll refrain from mentioning them because of spoilers, but it's surprising how many examples of an ordinary object being used in mystery fiction come to mind once you think about it. I doubt this post will turn into a series about all kinds of objects, but I hope this post has given a peek at how physical clues can be developed in mystery fiction.

Convenient for reading this post: a post on glasses in mystery fiction.

Don't you just get excited when you open a mystery novel and you discover there are floorplans or other diagrams inside? There's just something romantic about a visual depiction of the setting of a story. In some stories, having a clearly drawn map might be necessary in order for you to solve the mystery, while in other stories, the map is merely there to assist the text, just to make things a bit more clear and perhaps to add a bit of flavor. And as I've also mentioned in my reviews of novels like Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken and Murder Among the Angells, settings like houses, mansions or castles can also act as a character on their own in mystery stories, and floorplans really help giving life to these sinister settings.

For this short post, I wanted to show a couple of floorplans that made an impression on me. I won't be talking about them too much, as in some cases one can even figure out something important by looking at these diagrams if you know what to look for, but I think that no matter what, these floorplans just look impressive.

Ayatsuji Yukito - Meirokan no Satsujin ("The Labyrinth House Murders", 1988)

The title basically says it all. After his debut novel The Decagon House Murders, Ayatsuji continued with this series featuring the creations of the architect Nakamura Seiji and this third novel features an underground 'house' designed after the Labyrinth of the Minataur, and the building is absolutely insane.

Shimada Souji - Naname Yashiki no Hanzai ("The Crime at the Slanted Mansion", 1982)

The second novel in Shimada's Mitarai Kiyoshi series has an interesting diagram, as it's drawn with depth. Floorplans with perspective aren't really common actually, and I really like how this house looks with the tower.

Nakai Hideo - Kyomu he no Kumotsu ("Offerings to Nothingness", 1964)

These floorplans are a bit smaller in scale compared to the previous ones, but I love the hand-drawn feeling of these plans. Kyomu he no Kumotsu is an infamous anti-mystery novel where the protagonist detectives try to figure out how a murder was committed even though there's no proof it's a murder and they just want it to be a murder because it's more fun and they hope more murders happen. These plans of course help them with their deductions.

Ayatsuji Yukito - Kirigoetei Satsujin Jiken ("The Kirigoe Mansion Murder Case", 1990)

Another novel by Ayatsuji. Technically, Kirigoetei Satsujin Jiken isn't part of Ayatsuji's House series, though the connection is heavily hinted at and the floorplan certainly seems similar in its complexity. This one is remarkable because of its sheer size, and this is just the ground floor!

Nikaidou Reito - Jinroujou no Kyoufu- France ("La Terreur Château du Loup-garou La Second Partie: France, 1997)

Jinroujou no Kyoufu is a mammoth of an impossible crime mystery, consisting of four volumes of 600~800 pages each. These 8(!) floorplans are of the Blue Wolf Castle, which lies in France. A serises of horrible murders and other gruesome crimes happen in this gigantic castle, but what makes this a true terrifying experience is that this just half of the mystery: the Blue Wolf Castle is just one half of a set of twin castles, and another series of murders happen in the Silver Wolf Castle, just across the border in Germany. The Silver Wolf Castle has the exact same layout as the Blue Wolf Castle, but the happenings that occur in these two castles is just amazing, and one can sense the scale of this story just by looking at these castle plans.

Chisun Inn

Oh, wait, this isn't from a mystery novel. This is in fact a floorplan of the Chisun Inn, a hotel located in Nagoya, Japan. Which also happens to look exactly like something from a mystery story. The hotel is designed in a spiral form, with a lot of rooms in a fan form, but one can easily imagine this to be the setting of a series of murders, right? I for one would make sure my door was locked and double locked if I were to stay here, as there's bound to be someone who's planning some kind of ingenious alibi trick or an impossible murder!

Anyway, these were a few floorplans from mystery novels that made an impression on me because of how they were designed, the scale of the setting or simply how they were drawn. Feel free to leave a comment with the floorplans from mystery novels (or TV series/manga/games) that made an impression on you.

"How many times do I have to tell you? There is no such thing as ghouls, ghosts, goblins or monsters! Listen up, there is absolutely absolutely no such thing as.... MONSTER?!!!!"

