ボクの事件簿

"The show must go on."

(English saying)

Last week, I reviewed Van Madoy's FGO Mystery - Hirugaeru Kogetsukan no Kokkai - Kogetsukan Satsujin Jiken, a novelization of a quest originally written by Madoy for the highly succesful mobile game Fate/Grand Order. The Fate franchise is a fantasy series about the Holy Grail Wars, fought between Masters and their Servants, spirits based on historical and fictional figures from all across the world like Sherlock Holmes, but also Murasaki Shikibu and Ozymandias (Ramses II). While most (limited time) quests in FGO obviously revolve around battles, Madoy's first FGO Mystery event (held in May 2018) was different as Madoy used the FGO characters to tell a traditional closed circle murder mystery story set on a remote island, with next to no battle gameplay. It was a battle of the wits, as players were challenged to correctly guess who the murderer was and Madoy offered a very classic whodunnit story, where you could arrive at the identity of the murderer through the simple (but actually not very simple) process of elimination.

In May 2019, a second FGO Mystery event started in the game with the title Murder at the MEIHO-SOU. This event too was written by Madoy, and novelizations of this event, as well as of the 2018 event, were released right after this second event ended near the end of May. This second volume too has an insanely long title: FGO Mystery Tomadou Meihousou no Kousatsu Meihousou Satsujin Jiken ("FGO Mystery - The Examination of the Puzzling Meihousou - The Meihousou Murder Case", 2019) however luckily also uses the far shorter alternative English title The Meihousou Murders inside the book. The story starts with the discovery of a small anomalous temporal singularity in the Caribbean sea by the Chaldea Security Organization. Strangely enough, the singularity appears to have the form of a film set, dubbed a 'virtual drifting Hollywood' by Chaldea. While the unstable singularity is likely to disappear within a few days on its own, it's still deemed wiser to fix the temporal singularity and that is by having the film set fulfill its role as the setting for an actual film. Murasaki Shikibu is asked to write a story to film inside the temporal singularity, and she quickly comes up with a story and get the people (Servants) she wants as her cast.

The film story is set in the fictional Republic of Nadai Nada. After the fall of the royal house and the kingdom of Nadai Nada, Miguel Cortez (a role played by Professor James Moriarty) had become the first president of the Republic. When he passed away, he left behind a young widow (and former adopted daughter) Gabriella (played by Murasaki Shikibu). A small private gathering in memory of Miguel has been organized at the Meihousou, a former royal holiday palace which had become the residence of Miguel and Gabriella. The guests at this gathering however aren't all what they seem to be: from former court composer Antiono Jovin (played by Antonio Salieri) to Roma Kureishi (played by Sakamoto Ryouma) and Vargus (played by Ozymandias/Ramses II), all the characters in the film seem to have come to the Meihousou with ulterior motives. As they have little time before the temporal singularity will collapse on its own, Murasaki Shikibu never had time to tell all her actors how the whole story would go and what their characters were like exactly, and that results in a major problem when Murasaki Shikibu herself is knocked out due to a too powerful medicine which was 'supposed to have her feel more relaxed'. As none of the people involved with the film production know what Murasaki Shikibu's intentions were with the story, they are left with no choice: each of the actors tries to come up with their own version of the story, based on the clues left in the first half they had already filmed.

Oh, I have to say, I had not expected Madoy to come with this story, especially not after reading the first FGO Mystery novel. For that was really a classic whodunnit story set in a mansion on a remote island complete with a Challenge to the Reader, where you needed to follow a tight elimination process to arrive at the identity of the killer. This story however follows the less common unfinished movie trope. Trope, I say? Yeah, because funnily enough, I have read several mystery stories now that are about an unfinished mystery movie, where the actors themselves then have to guess what the solution was based on the hints already filmed, and everyone arriving at a different solution. Abiko Takemaru's Tantei Eiga is exactly about this theme for example, and a funny one too, as every actor wanted their character to become the killer (because that's the best role in a mystery movie). Yonezawa Honobu's Gusha no End Roll too is about an unfinished mystery movie filmed for the school festival,with again everyone coming up with a different solution to the locked room murder that occurs there.

Readers of classsic mystery fiction will definitely recognize the influence of Christianna Brand and Anthony Berkeley here, as those two writers too loved their multiple solutions. Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case is of course famous example of the detective story with multiple solutions, but Brand's novels too are always brimming with characters who come up with, well, quite plausible solutions for the matter at hand. In hindsight however, I have to say it shouldn't surprise me that Madoy came up with this. His Revoir series is about a private court set in Kyoto and in those trials, it's less about the truth, but about convincing the others/judge in accepting your "truth". The characters there are always coming up with new theories that suit their stance in the trial based on the evidence in front of them, so both defense and prosecution often come up with completely different interpretations based on the same facts. The Meihousou Murders does exactly that, as the five main actors come up with five completely different conclusions to the film based on the same first half of the film.

The various 'solutions' (conclusions to the movie) are fairly simple, but entertaining enough. Usually they're based on one single contradiction, or odd point in the first half of the movie, which is then the starting point to an idea that encompasses also a lot of imagination and fantasy. This story is definitely less 'rigid' in terms of mystery plot compared to the first, as a lot of the solutions proposed in this book are more in the spirit of 'Hey, this character acted odd in the first half of the movie, what if he was actually X and that his real goal is to...". It's an entertaining book, as you see all the characters coming up with widely different interpretations of the same base story, but as a detective story, it's not exactly fit for a Challenge to the Reader, which is strangely enough included in the story. As so much of the plot hinges on "I reject your reality and substitute my own", it's strange to be asked in a direct way to arrive at the one-and-only solution. The Challenge to the Reader is admittedly about a different problem (eventually Murasaki Shikibu wakes up, only to find everyone has come up with their own version of the story), and I think the final solution to save the movie is reasonably clever, especially on this scale and fits well with the theme (there's a weirdly specific hint that doesn't really work that well I think, but the base idea is something that a reader could definitely think of), but I don't really see the added value of a Challenge to the Reader for this story.

I think the first novel is more satisfying as a classic whodunnit mystery story, but FGO Mystery Tomadou Meihousou no Kousatsu Meihousou Satsujin Jiken is probably more enjoyable to readers as a piece of entertainment. This story was originally a quest in the game Fate/Grand Order (which is obviously not a mystery game at the core) and I think it's better in that regard compared to the first story, which can be far more difficult than this story. The Meihousou Murders is funnier, has far more character interaction with familiar faces (rather than "the original characters with borrowed graphical assets" from the first event), moves at a far more satisfying pace and is less 'precise' regarding its mystery plot, making it far more accessible.

Original Japanese title(s): Type-Moon (原), 円居挽『FGOミステリー惑う鳴鳳荘の考察鳴鳳荘殺人事件』

So for the last two months or so, I kept telling myself, don't forget to write an announcement, it'll take no time at all, it'll just be a short post.... And in the end, I still didn't manage to write this thing in time...

Last year, Locked Room International released the hilarious impossible crime mystery The 8 Mansion Murders by Takemaru ABIKO, translated by yours truly. That was not the first time Abiko had been translated to English, as some of his work for videogames (like TheStarship Damrey (3DS)) had already been available in the West, but The 8 Mansion Murders was his first proper mystery novel which had been translated into English. I was obviously happy to see that the novel was received pretty well when it released (if you haven't read it yet, please do). For those who enjoyed the novel, I have good news, as more Abiko is available now. The June/August 2019 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (which should be available right now) features Abiko's impossible crime short story A Smart Dummy In The Tent (orig.: 1990), once again translated by me. The story is part of Abiko's Mario series, and stars a... ventriloquist's dummy as the detective. Yoshio is an incredibly gifted, but somewhat clumsy ventriloquist who performs together with his puppet Mario. However, Yoshio's great secret is that Mario isn't just a tool of his trade, Mario's a whole seperate personality of Yoshio. And despite his arrogant and wise-cracking personality, Mario's also actually really cleverand sharp, which comes in handy in A Smart Dummy In The Tent, when Yoshio and his love interest Mutsuki get involved with an impossible crime that occurs in the backstage area of a circus tent.

Those who enjoyed the comedy and banter of The 8 Mansion Murders should really check out the story, as this one too is immensely fun to read, while the impossible crime angle of the story is also quite original, really fitting to the circus setting. I hope you'll enjoy the read! To end with a completely uninteresting note: I have been to the circus in real life only once, when I was a kid!

As for other projects and related announcements, that's a tale for another day. Another day that might not really ask for a DeLorean, but some patience will be necessary.

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces

Charles Lamb

So it doesn't happen often I buy (new) Dutch mystery novels, as I'm usually looking for older (used) books, but today's book, this one I decided to order from my local bookshop. Of course, I didn't know when I clicked the order button that day, that had I simply ordered it from a webshop, I'd have had the book delivered to my home the next day, while via the brick-and-mortar bookshop, it took three full days, and most of the fourth (I was notified the book was ready for pick-up near closing time). That's a pretty drastic difference in delivery time.

In 2015-2016, I reviewed a few novels by M.P.O. Books, a Dutch mystery writer who writes puzzle plot mysteries set in contemporary Netherlands. I found his books quite enjoyable, so I was also pleased to learn that he had also started writing short mystery stories under the name Anne van Doorn, as personally, I'm more a fan of the short, rather than the long form. It took me a long time to actually get started on the Anne van Doorn stories however. The stories were first released as individual e-books, which again is not a form I like (yes, I sound incredibly picky now). Hardcopy volumes were released later: De geliefde die in het veen verdween en andere mysteries (2017) and De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen en andere mysteries (2018) each collected five stories. But in spring 2019, a new hardcopy volume was released to replace these two earlier releases, collecting the first ten stories in Anne van Doorn's Robbie Corbijn series: De mysteries van Robbie Corbijn ("The Mysteries of Robbie Corbijn", 2019) introduces the reader to Robbie Corbijn, owner and head investigator of the private investigation agency Research & Discover, located in the city of Leiden. Corbijn is an ex-cop, who now specializes in (c)old cases the police won't work on anymore. Recently, he has hired Lowina de Jong (narrator) as an assistant-prospective partner in the business. At first, Lowina thought the job was rather uneventful and unrewarding, as there's usually a perfectly good reason why the police didn't manage to solve the case first (there's nothing more to be done, not even by Research & Discover), but occasionally, Lowina's boss shows he's actually really good at the job, solving baffling cases like a locked room murder dressed as suicide and other cases which would've been unsolved if not for Corbijn's interference.

In the introduction, van Doorn says the inspiration for these stories came from classic mystery fiction like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Baroness Orczy and yep, that's quite clear right from the start. Sure, the stories are set in contemporary, modern Dutch society, but the tricks being played here and some of the background settings are what you'd expect from classical puzzle plot mysteries, and sometimes even slightly older mystery fiction. Locked room murders, people dressing up as other people because that was super-easy in the 1910s-1920s if I were to believe all the mystery fiction I read, Dramatic Background Stories That Serve As Even More Dramatic Murder Motives, you know the drill. If you're a fan of the authors mentioned, you're certainly at the right place with this volume, though I also have to note that sometimes, things will feel too familiar. In fact, as I was reading through the book, often I'd think "well, this story, this one was obviously inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle", or another by Christie etc. I think it would've worked better if this would happen occasionally, but for example in this volume, basically half of the stories feel distinctly Conan Doyle-ish, which is a shame, because it constantly makes me think of the Holmes stories, rather than just of Robbie Corbijn.

The opening story is perhaps the least Doylish though. In De dichter die zichzelf opsloot ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In"), Corbijn is hired to investigate the death of Albert Meijer, a not-so-succesful poet and recluse locked in an unhappy marriage. The man spent his days in his log cabin out in the woods behind his house, a lifestyle he maintained even when his wife would go abroad for months to spend a long holiday. One day, the remains of Meijer were found inside his cabin, apparently shot by the shotgun lying next to him. With a locked door and a postcard from his wife from her holiday address saying she wouldn't give him even a penny anymore, it seems the poet committed suicide, but his son believes his stepmother committed the crime somehow and wants Corbijn to investigate. The problem of the tale revolves around how murder could've been committed, considering the log cabin had been locked from the inside. I like the idea behind this locked room, which is essence an idea that you occasionally see in more mechanically-inclined locked room stories, though executed in a completely different scale. The actual execution in this story however relies so much on coincidence and hindsight logic in order for it all to work out the way it did. Not only did a certain object needed to be available at that certain time, there was no compelling reason for the culprit to gamble and go through all the trouble, merely on the chance that they'd be succesful in creating the locked room. The culprit would also needed to have knowledge of certain facts, or simply gamble on the fact others wouldn't know, which seems really weird considering all the things they'd need to do to create this locked room. I do like the way how Corbijn first surmised what the real deal was behind the locked room mystery, a subtle but clever clue that is so easily missed.

Let's say the first story was more Carr-inspired than the Conan Doyle, Christie and Orczy from the introduction. Het meisje dat bleef rondhangen ("The Girl Who Remained")too is perhaps better categorized here then. Corbijn is hired to investigate a series of accidents on a lonely country road with a slight curve adorned by trees. Some weeks ago, someone crashed into the trees with his car, but before the driver lost conciousness, he asked whether the girl was okay. Apparently, he believed a girl had been standing in the road, which is why he drove into the trees. The problem: there had been no girl on the road, as per testimony of the two witnesses who saw the whole accident happen. The queer thing is that the same accident had happened some years before, with the driver trying to avoid a person who hadn't been there. Corbijn and Lowina learn that many years ago, a girl was run over on that road, and her mother (who lives near the road) still believes her girl haunts the place. The story with the most atmosphere of the whole volume, but the solution to the identity of the ghost is more practical than inventive, with a rather mundane explanation. The why is perhaps more important, but due to the rather small cast of characters (of whom the culprit really stands out like a sore thumb), the motive can be guessed rather easily.

In Het joch dat grenzen overschreed ("The Brat Who Went Too Far"), Corbijn is hired by a lawyer (who has a rather familiar-sounding name...) to clear the name of Geertruida Smelinck, who has been convicted for the murder on her nine-year old neighbor Ward, the Dennis the Menace of the cul-de-sac street of only three houses, all inhabitated by people who carried their share of pain in life. Ward was found dead in the garden of Geertruida, with a metal rod sticking from his body, and given the fact Ward had stolen her apples last year too, it was believed she had killed the boy in a rage for attempting to do the same this year. As Corbijn and Lowina visit the street again, asking the neighbor who lived between Geertruida and Ward about that day and reconstructing the movements of Ward, Corbijn realizes he might have a chance at overturning the verdict. This story is less 'mechanically' inclined compared to the previous two stories I mentioned, and perhaps also less intricate in terms of what really happened (the focus lies more on the unveiling, I think), though the story itself is perhaps more enjoyable as an actual "story", with more attention to character background. The real truth behind Ward's death is simple and not particularly shocking. In terms of dynamics, it also reminds me of a certain episode in a popular mystery videogame (which may well be sheer coincidence), but once you think of that game, it's very easy to guess what happened here.

De arts die de weg kwijt was ("The Doctor Who Lost His Way") is a distinctly Doylish story, reminsicent of The Greek Interpreter. In this story, a newly installed doctor is called out in the middle of the night for an emergency with one of his patients, but when he arrives at the house in The Hague, he finds not his patient waiting for him on the second floor of the building, but a woman who was shot and two men who seem to be up to no good. He is threatened by the men to help the woman, and afterwards is knocked out. The doctor awakens the next morning inside his own car (car keys inside) parked near Scheveningen Beach. He informs the police about the shot woman and they go to the house again, but he is shocked to find his real patient there, not the shot woman and the men. Considering the doctor was found inside his own car with his keys inside, the police thinks he probably came up with a cock-and-bull story about the shot woman for his wife to hide some affair, but the doctor needs to know what happened and asks Corbijn to help him. Both the problem of the disappearing house and the locked car are serviceable, but not particularly memorable. The car problem is barely a variant on a very classic locked room trick, so hardly impressive, while the problem with the house is... basically what you'd guess first.

De boerin die niet wilde sterven ("The Farmer's Wife Who Didn't Want to Die") too invokes Doyle (The Copper Beeches), with a private nurse having doubts about her new post, where she has to live on a remote farm to take care of a farmer's wife. Some specific working conditions like not only living on the farm, but not even being allowed to go outside, not even for a fresh breather, save for her day off seem odd, as is the fact her post seems to be screened. The story follows the familiar Victorian thriller thread all the way to the end, and is hardly a puzzle plot mystery. De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen ("The Mountains That Know No Oblivion") has Corbijn telling Lowina about the time a colleague wanted Corbijn for a second opinion. The case was a really cold one, as it happened in Albania in 1933. Deep in the mountains, the blood vendetta between clans is law, and in 1933, this blood vendetta hit a climax when a woman was shot inside a small attic room on top of a kulla e ngujimit, a tower especially built so people could lock themselves in when a blood vendetta would rear its ugly head again. There was only a small window in the attic room, but you'll only find a river a far way below that window, so it's unlikely she was shot through the window, yet the other people in the kulla heard her speak with her assailant right before she was shot, yet they found nobody else in the attic room. The long-running family fued plot invokes Victorian fiction of course, but the solution is basically borrrowed exactly from another, fairly famous mystery story and even with the new setting, it's not really one of my favorites. De dame die niet om hulp had gevraagd ("The Lady Who Didn't Ask For Help") too is distinctly Doylish, with Corbijn telling Lowina about the time he was still with the police force, about a woman who'd always call the police but would deny having done so every time they arrived at her home. The solution lies in the psat, but this is more Victorian revenge melodrama than puzzle plot, I'd say.