"Scooby-Doo"

Today, a book I really didn't want to read. I think I bought it used when I was in Kyoto, but the things I heard about it were so discouraging I left it unread for almost six, seven years. But I guess I had to read it some day.

Nikaidou Ranko series
Jigoku no Kijutsushi ("The Magician from Hell") (1992)
Kyuuketsu no Ie ("House of Bloodsuckers") (1992)
Sei Ursula Shuudouin no Sangeki ("The Tragedy at the Saint Ursula Convent") (1993)
Akuryou no Yakata ("Palace of Evil Spirits") (1994)
Yuri Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Lillies") (1995)
Bara Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Roses") (1997)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Deutsch Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Germany") (1996)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - France Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - France") (1997)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Tantei Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Detective") (1998)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Kanketsu Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Conclusion") (1998)
Akuma no Labyrinth ("The Devil Labyrinth") (2001)
Majutsuou Jiken ("The Case of the Sorcery King") (2004)
Soumenjuu Jiken ("The Case of the Double-Faced Beasts") (2007)
Haou no Shi ("Death of the Ruler") (2012)
Ran Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Orchids") (2014)
Kyodai Yuurei Mammoth Jiken ("The Case of the Giant Ghost Mammoth", 2017)

The celebrated detective Nikaidou Ranko and her brother Reito first learned of the horrible murders and other crimes committed by the super criminal Labyrinth in the adventures chronicled in Akuma no Labyrinth. Nobody knew who or what Labyrinth was, but he, or she, was able to commit the most horrifying murders and other mystifying crimes, and was also very eager to challenge Ranko in public to try and solve their 'exploits'. During the events of Akuma no Labyrinth, Ranko and Reito came across an old abandoned house that Labyrinth had used for some reason, and they discovered that Labyrinth had some of the old furniture there shipped off elsewhere. Soumenjuu Jiken ("The Case of the Double-Faced Beasts", 2007) starts with Ranko, Reito and the police hot on the trail of that set of furniture, and their journey brings them to the southern island of Kyushu. There they learn that two grotesque and blood-curling serial murders happened there the last few days: a whole hospital was completely destroyed from within, with the victims horribly mutilated with limbs torn off and worse, while elsewhere, the inhabitants of a whole village were also similarly killed as if they were mere broken toys. The only clue for Ranko are the testimonies of some survivors, which seem to point to the existence of genetically-engineered two-faced monsters created during World War II, who are being used by Labyrinth to... do what actually?

A few weeks back, I reviewed Nikaidou Reito's short story collection Ran Meikyuu, which also marked my return to the Nikaidou Ranko series after quite some years. The reason I hadn't touched this series for so long was basically this novel. I had already read most of the series, and I actually quite like it: I love post-war 70s atmosphere, the locked room murders and other impossibilities are often grand, over the top and always sure to leave an impression and the distinct occult/horror tone that pervades throughout the series is something perhaps not all can appreciate, but most of the time, I think it works out quite good. That is, the above holds mostly for the series until the mammoth work Jinroujou no Kyoufu (which is probably the longest locked room mystery ever, spanning four pockets of over 700 pages each).

The Nikaidou Ranko books written after Jinroujou no Kyoufu introduced a new storyline (though chronologically set before Jinroujou no Kyoufu), and a nemesis for Ranko: the enigmatic super criminal Labyrinth. These novels also meant a shift in tone: whereas the earlier novels were like Carr on crack, the Labyrinth novels were styled more closely to the henkaku horror mystery stories by Edogawa Rampo, which were lighter on the mystery, and much heavier on adventure, horror and grotesque story elements, reminiscent of the 20s-50s pulp science-fiction novels with evil scientists and things like that. The first novel in this mini-series, Akuma no Labyrinth was not that bad, but the fourth novel and ending to the Labyrinth series (Haou no Shi) was at best mediocre, with a disappointing mystery plot and an over-emphasis on horror and science-fiction elements. I had also heard that the two novels in the middle, Majutsuou Jiken and Soumenjuu Jiken were far worse, with especially Soumenjuu Jiken often panned as horrible, so I wasn't too eager to read them. But like I mentioned in the introduction, I only learned of Soumenjuu Jiken's reputation after I had picked it up, so it remained unread in my collection for a long time. I haven't read Majutsuou, nor do I have a copy at the moment, but the events in Majutsuou Jiken and Soumenjuu Jiken happen almost simultaneously: while Ranko is investigating the case of the double-faced beasts in the south of Japan, she learns of a horrible murder that occured during the show of an illusionist in the north and realizes Labyrinth is also behind that case.

But to get back to Soumenjuu Jiken: I have to agree with the general consensus that this was not a very entertaining novel. Most importantly, it's not really a mystery novel. It is pre-World War II science-fiction horror. Unno Juuza is quoted in the book, and yeah, that's certainly a name that'll pop up while you read this novel, as well as things like Conan Doyle's The Creeping Man, Rampo's Kotou no Oni orWells'The Island of Doctor Moreau. For the double-faced beasts that feature in the title? Yeah, they exist. The novel opens with an account by a woman who, as a girl, had miraculously survived the extermination of her village by the titular double-faced beasts. She lived on Skull Isle, an island housing a secret laboratory of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, with her village serving as camouflage. Strange experiments went on in that laboratory, all in the hope to win the war. The double-faced beasts were one of the weapons produced by these experiments: the gorilla-like animals had four arms, stremendous strength and stamina, possessed poison breath and could burn people with rays from their eyes. The beasts were taken away at the end of the war, their existence kept top secret by the extinction of the village on Skull Isle. We also learn that Labyrinth too was o a product of genetic engineering by the Imperial Army during the war: Labyrinth is a ruthless superhuman with extraordinary mental and physical traits originally designed as a super-soldier until they escaped the clutches of their creators, so Labyrinth gaining possession of these double-faced beasts is not good news.

The bulk of Soumenjuu Jiken consists of accounts by various people who had encounters with either the double-faced beasts or Labyrinth, both during the war or now, twenty years later, when Labyrinth and the double-faced beasts are leaving a bloody trail throughout Kyushu. Ranko learns about all these accounts as she's chasing after Labyrinth, slowly puzzling the tale of the double-faced beasts and the origin of Labyrinth together. These accounts are very grotesque and basically horror-stories, as we learn about the horrifying acts of these genetically engineered creations, with every single detail about how limbs were torn off and things like that explained. There's no mystery to be solved here, just sheer horror. At the end of the novel, Ranko does make a few deductions that show that not all events were as they seemed at first, but the things she figures out are poorly clewed and rather unimpressive. Soumenjuu Jiken reminded me of Shimada Souji's Nejishiki Zazetsuki, as that novel too revolved around an account of something that seems incredibly fantastical, and which invites to an alternate interpretation that is a bit closer to reality, but the 'alternative' interpretation by Ranko of the events and the existence of the double-faced beasts in Soumenjuu Jiken only involves small parts of the story: most of the monsters-are-loose story is true, and with genetically-altered monsters from World War II wiping whole villages out and things like that, it's kinda hard to care about what Ranko has to say about things that ultimately make no difference at all to the problem they're facing. (that is: that they have to fight genetically-altered monsters from World War II).

And what really kills this novel is the length. It's incredibly long. The version I have is about 750 pages long in double columns: the paperback pocket release consists of two volumes, each nearly 600 pages long. The thing is: it really doesn't need to be this long. The novel consists of accounts by various people on the double-faced beasts, and the story of Ranko and Reito piecing the whole thing together using these accounts, but I think almost half of the book is repeating itself. For example: there's an extended account by a teacher who discovers how a hospital was raided by the double-faced beasts, with everyone inside horribly ripped apart. This is followed by the Ranko narrrative, where she learns about the hospital case and then gets a report from the police. The problem: there is a lot of overlap. All the important facts we learn from the accounts, is always also repeated again in the Ranko narrative, so you're almost always told something twice. Obviously, something good could be done with a dual narrative structure: the discrepency between the eyewitness account and what Ranko learns from the police might for example be connected to some mystery. This however never happens in this novel. It's always a horror account, followed by a more business-like account of the same facts. This repeats itself over and over again, which explains why this book is so ridiculously long even though very little happens here. So even read as a science-fiction horror novel, I can't say Soumenjuu Jiken is good: it's a very repetitive novel and the horror-side of the story doesn't really work towards a (worthwile) climax anyway, so you'd better have no expectations there either.