De geliefde die in het veen verdween ("The Loved One Who Disappeared in the Bog") on the other hand is more distinctly Christie-esque (or Baroness Orczy-esque, perhaps). Corbijn is asked by their neighbor to help her niece, whose boyfriend Eickhout disappeared more than six years ago. Her boyfriend was a project developer who loved to hike, which he last did in the Belgian Ardennes. He had actually been in Belgium to pick up his engagement ring, as he planned to propose after his return, making this a full tragedy. It was thought by the police had been Eickhout 'spirited away' by some of criminal associates, as on that fateful day, several people had seen the hiking Eickhout being followed by a shady figure and it's believed Eickhouts body is now somewhere in the bogs. The client hopes that even if Eickhout's dead, she should at least give him a proper burial, so she hopes Corbijn can at least figure out what happened on that day. Like I said this story feels more like Christie, as much of the story depends on direct misdirection and making witnesses believe in certain patterns or happenings, simply because it seems likely that was what happened. As Corbijn shows, once you stop assuming things however, it can be easy to figure out what really happened. This story is fairly easy to solve once you let go of these assumptions, resulting in a story that feels very much like one of those Miss Marple shorts.

In a way, two other stories work on the same principle. De vluchteling die alles achterliet ("The Refugee Who Left Everything Behind") is about the disappearance of a Bosnian refugee, and the disappearance of Susanne Westera one day earlier from the island of Terschelling. The two were determined to have had a relation, and it is assumed they disappeared together, though it's a mystery how Susanne managed to get of the island completely unseen. Now many years later, her father is terminally ill and he wants Corbijn to give him closure on what happened to his daughter. The story is nicely plotted and like the best of Christie's short efforts, depends on the notion of the witnesses and the reader willing to assume things at face value and probably succeeding in that feat even though the reader's already warned. That is perhaps also a problem though, as Het hoertje dat geen spoor achterliet ("The Hooker Who Didn't Leave a Trace") is technically a good mystery story, but by the time you get to this story, it's so easy to guess what was going on. Marliende Vries, better known as the erotica author Patricia de Rooth, was caught and sentenced for murdering her husband, having caught him together with a prostitute in a room of a shady hotel. The evidence suggests Marliende shot her husband, though there's also the problem of the one witness (the prostitute) having run away. Marliende's brother however does not believe in his sister's guilt and wants Corbijn to find the real murderer so Marliende will be released. But like with Baroness Orczy's The Old Man in The Corner however, the solution is hardly shocking considering the underlying principle has been used multiple times already in the same volume.

De mysteries van Robbie Corbijn was an entertaining volume of Dutch puzzle plot mysteries that at one hand, is adequately plotted and written, but at times also feels too much like the stories that inspired the author. Compared to the books written under the M.P.O. Books name, these ten stories are definitely more pleasing to the puzzle plot story reader with more focused plotting, but these stories are also a lot less surprising, as they often feel too familiar in terms of structure, especially when read one after another. I'm definitely interested in reading future stories, though I guess I'll have to wait for the hardcopy version again (and of course hope that hypothetical volume won't be replaced by an even more hypothetical volume that has more stories for about the same price...)

Original Dutch title(s): Anne van Doorn De mysteries van Robbie Corbijn: 'De dichter die zichzelf opsloot' / 'De geliefde die in het veen verdween' / 'De arts die de weg kwijt was' / 'Het joch dat grenzen overschreed' / 'De vluchteling die alles achterliet' / 'De boerin die niet wilde sterven' / 'Het meisje dat bleef rondhangen' / 'De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen' / 'Het hoertje dat geen spoor achterliet' / 'De dame die niet om hulp had gevraagd'

"What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow."

"The Long Goodbye"

The previous book in the series discussed today had a gorgeous cover too, but I really like this one too! Definitely a contender for favorite cover for this year! Don't you just love covers for short story collections when they incorporate something from each of the stories?! And yes...this is the third Madoy review in a month. This review was actually written months ago already, the two FGOMystery novels discussed earlier this month were just wedged in the schedule.

Almost four years ago, I read and reviewed Van Madoy's short story collection Clover Leaf wo Mou Ippai - Koyoi, Nazotoki Bar Sangoukan he. If you want to look for the book now however, you might have some troubles finding a copy of Clover Leaf wo Mou Ippai: when the book was re-released as a paperback in 2017, it got not only a new cover, but also a brand new title: Kyoto Nazotoki Shikihou - Machi wo Aruite Fushigina Bar he ("The Kyoto Mystery Solving Seasonal Report - Strolling In Town To The Mysterious Bar"). The sequel too follows these new title: Kyoto Nazotoki Shikihou - Kosho to Gokai to Ginga Tetsudou ("The Kyoto Mystery Solving Seasonal Report - Used Books, Misunderstandings and the Galaxy Railway", 2018) brings us five new stories starring Toochika Rinto, a young man who started life as a student at Kyoto University only a few months ago. Life has not changed much for Rinto since we last saw him: he is still a member of the city hiking student circle Kamogawa Rampo and while he fell in love at first sight, his relationship with fellow circle member Aoka Sachi still hasn't been updated to the dating status. What has changed however, is that Rinto hasn't been able to find the mysterious bar "No. 3" lately. Rinto himself knew from his own experience that "No. 3" wasn't just an urban legend of the university, but that there really was a bar hidden somewhere on the campus of Kyoto University. In this bar, you don't pay with money, but with a tale of a mystery you encountered. The drinks served by the beautiful bartender Souma Miki always managed to stimulate Rinto's brain, so he could figure out these mysterious events in his life himself. The bar seemed to have disappeared after the events of the first volume, but with some new everyday life mysteries awaiting Rinto in the summer and fall, his reunion with Souma isn't far off.

I enjoyed the first novel in this series because it reminded me a lot of my own year studying at Kyoto University: most of the locales featured were in the vicinity of Kyoto University (or set on the main Yoshida campus), so it all felt very familiar to me. The everyday life mystery genre can be a hit or miss, as the mysteries aren't about "obvious" mysteries like murder, but far more mundane mysteries (though still baffling), but it's quite difficult coming up with a mystery that is a) mundane enough to have some convincing power, and yet b) mysterious enough to pique your interest (and have a satisfying solution). Not all stories in the first volume were as strong, but overall, I liked the book, so it was only a matter of time before I'd continue reading the series.

The opening story, Tama ni Sedori On The Rocks ("And Occasionally A Sedory On The Rocks"), is set at the Shimogawa Shrine Used Book Fair, a book fair held every summer on the grounds of the Shimogawa Shrine. Rinto is this year helping out at one of the stands together with a few other members of Kamogawa Rampo, but none of them know that Rinto was given two secret tasks. One of them was to locate a certain book, which was listed on the inventory list of the stand he's working at. It's supposed to be a rare book, but Mystery Club president Mitsuru thinks nobody else has noticed the presence of the book yet, and hopes Rinto can help her secure the book before somebody else buys it. Rinto's other task was set upon him by his friend and vice-president of Kamogawa Rampo: somebody has apparently sold the address list of the club to a third party, and everyone is been receiving spam mailings at home now. There is a small list of suspects, and Rinto has to check which of them (all helping out at the book fair) is most likely to sell the list for some money. Some odd events happen during the day however: people keep coming asking for certain rare books which were never listed at their booth, and according to Sachi (who is working the register), it seems books have been vanishing from their stand, despite Rinto and another member being on watch inside the booth. Rinto has trouble making sense out of all this, until he runs into Souma Miki, who is enjoying a drink at the book fair herself.

Oh man, if there's one thing I remember of my own visit to the Shimogawa Shrine Used Book Fair it's this: bring an umbrella. I hadn't, and it suddenly started to rain extremely hard (happens often in the summer), so I went inside one of the booths, figuring I could just browse until the rain would stop. Of course, this was in the summer, in Kyoto (notoriously hot and sticky), and let me tell you this: you do not want to be stuck inside a small booth with plastic walls, with other people, in the summer. Anyway, the sedory in the title refers to sedori, professional used book dealers who know where they can buy a certain title cheap to sell for a better price elsewhere. This story is the most like a conventional mystery story, with books slowly disappearing despite two sets of eyes on guard and some other events that play in the background. The way the books are stolen wouldn't work normally in a normal brick 'n' mortar bookshop, but in this particular setting I can definitely see it going succesfully. I can't really write about the other plot points in detail as that might spoil too much, but I think Madoy does a good job at hinting at how it's done, even if it's a bit too obvious the way it's done now.