So no, I can't say I can recommend Soumenjuu Jiken, not even if you like the Nikaidou Ranko series. It's completely different from the earlier novels, and while the other two Labyrinth novels I'd read where also a bit more focused on horror, they at least featured stories one could recognize as a mystery plot, with locked room murders or other impossible crimes. Soumenjuu Jiken on the other hand is all about monsters causing bloody havoc, which at the end is followed by a flimsy attempt at turning it into a mystery story by having Ranko making insignificant deductions, considering they do nothing at help solving the problem that they are facing double-faced four-armed monster gorillas. I remember that Haou no Shi (the last of the Labyrinth novels) kinda revealed the plot and outcome of this novel, so for those who have emotionally invested in this series, I can say you can just skip this novel and skip to Haou no Shi if you really want to see how the Labyrinth saga ends (even if that novel isn't that great either).

Original Japanese title(s): 二階堂黎人『双面獣事件』

まだ痛む右腕愛しいあなたを

思い出せと巡るから

剣を求め彷徨う

「Marionette Fantasia」（Garnet Crow)

I meander in hopes of remembering you,

my beloved with your wounded right arm,

Wandering around in search for your sword

"Marionette Fantasia" (Garnet Crow)

I've seen a couple of those small free libraries pop up in the neighborhood, where you can exchange novels and books for free: you can simply leave a book you'd like someone else to read behind, and readers can take a book with them for free. I got today's book from such a library.

Every year on the third Tuesday of September, the Speech of the Throne is held by the monarch of the Netherlands in the Hall of Knights, informing both the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives on the outlines of government policy for the coming year. The speech always starts with the sentence "Members of the States-General...," but this year, it is all the monarch managed to say, as at that exact moment, one of the chandelier light fixtures in the Hall dropped down, killing several members of both the Senate and the House, as well as the head security of the parliament. With the several members of the States-General deceased and the Speech of the Throne interrupted, the country is facing a constitutional dilemma, as a lot of procedures that should've been finished now haven't yet. Police Inspector Hendrix is put on the case to investigate whether this was an accident, an act of terrorism or something else, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives decides to have Elizabeth Brederode, the Head Clerk, appointed to the investigation too as Hendrix' partner considering her knowledge about the procedures and on-goings in the political world. As Hendrix and Brederode dig into the curious incident, they slowly realize that there was malice hiding behind it all in Theo Joekes'Moord in de Ridderzaal ("Murder in the Hall of Knights", 1980).

Theo Joekes was a Dutch journalist, writer and member of the House of Representatives during his life and Moord in de Ridderzaal, his very first detective novel, was written during the period he was still an active member of the House of Representatives. The subject matter of this novel was thus more than familiar to him, and while the book opens with a note that the various political functions that appear throughout the book are not based entirely on reality (the political parties mentioned for example are fictional), one can feel that the writer had quite some affinity with the stage of this tale, where various political games, but also the personal lifes of politicans play an important role.

The most singular characteristic of this novel is perhaps the detective role: while Police Inspector Hendrix is obviously a very obvious choice for a detective-character, having the Head Clerk of the House of Representatives act as a detective is quite surprising. Joekes did a good job at utilizing the device of having two detectives: early on in the novel, the two each act according to their own hypotheses, with Brederode of the opinion the incident was a planned murder, while Hendrix following the idea that it might just have been an unfortunate accident. Later on, when the clues gathered seem to suggest murder, the two bounce ideas of each other, with Hendrix obviously having more experience as in criminal investigation, while Brederode shines a light from surprising angles because of her experience in the political world. The Speaker of the House is also added to the mix, as he acts as a 'judge' between the two detectives, weighing their hypotheses and evidences against each other. The result is a fairly chatty detective novel, with two detectives working with each other despite different ideas, and that's something I quite like actually, as it gives a mystery novel a certain dynamic that's sometimes absent in stories focusing on one single detective who only acts on their own ideas.

As for the mystery plot... I did not like it that much. I think my main gripe is that it feels very contrived. The initial incident, of the falling chandelier, serves as an impressive, graphic story opener, but what follows is a plot that hinges on a lot of coincidences or unlikely events. For example, witnesses who just happen to see, and remember, some incredibly minor event that turns out to be important even though nobody would've had any reason to pay attention to that. But then the opposite happens too, with obviously suspect incidents being brushed off as having nothing to do with the case until several pages later, the surprising reveal is made that that suspicious scene was indeed *gasp* important. The scheme uncovered at the end that explains the titular Murder in the Hall of Knights is almost insanely contrived, asking for way too many steps and opportunities for it to fail. if it was only once or twice, okay, I could live with that, but that is not the case here: everything feels artificially conceived, and not in the 'fiction is good because it's artificial' kind of way. Interestingly enough, the plot seems like it'd have fitted perfectly with Higashino's Galileo short stories (not the novels, mind you), even though this book is like two decades older. And while politics do play a role in the plot, you don't need to be afraid for complex political schemes that endanger the whole country or something like that. At the core, The Murder in the Hall of Knights is a fairly standard mystery story.

To illustrate how unimpressed I was with the story: I only remembered halfway through the story that I already knew the thing! Some years ago, I listened to an old Dutch radio play based on this book (which was quite faithful to the original book, I know realize), but I had completely forgotten about it. You'd think that a setting like the Hall of Knights and the Speech of the Throne would make a better impression with me, but no. The radio play was originally broadcast in 1982 by the way, so two years after the book's original release.

One thing I realize now as I write this is that I think the setting is pretty good. If you say "political center of the Netherlands", one might think of some faraway place only accesible for those in the world, but I think most Dutch readers will be quite familiar with the Binnenhof, which houses the Senate, House and the Prime Minister. I don't know how it is in other countries, but the Binnenhof (Inner Court) is easily accessible for everyone and most people actually simply use it as a short-cut to head for the shopping center of The Hague. In every-day use, it's more like a street than "the political center," so it's a place many people will be familiar with even if they have no affinity with politics.

So I am not overly enthusastic about Moord in the Ridderzaal. While I think the story does have some interesting features in the form of its detectives and its location, I think the overall plot is strained with most of the plot-driving developments feeling rather unnatural and manufactured. Joekes did write more detective novels after this first one, but I doubt I'll be going after them actively (then again, I got my copy of this book for free too, though I may just place it back for someone else to read).

「警察の正義とは、悪を地獄に落とす事であり、善を地獄より救い出す事である。真実の破片を集め、組み立てるのは天国・地獄行の切符を同時に発行するようなものだ」

「矢島喜八郎」

"The justice of the police is sending the evil to hell, and saving the good from hell. Finding the fragments of truth and putting them back together, is like issuing tickets destined for both heaven and hell."

"Yajima Kihachirou"

I might be wrong, but I have a feeling I am one of the few mystery bloggers who regularly also discusses mystery fiction in the videogame medium. For me, mystery fiction in the form of a videogame is as normal as mystery novels, TV series or audio dramas and there's all kinds of exciting things videogames can do with a mystery plot that are neigh impossible to do in any other medium, so I never really understand why people who like mystery fiction in general, would even want to ignore something as important as mystery videogames. One of the most important systems for mystery gaming was to be the original Nintendo DS line, where a plethora of mystery adventure games were released for. Its success is in hindsight no surprise: its dual screen, touch screen control and portability basically foreshadowed our obsession with smartphones now, making gaming both accessible and easy to take with you and the system also managed to hit an excellent price point for its games, as game cartridges (memory cards) were becoming cheaper, while a DS game in general didn't need as much development costs as games for home consoles like the Wii or PS3. Lots of mystery adventure games were thus released for the DS, as they were relatively cheap to develop, and these kinds of story-based games appealed to a lot of non-traditional gamers.

Nishimura Kyoutarou is an extremely prolific writer who, as of now, has more than 600 books to his name, is not only strongly associated with the travel mystery genre, but also with the numerous TV suspense dramas based on his books or original ideas by him. He was also one of the writers who jumped into gaming early on, with games based on his works released for systems like the Famicom (known as the NES in the West), PC and 3DO. What's unique about these games are that they aren't adaptations of existing novels, like sometimes happen with an author like Agatha Christie. The games featured originals tories, and Nishimura was usually credited with the original plot or at the very least, with his supervision over the project, making him usually at least somewhat connected to these games in terms of contents, instead of just signing off his name.