In Mienai Blue ("Invisible Blue"), Rinto's becoming rather worried when Sachi doesn't reply to his mail and doesn't answer her phone either, especially as he can't remember whether he said something stupid after having too many drinks at the Kamogawa Rampo get-together. While aware that it's kinda stalker-y, he decides to ask help from a fellow Kamogawa Rampo member. He hadn't much in common with the rather attractive Haibara Karen, but when he learns she lives in the same apartment complex as Sachi, he pleads with Haibara to let him inside the complex and go try visit Sachi. She, reluctantly, agrees, but the two are surprised to not only learn from Sachi's neighbor that he heard some loud noises from the room next door two nights ago, when Rinto tries the door, he finds it's unlocked, and they see blue plastic sheets covering everything! Haibara and Rinto spend some time together discussing Sachi and end up at a temporary No. 3, where bartender Souma Miki warns Rinto, as this mystery is far more than he could guess. This is a classic example of an "look at the events from a different angle" story, which is something that works quite well within this subgenre of normal, mundane mysteries. Indeed, there's nothing really strange going on in this story, but once the solution is out, you realize you might've taken some things for granted. As a standalone mystery story, this isn't a particular strong one, but it works really well as a way to further develop the relation between Rinto and Sachi, while still having a mystery plot as its foundation.

The aftermath of Nadeshiko wa Mou Suki Janai ("I Don't Like Nadeshiko Anymore") has Rinto in a rather depressing mood, and things only become worse. The circle Kamogawa Rampo was assigned a rather horrible booth spot for the upcoming November Festival (Kyoto University's school festival), so Rinto was to renegotiate with the festival comittee. Rinto arrives a few minutes early for his appointment, and has a few rounds of two-man poker with a former member of Kamogawa Rampo in a classroom next door, figuring he'd see the committee president pass by the hallway. But when he finally sees the president, Rinto's utterly surprised to learn that more than an hour has passed since their appointment, and that they'll get no new rooms, even though Rinto's sure he only spent a few minutes playing poker next door. Rinto checks different clocks at different times during the story, so how could the time suddenly change from a few minutes past six to long past seven? The solution is kinda easy to guess, as it obviously all revolves arounds clocks. The storytelling doesn't follow a chronological order, with some initial events somewhat vague because it's not been explained by a flashback yet, which makes this story only seem more complex than it actually is. I'd say this story is the most like conventional mystery story together with the opening story. The reference to Ayukawa Tetsuya's Itsutsu no Tokei is nice though, as that too is a story where somebody seems to have a perfect alibi vouched for by five different clocks. By the way, I think I forgot to mention this in my review of the first book, but this whole series with a mysterious bar etc., is a reference to certain series by Ayukawa Tetsuya.

The November Festival is on the way in 5-fun Dakedemo Matte ("Take Five"). On the second night, most student and circle clubs that have a booth in a classroom stay overnight on campus, in their respective assigned rooms. Haibara and Sachi, who have been chosen to be become the club president and vice president next academic year, are staying overnight too, while Rinto's gone home. Haibara and Sachi wake up in the very early morning (the others are still sleeping because of all the booze), when both of them make shocking discoveries. Sachi, who was working register at their booth, finds out that all the money bills from their money box have been removed. At the same time, Haibara realizes that the door of the classroom can't be opened: something is blocking the door. It turns out someone had filled a water mattress right in front of the classroom door, trapping all the members of Kamogawa Rampo who stayed overnight in their classroom. In the morning after they have been rescued, Sachi decides to ask Rinto for help in finding out what happened to the money, as things just don't add up: some other circles had been robbed of money too overnight, it seems, but why was Kamogawa Rampo the only circle to have been locked up in their classroom, and while they may have been all asleep during the theft, how did the thief manage to steal the bills without making any noise, as all the money, coins and bills, were thrown together in a metal tin box? I really like the motive, as it's realistic and firmly set within the culture of Kyoto University's November Festival and it fits wonderfully in the idea of an everyday life mystery, but I have some questions with the execution, as no matter how you look at it, why the water mattress? It's a really weird way to block a door, especially as this was in a hallway in a faculty building, where more circles were residing that night. It seems so unlikely nobody would've noticed a water mattress being filled in a hallway until Haibara and Sachi did early in the morning. I'd have loved some more hinting too: I don't think this is a bad story, by any means, but I do feel the story has much more potential than it shows now, and while the final product isn't my favorite story of this volume, I think the core idea is: if only the execution had been slightly different.

Gineiden no Yoru ("The Night of the Galaxy Eizan Electric Railway") is actually the story that I was looking forward the most, but also the most disappointing story. The Eizan Electric Railway is a small local railway line in Kyoto which starts out in Demachiyanagi and then heads towards Mt. Kurama. When I lived in Kyoto, I lived half a minute away from the Shugakuin Station on this line (you might also know it from the anime K-On!), so I was quite curious to see how this small railway line would feature in a mystery story, but this story does something completely different from what my (admittedly unfounded) expectations were. Having grown closer in the last story, Sachi has confided to Rinto something that happened to her when she was young and on holiday in Kyoto with her family. Her family was staying in an inn near the Eizan Railway at the time. She woke up in the middle in the night, and looked outside to see the Eizan train riding off into the sky. She doesn't expect Rinto to believe her, but she'd would like to know what it was what she had seen. There's so little happening in this story that writing anymore would veer into spoiler territory. Basically, when a certain prop appears in a certain scene, it's kinda easy to guess where this story will go to. It's not really a mystery story either, but more like a lite mystery book-end story so Rinto and Sachi can grow closer at the end of this volume.

As a pure mystery short story collection, Kyoto Nazotoki Shikihou - Kosho to Gokai to Ginga Tetsudou is probably too lite for most people: only one, arguably two are "conventional" mystery stories, while the others are plotted around misunderstandings in human relations. While the core is definitely mystery, I think most people would enjoy the book more if read as a YA novel. Of course, it speaks to Madoy's plotting that he can make these situations still feel like puzzle plot mysteries, and you never really feel like he's playing unfair, but I am quite aware that not everyone will have the same nostalgic feelings I definitely have when I'm reading this book. I for one really enjoyed seeing all these little mysteries set around locales and communities that should feel very familar to a student of Kyoto University, and some ideas like the Book Fair setting or the motive for the November Festival mystery work really well, I think, but yeah, if I were to give points in my reviews (which I will never do), I'd do the "you can subtract 2 points if the nostalgic factor doesn't count for you".

Original Japanese title(s): 円居挽『京都なぞとき四季報古書と誤解と銀河鉄道』：「たまにはセドリー・オン・ザ・ロックスを」/ 「見えないブルー」 / 「撫子はもう好きじゃない」 / 「五分だけでも待って」 / 「銀叡電の夜」

One little nigger boy left all alone

He got married and then there were none

First impressions are ever-lasting, so I always imagine Kidd and Pink from these books exactly like they appeared and sounded in the PlayStation game Cat the Ripper, even though that was err... quite a bad game (though the voice-acting was okay).

Last year, I reviewed Yamaguchi Masaya's amusing The 13th Detective, a gamebook-turned-novel which was set in Parallel Britain, which is not a world where Brexit didn't happen, but a world that is similar to ours, but different at key points (for example, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was a comedy, not a tragedy). The most important difference however is that all the fictional detectives we know, like Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Gideon Fell or Father Brown, all exist in Parallel Britain. Their successes led to Edward's Law in Great Britain: detectives belonging to the Masters of Detective Association are allowed to lead and command any official criminal investigation for 72 hours, during which the police force must follow the detective's orders. Due to the superior position of the MDs in this world, Scotland Yard has been reduced to a lowly supporting role, and nowadays most police officers are just punk hooligans or slackers who consider policework nothing but a job like any other.

The mohawk-bearing Kidd Pistols is one of these punk police detectives of Scotland Yard. He and his girlfriend/subordinate Pink Belladonna form the National Unbelievable Troubles Section (NUTS) inside Scotland Yard, where they deal with weird incidents that normal police detectives can't handle, and therefore they often have to team up with rather eccentric MDs, like Sherlock Holmes Jr. (one of many who claim to be the son of the great detective) or Dr. Bull (a disciple of Dr. Fell). While Kidd is often mistaken for just another of those lazy, good-for-nothing punks who work at Scotland Yard, Kidd is actually often capable of out-thinking the proper MDs in the nutty cases he handles by acting exactly like a punk, not confirming to fixed views and looking at things from a completely different angle. In Yamaguchi Masaya's short story collection Kidd Pistols no Boutoku ("The Blasphemy of Kidd Pistols", 1991), we are presented with four NUTS cases patterned after Mother Goose rhymes which involve, among others, a dead hippopotamus, a plastered piece of shit and a locked room murder committed by the Jamaican spirit Duppy.