A while back I reviewed Nishimura Kyoutarou's not-so-good novel Tokkyuu Fuji ni Notteita Onnaand a commentator asked about some of these games, and I had to admit I had only played one of them. But it was a long time ago, and I played it when I had just started studying Japanese, so I thought now was as good a time to play the game again. I had to dig around, but I finally found my cartridge of the Nintendo DS game with the overly long title DS Nishimura Kyoutarou Suspense Arata Tantei Series: Kyoto - Atami - Zekkai no Kotou Satsui no Wana ("DS Nishimura Kyoutarou Suspense - The Arata Detective Series: Kyoto - Atami - The Lone Isle In The Deep Sea - A Murderous Trap", 2007). Nishimura Kyoutarou is credited with the original plot and supervision for this game which features a new, original detective character. The 35-year old Arata Isshin is the son of the private detective Arata Kenshin, who was murdered three years ago. Unable to cope with the death of his father, Isshin left Japan to wander around the world for three years. Realizing he can't run forever, Isshin decides to return to Japan and step in his father's footsteps as a private detective. Upon his return to Japan, Isshin finds that his first task is to find his father's disciple Asuka, as he can't possibly run a detective agency without her help, but he finds that she has stopped working as a detective and is now working as a maid in a traditional inn in Kyoto. Isshin runs off to Kyoto to get her back, but he's only just arrived when a murder occurs in the traditional tea room in this faraway inn in the ancient capital of Japan.

I'll just refer to this game as DS Nishimura Kyoutarou Suspense Arata Tantei Series 1, as the full title is way too long. This game, which was followed by a sequel in 2008, is designed to be like the TV dramas based on Nishimura's work, which is also evident by its presentation, with the overly dramatic music and even "eyecatchers" for the "commercial breaks". Storywise too, DS Nishimura Kyoutarou Suspense Arata Tantei Series 1 feels very much like a "stereotypical Nishimura Kyoutarou" story, with a murder happening at popular tourist destinations or other exotic places and an emphasis in the mystery plot on alibis and the use of time-schedules (when you say Nishimura, you say elaborate alibi tricks using train schedules). This game consists of three stories, each set somewhere else: the opening story A Maze Four-and-a-half Tatami Mats Wide is set in the ancient capital Kyoto, where Isshin tries to convince Asuka to come back to Tokyo to work with him at the detective agency. The second story, A Miniature Garden of Love and Hate, starts Isshin and Asuka returning to Tokyo by Shinkansen, when their train is stopped in popular sea resort Atami because of a bomb threat. The final story, Broken Similarities, has Isshin and Asuka being kidnapped to a solitary island, where he's forced to prove that the current defendant for his father's murder is actually innocent.

As a game, DS Nishimura Kyoutarou Suspense Arata Tantei Series 1 is extremely beginner-friendly. It follows the standard adventure format: you wander around various locations as you interview people and gather evidence or testimony. The evidence and testimony you have gathered allow you to answer the quiz-like questions asked in dialogue confrontations with allies or suspects, which will further develop the plot and eventually allow you to solve the case. DS Nishimura Kyoutarou Suspense Arata Tantei Series 1is very easy to pick up for non-gamers, as there's no penalty for giving wrong answers (it asks you to reconsider your answer), and the game also makes it clear to the player where you should go next or who to interview next, making it impossible like in older games to wander around for hours as you don't know who you should talk to about what in order to advance in the game. The downside of this accessibility is of course that this game is almost ridiculously easy, as you can't possibly stray from the correct path. So you're really here just to enjoy the story.

Mystery-plot wise, the game is never really surprising (again, the difficulty is fairly low), but the core ideas are usually okay, though one can question where they wouldn't have worked even better in a different format. A Maze Four-and-a-half Tatami Mats Wide has some nice ideas in terms of clews in relation to the crime scene (a small room for the traditional tea ceremony) and it really fits the Kyoto vibe. A Miniature Garden of Love and Hate is pretty ambitious and is perhaps the most "Nishimura Kyoutarou"-esque, with its focus on the Shinkansen bullet train and multiple crime scenes in both Tokyo and Atami. There's a pretty daring plot going too, but the step-by-step presentation that doesn't allow the player much freedom does prevent this story from becoming truly surprising. Interesting is the guest mention of Nishimura's most famous creation, Inspector Totsugawa and his subordinate Kamei, who are helping the Atami Police in this case. The final story, Broken Similarities, is set in a 1:1 replica of the building where Isshin's father was murdered. Isshin is first forced to prove that the current defendant is innocent, even though it was Isshin himself who first discovered his father's body three years ago, with the defendant standing near the body with a gun in his hand. During this new investigation however, a new murder happens in the exact same way his father's was murdered, and this time, it's his father's best friend Agata who's found holding the gun. While the "strange building on an island" reminds more of Ayatsuji Yukito than Nishimura Kyoutarou, the mystery is actually very Nishimura-like, with an emphasis on alibis and character movement. The trick behind the seemingly impossible murder is actually very clever, and there's a brilliant clew staring in you in the eyes that only becomes obvious in hindsight, but I can't deny that this final chapter is also a bit draggin, and it's a bit obvious who the murderer is as they have the widest variety in character animations prepared for them compared to the other characters!