Kidd and Pink are called out to the home of the legendary actress Elizabeth Skinner, who lost her first love of her life in the war, and got dumped by her second love. After that, she remained cooped up in her own home for fifty years, never ever setting a foot outside anymore, only eating and drinking each and every day. The only people she let inside her house were her maid and her solicitor. Her pitiful life also ended in a pitiful way, because the rather corpulent Elizabeth was one morning found murdered in her home (and with corpulent, I mean they needed Kidd, Pink and two others to move her body out the house). Traces of poison are found in her dinner of the previous day, but the whole case doesn't jive: Elizabeth wouldn't have let anyone inside, the maid who prepared the food could hardly be so foolish as to poison the food she made herself and there are no traces of unlawful entry in the house. Kidd, Pink and Sherlock Holmes Jr. therefore have to figure out who murdered a poor woman who hadn't even gone outside even once in fifty years in the opening story "Mushamusha, Gokugoku"Satsujin Jiken, which also carries the English title The "Victuals and Drink" Murder Case.

The mystery revolves around how the murder could've taken place considering the rather unique and curious circumstances of the crime scene (the woman never let anyone she didn't know inside), and the exact location of the body. There are some pretty smart ideas going on here (I love the deductions revolving the location of the body). The solution does require you to deduce the actions of a certain person based on some clews which might not be completely farfetched, but do lack a bit of convincing power.

In Kaba wa Wasurenai or Hippopotamus Can Remember, Kidd, Pink and Sherlock Holmes Jr. find themselves investigating the murder on a zoo owner, and his pet hippopotamus. The victim left the dying message "H" on the floor with his own blood, but the mystery is of course why the hippopotamus was killed together with its master. As a whydunnit mystery, this story is rather simple as once you remember one early scene, you're very likely to figure out what happened exactly, but capably clewed.

Magatta Hanzai or The Crooked Crime has Kidd and Sherlock Holmes Jr. investigate a series of strange incidents: first a pet shop owner is killed followed by the murder on a businessman, who had purchased two cats from said pet shop owner. The businessman was discovered inside the junkyard/atelier of an artist with whom he had cut financial ties recently, as the "art" the man made was a bit too eccentric considering the cost. The victim's body had been covered in plaster, exactly like the artist's best known works, which obviously seem to suggest the artist had something to do with it, but Kidd manages to arrive at a completely different truth. This is the longest story in the collection, I think, and there are some good things going on here, like a very good, well-supported fake solution and some really neatly hidden clues (though it also has to be said that one early scene is very likely to attract a lot of attention because it's so obviously out of place, it has to be relevant to the solution). I think this plot might've even worked well as a full-length story.

The Punky Reggae Murder starts with the seaside live concert Sound System Live, organized by a pirate radio station. The main attraction is without a doubt Buster Solomon and his band the Little Criminals. Buster who started out as a poor boy in the slumps of Jamaica, has now become an major hit in Parallel Britain with his reggae music. He is also a devout believer of Rastafari and uses his music to help out the Labour Party in his home country, as they support Rastafari. This has earned him the treats of right-wing activists, who are likely the ones who are sending him and his band threatening letters with verses from the nursery rhyme Ten Little Niggers, signed by Duppy (a Jamaican evil spirit). Despite these threats, as well as physical fights between his two publishers who would wish the other's dead, Buster intends to play at the fund-raiser concert tomorrow. Everyone in the band, the publishers, as well as Kidd, Pink and Dr. Bull (who were invited through Pink's connectons) stay in cottages overlooking the sea that night. Kidd is called on the phone in the night by Buster, saying he thinks Duppy is hanging outside his cottage, followed by a cry for help. Kidd rushes to Buster's cottage, only to find the front door locked. The french windows on the seaside terrace however are opened, and inside they find Buster, stabbed in his chest and his dreadlocks cut. And to the party's surprise, they find (red) herrings spread around his head, like the verse "A red herring swallowed one and then there were three" from Ten Little Niggers. At first, it is assumed the murderer escaped across the terrace, but a narcotics detective, who had been sent here on a tip regarding a big heroine deal, had been watching the terrace all the time, and had seen nobody leave that way. As the front door was locked, this means this was an impossible murder, as the murderer couldn't have escaped any way from the cottage. Meanwhile, another band member is found dead in the cottage next door, and he has three horrible slashes on his back, like "a big bear hugged one".

The background setting of Rastafari and Jamaican religions is rather original and something I at least had never seen in detective fiction before. The use of Ten Little Niggers/And Then There Were None as a theme is of course a risky one, as anyone would be tempted to make a comparison with Christie's work, but this story is quite different, and manages to do very different things with the same rhyme. The fundamental idea that is played out here is not extremely original, but the clewing (with the red herrings) is fairly accomplished. The locked room situation too is not particularly awe-inspiring, though it is connected well, and naturally to the other events going on in this story, so it doesn't feel like it's just there because we needed a locked room murder (note by the way that Dr. Bull is an expert in locked room murders, which is why he's featured in this story rather than Holmes Jr.) One other major clue however is a bit harder to get: it is based on two physical clues, and while one of them is rather cunningly hidden (though to be honest, I had no idea that existed in that form, so I wasn't able to figure that out), but the other one is hardly addressed until the moment Kidd actually explains it.

My first introduction to Kidd Pistols as a character was a bit strange, as the game Cat the Ripper is really weird, and while I did like the novel adaptation The 13th Detective, Kidd wasn't really the protagonist there. Kidd Pistols no Boutoku is thus the first time I've read "proper" Kidd stories, but these Mother Goose rhyme-inspired stories are quite entertaining. The setting of Parallel Britain allows for some odd, but funny scenes (like Pink constantly stealing things even though she's a cop) and ex-drug addicts and other punks functioning as the world's narcs and coroners, and most of the stories are plotted well as mysteries, with rather crafty clues at times. And it's only now in this final paragraph that I realize that these stories all feature rather unique motives for actions, which adds to the zaniness of this world. Anyway, I'm certainly interested to see how the other adventures of Kidd and Pink will turn out!

Original Japanese title(s): 山口雅也『キッド・ピストルズの冒涜』: 「むしゃむしゃ、ごくごく殺人事件」/「カバは忘れない」/「曲がった犯罪」/「パンキー・レゲエ殺人（マーダー）」

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

(Nursery rhyme)

I always have to think of an old college classmate, whenever I come across something related to Alice in Wonderland, which is kinda strange because I'm pretty sure we only talked about the novel once. I guess she'd like this novel too though.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, but it was no accident. Some person, or animal, had oiled up the wall upon which the great egg had been sitting, and there was still a vaguely visible hand print left on one of the cracked shell shards. A murder in Wonderland! The Mad Hatter and the March Hare investigate the murder and quickly find a witness: the White Rabbit swears that Alice, and nobody else but Alice entered the garden where Humpty Dumpty was. Alice says she is innocent, but when the Gryphon is murdered too by suffocating on literally a mouthful of shellfish and Alice once again lacks a clear alibi, the net around her seems to be closing.

Lately, college student Kurisugawa Ari has been having these weird dreams that place her in some kind of mysterious and highly nonsensical Wonderland ruled by the Queen of Hearts. But once she started thinking about it, she realizes she has never ever had dreams about anything else: she always dreams about her being in Wonderland, having adventures with characters like the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit. On the day after she dreamt Humpty Dumpty died, she is shocked to learn a student of her faculty died in a creepily similar manner, by falling of the roof of the faculty building. It seems it was a simple accident, but speaking with some of her fellow students, she learns that it was no coincidence: more people around her dream of Wonderland! The smart Imori, a classmate, turns out to be the dull-witted Bill the Lizard in Wonderland, and they realize that the deaths that happen in Wonderland are reflected in this world too. The two work together both in the real world and in Wonderland to prove of Alice's innocence and find the real murderer in Kobayashi Yasumi's Alice Goroshi (The Murder of Alice, 2013).

I have not read the original Alice in Wonderland, nor even seen any of the (animated) movie adaptations, but man, I come across it a lot in Japanese mystery fiction. In fact, I think I can more-or-less construct the whole original story, simply by putting all the references I know one after another. It's kinda like Star Wars, which is parodied and referenced so often one can basically guess how the whole story goes just by consuming other media. A few titles I have reviewed here are for example Alice Mirror Jou Satsujin Jiken, The Land of the Wondrous Beauty in the second volume of Kaiki Tantei Sharaku Homura, and several works like the short story Jabberwocky by Arisugawa Alice, who took his pen name from Alice in Wonderland. Actually, I even praised myself a bit for picking up on the Alice in Wonderland reference when I was translating Arisugawa's The Moai Island Puzzle, exactly because I shouldn't even have noticed it as I don't have direct knowledge of the original story. Anyway, the concept of a mystery story that revolves around Alice in Wonderland wasn't special an sich, was what I was going to say.

Kobayashi Yasumi's Alice Goroshi seemed like an interesting title/topic when I first heard of the book, but I have to admit the title only really caught my attention when Kobayashi released a sequel titled Klara Goroshi ("The Klara Murders"), with Klara being the friend of Heidi. Now things were becoming really interesting, as the premise of a whole series built around classical children's fiction seemed too good to pass. I opted to wait for the (cheaper) pocket re-release of Alice Goroshi though which was finally released in 2019.

Was it worth the wait? Yep, it sure was! As one can guess, story chapters alternates between Wonderland and the real world: in Wonderland we follow Alice and Bill the Lizard, while in the real world we follow Ari and Imori. The parts in Wonderland are fantastic. As said, I haven't read the original Alice in Wonderland, but the nonsensical dialogues and wordplay that go on in these half of the story are great and also sure to annoy you immensely (in a good way): everyone seems to get their wires crossed as they talk with each other leading to amusing, but nonsensical conversations, and that while Alice is desperate to find some way to prove her innocence. It's what you'd expect of Alice in Wonderland, and this novel really manages to capture that spirit. It's in this strange world that Alice tries to solve the murders, and it results in some really unique situations, with creatures like a Boojum also appearing as fanciful murder methods. Fantastical ways to kill off people are possible in Wonderland, and there's no scientific investigation like checking for DNA or blood of course, so the reader might be overwhelmed by all of this, figuring it's impossible to figure out who the murderer is: that is not the case. In fact, Kobayashi plays a nasty game with the reader here, as he plants some deliciously subtle clues in the nonsensical dialogues that actually allow you to identify at least some part of the mystery quite early on. If you manage to pick up on that, of course (I wasn't).

The events in the real world are of course less fantastical, but the more realistic tone here does really help the story, as 380 pages of only Wonderland would've been quite tiring. That said, the worlds do kinda seem to blend into each other as the story progresses. In the early chapters, Ari obviously has trouble accepting the truth that she's been living in Wonderland in her dreams and that she shares this dream with other people. But as events unfold, we learn of more people around her who have an avatar in Wonderland and certainly near the end, some human characters seem to resemble their Wonderland avatars a lot more than at the start of the story. The murders that are committed in Wonderland lead to death in the real world, but not in the exact same manner: the counterpart to the Gripphon for example was a professor at the university, but he died 'simply' of food poisoning (from shellfish), not by being force-fed them. That means that even though we're talking about a series of murders in Wonderland, there aren't even really murders happening in the real world, leading to a very unique situation where the human characters in the real world are investigating a series of murders in Wonderland. It's in Wonderland where they can find proof and interrogate witnesses, but due to the crazy characters in Wonderland, it's only possible for Ari and Imori to apply real logic to the problem and really think about the how and who while in the real world. There is an added thread of suspense here as Ari is also under investigation by two police detectives who suspect there's something fishy going on with all the deaths that happen at this university, and who are very eager to find out who Ari is in Wonderland.

You don't need Wonderland-logic to solve this mystery though. It's a surprisingly tricky plot, because it's split up in two distinct locales with their own narratives: for example it is possible to figure out who the murderer is in Wonderland fairly early on (or at least have founded suspicions), but that doesn't mean you know who that character is in the real world. You need to combine clues from both worlds in order to solve the mystery, which can be quite a challenge, especially as the dialogues in Wonderland can seem to be so crazy at times. The main clue to the identity of the murderer for example can be really easy to miss because the jumping between the two worlds, but once pointed out it seems so obvious. I myself only got the last big twist, but missed most of the stuff regarding the murderer. There's also a nice dying message near the end of the story that points towards the murderer in a very roundabout, but at the same time also very logical manner. It is a good example of how to do a dying message that is meaningful in the context of the story, without being too complex just for the sake to be too hard to decipher for the reader.

Oh, I do have to make a note that Alice Goroshi can become quite gory near the end. Guh. I mean, you might be thinking 'Haha, Alice in Wonderland, it's so cute,' but man, I didn't see that one scene in the house near the end coming. It's really frightening. It becomes really messy once you're past the halfway point.

So yes, I really enjoyed Alice Goroshi, as it not only had a really unique premise and setting, it also made excellent use of that to bring a tightly-plotted mystery plot that works because of the premise. The way it utilizes Alice-mythos isn't just for show, but in integral part of the plot, resulting in one of the more memorable reads of this year. I am definitely looking forward to reading the sequels to Alice: at the moment of writing this review, Klara and Dorothy (of The Wizard of Oz) have already featured in their own titles, so I hope the pocket versions are released soon.

Original Japanese title(s): 小林泰三　『アリス殺し』

「これは記憶媒体？」

「記憶じゃない、思い出だよ」

『名探偵コナン　　純黒の悪夢』

"Is it a memory stick?"

"It's not memory storage... it's a memory."

"Detective Conan: The Darkest Nightmare"

It is no secret that I am a fan of puzzle plot mystery stories that feature supernatural powers, or fantasy or science-fiction elements. Some might mistakenly think that these "unrealistic" elements make a true fair puzzle plot impossible, but that is no true: as long there's consistency in what's possible in the specific world, a puzzle plot mystery works, whether it's our "real" world or a world where people can teleport and walk through walls. The key is of course to use the non-realistic elements to come up with a mystery story you couldn't otherwise, to utilize the tools specific to that world to create a plot that follows the internal rules, like the Three Laws of Robotics or specific rules to casting magic. Today's book is another interesting example of a puzzle plot mystery that uses a supernatural setting.

After the death of her parents, Yukari was brought up by her grandmother, but when she died too, it was arranged that Yukari would move to Tokyo to live with her father's cousin Shinsuke at least until she'd finish high school there. Ever since she was a child, Yukari has been in the possession of paranormal powers in the form of psychometry: she can read the memory of objects, seeing flashes of the persons who owned or touched the object in question. The fact Yukari's an esper turns out to come in handy at times for Shinsuke, as he's a police detective of the Metropolitan Police Department, and occassionally, Yukari manages to help out with his cases by reading the memories of objects involved with his cases. Imamura Aya's short story collection Hasami no Kioku ("Memories of Scissors", 1996) showcases four stories in which Yukari's powers turn out to be the key to solving the case.

This is funnily enough not even the first time I've seen psychometry used in a mystery story. The manga Psychometrer EIJI is pretty famous, written by the author of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo. I've also reviewed the videogame Glass Rose in the past, wich had a protagonist who could read memories from people and objects. The power to read an object's memory might sound like a cheat for a detective story: an esper could just read the murder weapon and see what happened, right? Imamura however manages to do a few interesting things with the device of psychometry that makes this short story collection a worthwhile read. First of all, given that Yukari's just a high school student, Shinsuke obviously can't just take evidence with him to have Yukari touch it. But besides this practical reason, there's also a structural reason why psychometry isn't a cheat here. What Imamura does here is build her stories around a crucial contradiction between the facts as the police confirm them, and what Yukari learns through her psychometric powers. While the methods differ, the facts obtained from both sides are treated equal, and the mystery of these tales thus revolve around why there's a contradiction between these facts.

The opening story, 3-ji 10-pun no Shi ("Death at 3:10"), is by far the best story in the collection. One of her first friends Yukari made when she moved to Tokyo was Sanae, who worked at the flower shop, and she, or to be exact, her boyfriend Junpei is in trouble. Junpei's wealthy uncle was killed, and he is the main suspect, especially as a neighbor says he saw Junpei leave the house in the middle of the night. His alibi that he was with Sanae isn't trusted by the police, but Yukari learns that this alibi is correct, as she touched Sanae's necklace and read its memories. But who did kill the man then at 3:10, as shown by the broken clock? This is a really ingenious story that not only makes good use of the concept of psychometry to present a contradiction and a mystery (we, as the reader, know that Junpei's alibi holds), but the solution surrounding the mystery of the time of death also very devilishly clewed.