This game also has a mode called West Village (literal meaning of Nishimura), with 50 short mystery quizzes and riddles. In some of them you have pick out a contradicting line in a story to solve the mystery, in others you have to figure out an alibi trick with a train schedule by moving trains around to arrive at a certain spot by a certain time. These are usually fairly entertaining short quizzes that serve as a break for the main game, and the latter quizzes are easily the more challenging part of this game, surpassing the main story!

DS Nishimura Kyoutarou Suspense Arata Tantei Series: Kyoto - Atami - Zekkai no Kotou Satsui no Wana is overall never an exceptional game, though it's never a bad game either. It's obviously created in a way so non-gamers can also enjoy this game and in that sense, this game is a pretty good introduction for people to see how a mystery story can translate to a game. There's little challenge here, and the mystery plots do suffer a bit from this streamlining, but overall, I have to say I did have fun with this second playthrough of the game. I never got around to playing the second game in this series actually, and I might pick it up, as it's cheaper than lunch nowadays.

Original Japanese title(s): 『DS西村京太郎サスペンス新探偵シリーズ「京都・熱海・絶海の孤島殺意の罠』

"Paris in the fall, the last months of the year, at the end of the millenium. The city holds many memories for me, of music, of cafes, of love, and of death."

"Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars"

As people may have noticed, I'm not a big fan of John Dickson Carr. Not that I dislike his works, but unlike other authors with similar reputations I never really caught the virus. I liked The Judas Window a lot for example, and I think The Hollow Man has some great moments (it's a bit too contrived at times though), but I never felt the urge to read all of Carr (or certain series), while I did have that feeling of wanting to read more and more with Christie's Poirot and Ellery Queen. In fact, I can't even see what people prefer in Carr over early Queen in terms of pure mystery plot (I can see the point if we're talking about story 'fluff', but in terms of the core mystery plot...). I might read some Carr whenever I come across them and most of the books I read have some okayish-to-good ideas and concepts in them, but for some reason I never get that "I need to read more" epiphany. So I usually average out on maybe one Carr review once every two, three years...

After her divorce with cheating and ne'er-do-well Ned Atwood, beautiful Eve Neill got herself engaged with Toby Lawes, of the respectable Lawes family. The Lawes lived right across the street from Eve in the city of Paris, which is also the reason why Eve was scared to death when one night Ned appeared in her bedroom, with the helpf of a spare key he had kept. Unable to give Eve up, Ned pleads with Eve not to marry Toby, and to come back to him, but Eve rejects him vehemently, but with her in-laws right across the street, she's afraid to make a scene, as being seen with her ex-husband in her bedroom late at night probably doesn't look good. Ned refuses to give up however, and even threatens her sexually to prevent her from marrying another, but as he notices that Sir Maurice Lawes, father of Toby, is in the study, he walks over to the windows to draw attention to him and Eve. Eve tries to stop him, but the two see a horrifying scene. Sir Maurice has been bashed on the head, and it's obvious he's not among the living anymore, and Ned even spots someone leaving the room at that very moment, though he's not willing to share the identity of the owner of the brown gloves with Eve. Eve tries to get Ned out of her house as quickly as possible, fearing the police and her in-laws will come as soon as the murder is detected, but pushes Ned off the stairs in her haste. Ned manages to leave the premise with a bloody nose and a bump on the head, but this turns out to be a grave mistake, as Eve is later suspected as the murderer on Sir Maurice, as the police found blood on her clothing (which we know is Ned's), as well as a shard of a snuff-box once owned by Napoleon, which has just been purchased by Sir Maurice that night and which had been smashed into pieces at the crime scene. And to make things even worse: the fall on his head resulted in a concussion for Ned, and he's been unconcious for days, unable to collaborate Eve's story. Luckily for Eve though, a certain doctor is able to find a way out for her.