In the title story Hasami no Kioku ("Memories of Scissors"), Yukari is basically kidnapped by Noriko, a friend of Shinsuke and a manga artist, who desperatedly needs an emergency assistant to help finish up the last few pages for her deadline. After work, Yukari is chilling in Noriko's room when she touches a pair of sewing scissors and reads emotions of death, and memories of a loving mother and her son in pain. Most of Noriko's interior consists of things people threw away or discarded, and Noriko had picked up the pair of scissors, which was in a box with a handsewn teddy bear and more, a few weeks ago. Suspecting the pair of scissors had been used to kill the boy from the memories, Yukari and Noriko start searching for the original owner, but they learn that she has died, and strangely enough, they learn of an episode years ago, when her son was still a child, where her young son accidently stabbed his mother with a pair of scissors, even though the memories of the scissors say otherwise. Compared to the first story, this story is far more focused on figuring out the exact relations between the various characters, which make it a less involved mystery story in my eyes, but still a tricky one. The first one would be the "technical" mystery, while this story I'd describe as the more "human drama" based one.

Bentoubako wa Shitteiru ("The Lunch Box Knows") is I think the shortest story, and involves the murder of a middle-aged man who was recently been let go by his company. He had been happily married with his wife for seven years, with many of his colleagues jealous of the lunchboxes she made for her husband, but some days ago, his wife suddenly disappeared, as the past caught up with her: an old boyfriend who was so crazy about her that he killed another man was recently released from prison and is now trying to find her. Fearing that not only she, but the man who actually married her, are in danger, she ran away, but it was too late, as her husband was found murdered at home. Shinsuke however discovers some discrepancies between the facts, and manages to get hold of one particular object that would allow Yukari to solve the case. A simple story, with a rather obvious conclusion/'punchline' coming up, but it works fairly well. There's not much of a mystery going on here though, as Shinsuke himself manages to work most of the story out himself.

Neko no Ongaeshi ("The Cat's Return of a Favor") has slight fantasy undertones. We are introduced to Masamichi, an elderly vet who quit his clinic after his son Masahiro died in a tragic traffic accident as he swayed to avoid a cat. Masamichi runs into Yukiko, a woman who says she was classmates with Masahiro, back in elementary school when he was living with Masamichi's sister for a short period to recover from an illness. Learning of Masahiro's death shocks her greatly. As she recently came to Tokyo to find work, hoping that Masahiro would help her out, Masamichi decides to have her live with him in the house, doing the housekeeping until she finds another job. Funnily enough though, Yukiko appeared soon after a stray cat Masamichi often fed disappeared from the streets, and more than once, Yukiko seemed to show signs of perhaps being that cat, with her knowing the way around the house before Masamichi even said anything. Yukari learns of this story through the drawing assistant of Noriko, but Yukari's suspicions are instantly raised, as she knows of a recent murder case, where a woman swindled her way into the life of an elderly, single man, living with him for a while after which she robbed him of all his money and his life. She informs Shinsuke of this, who goes to take a look, but he finds that Yukiko has already gone, but without stealing anything. The hand mirror she left behind however allows Yukari to solve the mystery of Yukiko. The mystery here is a bit simple, as one particular memory Yukari manages to read from the mirror is basically the solution as is. Cute story though.

Imamura died in a rather tragic manner in 2013 and Hasami no Kiokuthus remains the sole story collection with Yukari and her psychometric powers. While not all four stories in this collection are as strong as mystery stories, the way Imamura manages to use psychometry in meaningful manners for this contradiction-based stories is quite admirable, and overall, this book is quite an entertaining read and a good example of how supernatural powers can still work in a fair play mystery story.

Original Japanese title(s): 今邑彩『鋏の記憶』：「３時１０分の死」/「鋏の記憶」/「弁当箱は知っている」/「猫の恩返し」

「いろりろおききするのが、私の仕事でして」

「失敬な人だな。いったいどこの局？名前と所属を聞いておくよ」

「名前は福家です。所属は警視庁捜査一課です」

『相棒』

"It is my job to ask questions about everything."

"Do you know how rude you are? What station are you working for? Give me your name and your department."

'My name is Fukie. My department is the Metropolitan Police Department, Division 1."

"Partners"

Now I think about it, I don't really read many inverted mystery series. Sure, Conan and Kindaichi Shounen have some occasionally, but I haven't actually read a whole series that consists solely out of inverted stories... (with the Columbo and Furuhata Ninzaburou novels/short stories being exceptions, but not really series on their own in the first place).

Earlier this year I reviewed Ookura Takahiro's Fukuie Keibuho no Aisatsu, the first volume featuring the inverted mystery stories starring Lieutenant Fukuie of the Metropolitan Police Department. Ookura had in the past written several officialColumbo novelizations for the Japanese market and the inspiration the Lieutenant Fukuie series takes from his grand predecessor are quite easy to pick up. Fukuie is a youthful-looking, small woman with frameless glasses who is often mistaken to be a college student, reporter, secretary or anything but a police detective, but she is in fact one of the sharpest officers in Division 1, in charge of homicide investigations. The first impression of most people is that of a scatterminded, clumsy woman, who has a knack for losing track of her police badge, but the real criminals soon learn that Fukuie is more than meets the eye, as the efficiency with she works, as well as her eye for fine detail usually put her right on their trail. Fukuie Keibuho no Saihou ("The Second Visit of Lieutenant Fukuie, 2009), which also carries the alternate English title of Reenter Lieutenant Fukuie, contains four stories told from the perspective of the criminals as they're being cornered by the Lieutenant, from a popular screenwriter who comes up with an elaborate fake abduction to secure his own alibi to one half of a comedy duo who takes drastic measures in order to break up his partnership.

Not much time passed between me reading the first volume and this second volume in the series, which usually indicates that this is a series I enjoy, obviously. And it is! Granted, the stories are all relatively short and because each of these stories follow the same inverted style, they eventually feel somewhat alike as most of the time the set-up of the core plot is rather similar (criminal comes up with perfect plan to commit murder, unforeseen happening during the crime allows Fukuie to solve the case), but nonetheless, this is great entertainment, and like an episode of Columbo, much of the joy comes from seeing how Fukuie slowly but surely manages to creep up to the murderer with evidence. Part of the fun also lies in the diverse backgrounds of each of the stories. In one story, you'll be reading up on the world of vinyl figures and counterfeit toys, the other is about a manzai stand-up comedy duo and the entertainment industry. Each story touches upon completely different worlds, so at least in that aspect, this series never disappoints. Like many of the Columbo episodes, the criminals are usually people who have been succesful in their lives (or at least in the past). Different however is that most of the murderers in this volume are driven to their crime because they're being blackmailed for a past mistake. Only one story features a motive that is closer to the "immediate gain"/"removing an obstacle" motive often seen in Columbo.

I didn't mention it in my review of the first volume, but the Lieutentant Fukuie also resembles Columbo due to the comedic undertones. Fukuie being mistaken for all kinds of people, the way the forensic investigator Nioka always ends up having to tag along with Fukuie as she goes off on a hunch of hers and the numerous hints to Fukuie's private life all bring some lighthearted moments. Fukuie makes no hints about her husband or any private relations, but she reveals herself to be a big fan of stand-up comedies and even children's action hero series, and it's a mystery how she manages to watch them as she never sleeps whenever she's working on a case. A lot of comedy is also derived from the many, many side characters who appear each story. Each story is usually divided in about 10 segments, and often, four or so of them are about related parties, like acquaintances of the victim or culprit or just the waiter from an often-frequented restaurant, getting a visit of Fukuie. These segments are usually very short, five or six pages, each featuring characters who only make their one appearance then, so while the stories are relatively short and the core crime fairly compact, you'll always see quite a few characters pass by as you follow Fukuie's investigation. These characters are also surprisingly well-defined despite their short time on the stage, and they too often lighten the mood.

Like I mentioned in the other review however, I do find it hard to write down my thoughts on the individual stories, as it's so easy to spoil too much about them. Their inverted nature mean that the reader will always know more than the Lieutenant and that much of the underlying mystery plot is revealed right from the start to them: from the way the murderer committed the crime to the lines of defense erected by them to divert suspicion. Most of the time, the mystery for the readers revolves around two points: how did Fukuie first start to suspect the true criminal, and how will she manage to prove her target did it? Usually, the trail is born because some unforeseen event occured during the crime, for example because the victim fought back or something else happened at the same time as the crime, and it's up to both the reader and Fukuie to deduce what that event is. This is also the case in the opening story, Max-Gou Jiken ("The Incident On The Max"). Harada Akihiro is the director of a home security company who who is an often-seen guest on television as an expert on his field, and his security company is preparing to do business in the States too. That is why Harada is desperate to hide the fact that long ago, when he started out as a private detective, he blackmailed people: it was this money that eventually made him the man he is now. His partner in crime then was Naomi, a freelance investigator. She too used her money to open her own business, but her bar has now folded, and with gambling debts too weighing her down, she turns to Harada "for old times' sake", with some audio tapes with incriminating conversations as her insurance. Fearing she'll forever keep him on a leash, Harada decides to kill Naomi. He invites her to the Max, a small leisure cruise ship that's usually carrying guests from Muroran, Hokkaido (Northern Japan) to Hakata/Fukuoka (Southern Japan), but this time, the Max has been chartered by a tour operator for a overnight trip to the islands south of Tokyo back. Harada's plan is to kill Naomi and make it seem like another of her victims is the killer (as one of their men was sent to the Max too to keep an eye on Naomi). What Harada couldn't have guessed however that Lieutenant Fukuie would accidently become a stowaway on the Max (having lingered too long on the ship for a different investigation). Most of the mystery is already revealed to the reader, though it's a bit of a stretch of how Fukuie managed to guess that Harada would be present on the ship in the first place. The clue that proves that Harada is the killer however is done splendidly, with you knowing that something must have happened that neither Harada nor the reader know, but which Fukuie manages to deduce based on the same things both the killer and we know.