The Emperor's Stuff-Box (1942) is, as far as I know, widely considered as one of Carr's finest works, and interestingly enough not even a locked room, or impossible mystery. It felt in my eyes a lot like a Christie-esque story in fact, with a focus on psychological misdirection. Which granted, Carr also liked to use, but with a thriller-like set-up, the relatively simple murder (no 'dressing up', but just a corpse lying in the study with quite a few bashes on its head), the members of a single family at the crux of the problem and rather limited setting, The Emperor's Stuff-Box felt surprisingly familiar to me as someone who has read much more Christie than Carr. Christie's 4.50 From Paddington (1952) dates from later than this novel, but uses a similar opening scene by the way, with someone witnessing a murder through the window (in Paddington's case, it's someone seeing a murder happening in a train that's running parallel to the one the witness is riding). The idea of a window literally serving as a window into a world of (possible) murder is probably best known from Hitchcock's Rear Window, my guess would be.

So no over-the-top, mystical magic tricks in The Emperor's Stuff-Box, though obviously, psychological misdirection is part of any good magic trick. And what's done in this novel is quite brilliant. What happened in Sir Maurice's study is essentially really nothing more but one of the most basic of magic tricks, combined with another very common mystery trope, but it is pulled off in a very convicing way here. To be honest, I figured out quite early on what was going on, because once you recognize the pattern, you'll realize you'll have seen dozens of variations of the same idea in other mystery stories, but knowing what was going on made my reading experience an educational one, as I saw more clearly why some things happened. For example, I am normally a bigger fan of the short story format, and at first, I also felt this story might've worked better as a short story (more on that later), but I realized what was going on, I understood why this misdirection worked much better in a full-length novel, as it has more time to settle. The misdirection also works on more levels than just the story-level (in fact, it works outside the book itself!), but it also needs the room a novel offers to fully work. It's interesting that the misdirection starts even before the first page of the story, in a way, but it'll remains quite fair towards the reader. Simpler variations of the same idea can often be found in courtroom drama mystery, now I think about it.

In fact, I am inclined to say that this piece of psychological misdirection is an especially fair one. In general, I think psychological clewing is a hard to do in a truly fair way in mystery fiction. When we get to "He may have felt X, so that's why he believed Y", I feel (hah!) there's too much uncertainty. Sure, the writer can repeatedly say character Z has this or that character trait, so there was no doubt Z would do that, but still, these explanations can feel a bit forceful. The Emperor's Stuff-Box however makes good use of its medium (a book), as well as the fact that part of the misdirection is not only aimed at a certain character in the book, but also at the reader at the same time. The reader who is fooled until the end will thus not feel "cheated" by the explanation about the psychological misdirection in the denouement, as very likely, they'll have been victim of that same idea too.

I am a fan of logic school mystery fiction and there human psychology is usually reduced to one easy-to-remember rule: any character is to act in their own best interest, given the knowledge they have at that moment. That means a murderer might take actions that seem strange, but they make perfect sense considering the knowledge they have at that very moment. There is less uncertaintity about human psychology and the things they might do there, as it's mostly based on self-preservation and knowledge flow.

I do really have to point I really disliked most of the characters in the book. There are very few nice people here. Most of them are actually quite nasty, and to be honest, I found it quite a chore to read the book because each scene was filled with characters who I really didn't like talking in melodramatic ways. And part of that might be design, but man, it's been a while since I read a novel with basically no likeable characters.

So in short, I found The Emperor's Stuff-Box to be an entertaining mystery novel, that manages to take an otherwise a very common, and basic trope from both stage magic and mystery fiction and use it in a very effective manner, with a novel that is clearly built around this certain piece of psychological misdirection. It's an excellent example of using craftmanship to make much more of a simple and common idea. That said, the characters are definitely not the main attraction here.

番外編：The 8 Mansion Murders Released

The Comic Book Mystery

Go Your Own Way

The Wrong Shape

Black Coffee Rag

Designs in Crime

Double, Double

Prism of Eyes

Black Orchids

The Eleventh Striker

The Message in Red

Brand New Story

Sailing In The Sunset

Night on Haunted Mountain

Eye on Crime

The Quest of the Missing Map

Monsters Unleashed

Knight Time Terror

Moving Target

In The Mind To Suffer