Ushinawareta Tomoshibi ("Lost Light") reminds slightly of the Columbo episode Negative Reaction, as it concerns a fake kidnapping. Toudou Masaya is a succesful screenwriter for both the silver screen and television, but nobody knows his hit debut work was actually stolen from a childhood friend who died young. Well, nobody except for a shady antiques dealer who happened to come across the same script when the friend's parents were selling the contents of their old storage. Toudou comes up with an elaborate plan to kill the antiques dealer. Mimuro Kanji is a unsuccesful actor who is a big fan of Toudou and even comes close to being a stalker. Toudou tells Mimuro he wants him to play the role of the kidnapper in his upcoming production. The final call is on the head of the director and the producer of the movie, so Toudou says he'll secretly go through the play together with Mimuro so he'll nail the audition. The two leave in secret to Toudou's villa in the forest to practice the role, but in reality Toudou's been secretly recording all of Mimuro's lines as a kidnapper. Later, he knocks Mimuro out, and uses the recordings to call his own secretary to fake his own abduction. Of course, Toudou kills the antiques dealer during his "abduction" and after his return to the villa, Mimuro is also silenced, with the scene looking as if Toudou killed Mimuro in self-defence. This is the longest story of the volume, with two murders no less, and it's certainly also one of the better stories in the series. Fukuie's suspicions are first pointed towards the curiosities at the abduction site. The clues are relatively "insignificant", but taken together really show Fukuie's suspicions are justified, like how the order of the shoes in the entrance was wrong, or how strangely enough, Toudou's laptop's battery was empty despite him having been captive for the day. The way Fukuie eventually manages to trap Toudou on the murder on the antiques dealer depends on a very old trope in inverted mystery stories, but the way this is set-up is good: Ookura leaves several incomplete and seemingly insignificant clues throughout the story that when taken together indicate a certain happening that forms the key to solving the case.

Aibou ("Partners") is about the manzai stand-up comedy duo Yamanote Nobori / Kudari, veterans in the trade but lately not doing as good as in the past. Half of the duo, Tachiishi Kouji, has been offered a chance to go at it solo, but his partner, Utsumi Tamao, is not willing to disband, at least not until the anniversary of the death of their mentor. The offer for Tachiishi however will not last for so many months. It also frustrates him that these last months, Utsumi has clearly been winging his gigs with Tachiishi, sometimes forgetting his lines or mistiming them, so Tachiishi decides the only way out is to eliminate his former partner. The plan is to lure Utsumi to their secret hide-out, a house they bought together long ago in the outskirts of Tokyo where they could practice their sketches. Knowing that Utsumi, who has lost his key, will try to climb the tree in the garden to get the spare key hidden in the potted plants on the balcony on the second floor, Tachiishi awaits Utsumi there to push him from the tree. He succeeds, but Fukuie, a fan of manzai comedy, quickly notices something's off. The greatest mystery here lies in the fact that Utsumi had taken a few weird actions before coming to the house (like dressing up in the clothing from when Yamanote Nobori / Kudari debuted). This is a riddle to both Tachiishi and the reader, so in that aspect, you're on level ground with Fukuie, who is still likely to figure things out swifter. Once you know why Utsumi did those things, it still takes a bit of imagination to arrive at the clue that will prove that Tachiishi killed his partner, but overall, this is a short, but nice enough story.

The final story is Project Blue. Arai Nobuhiro is the director of Swamp Imp, a project planning bureau that specializes in toys, coming up with toy designs, promotions for toys etc. 15 years ago however, Arai made money by manufacturing counterfeits of rare vinyl kaiju/monster figures. Nishimura, a toy modeler, has finally found proof of Arai's shady past, but Arai quickly eliminates this threat, and dresses the scene to look like an accident, with Nishimura "apparently" having been hit by his own car with bad brakes after he had parked it on a slope. When Fukuie first visits Arai, we learn his alibi for the murder: he claims he had been working on a model figure of the new version of Blueman. The hero of the show that is now airing will have a powered-up form next year, and final decisions on the design were only made last night by the TV production team: they immediately mailed the design to Swamp Imp, and Arai made and painted his prototype that same night, giving him the alibi. It's not particularly hard to guess how Arai managed to prepare his alibi, but the manner in which Fukuie eventually manages to prove Arai was at the crime scene at the time of the murder is again slyly done, with several smaller incidents that don't seem to mean much on their own, indicating an important event that had gone unnoticed by both the murderer and the reader until it's too late.

Fukuie Keibuho no Saihou is perhaps not very different from the first volume: here too you'll find four well-plotted inverted mystery stories that admittedly can feel somewhat similar in structure and in the way Fukuie manages to catch the culprit, but the stories are all really well done and the whole volume is a very solid read overall. It's very consistent in its quality, and I think for me, it'll be one of those 'safe reads' when I don't know what to read next and simply want something I know will be good.

Original Japanese title(s):『福家警部補の再訪』：「マックス号事件」/「失われた灯」/「相棒」/「プロジェクトブルー」

"Be a detective and examine everything to unlock the doors of the mystery of time and space."

"MOTAS: Mystery of Time and Space"

Huh, apparently there are a handful of mystery novels in Japan about Escher...

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan opened up its ports for trade after centuries of closure, but that didn't mean foreign traders were free to go anywhere they wanted. Foreign settlements were opened at select places across Japan, most notably in Yokohama and Kobe. The foreign settlement in Osaka was located in Kawaguchi, and it also provided the home for a certain Dutch civil engineer called George Arnold Esher (who has a son called M.C. Esher...), who was hired by the Japanese government as an advisor, overseeing hydraulic projects like the restoration of the Yodo river in Osaka. One night Escher returns to Osaka after overseeing the harbor in Mikuni, when he is kidnapped and stuffed in a hansom coach. The threats by his assailants make it clear they're actually not after him, but a tradesman called Hans Boemler, but attempts at clearing up the misunderstanding fail. The blinded hansom doesn't allow Escher to see much, but he notices that his kidnappers brought him to the Kawaguchi Foreign Settlement (which is where he was heading anyway), and he's brought into a room, where he finds... the body of Boemler, who apparently had already been found and killed by his kidnappers' boss. With a body on their hand, and a mistaken abductee, the fiends decide to burn the place down, but Escher is miraculously saved from the fire. But in the subsequent investigation, one problem arises: Boemler's body was never found. Escher and his comrades try to figure out what happened exactly that night, but none of their theories work, and Escher would eventually leave Japan.

Morie Shunsaku takes up the case of Mr. Shioji in 2001, who is accused of murdering Udou, a businessman who together with a few other men beat Shioji up at the golf course, after Shioji assaulted them first. Shioji used to be a police officer, but he was basically crippled by Udou and his friends back when they were students and participating in the student riots in the 70s, giving Shioji enough of a motive for murder. Udou had been strangled on the street at night, and with witnesses stating they saw Shioji tailing Udou, and even someone who saw the murder happen from across the street, Shioji's guilt seems clear, but he swears that he never touched the man and that Udou was assaulted by some invisible ghost, as he saw Udou suddenly struggling and falling down on the street even though there was nobody around. This alone sounds like an impossible crime, but Morie also learns that in 1970, Udou's circle of friends was involved with a mysterious murder. The friends had been drinking near the warehouse district, when Hikura headed back home. He made his way through Ajigawa Tunnel (a deep, long tunnel running beneath the Aji River) and at the other end of the tunnel, he discovered the body of Toomi, one of the friends he had been drinking with. While Hikura had not seen Toomi when he left (meaning Toomi could've come here before him), Hikura did see Udou and the others before he left and none of them could've overtaken him to arrive at the tunnel earlier and commit the murder, as there is only one single road to the tunnel. Morie has a nagging feeling that the Ajigawa Tunnel Murder has some similarities with the George Esher case he read about in a pamphlet, and he decides to try to solve these cases too in Ashibe Taku's Toki no Misshitsu ("A Locked Space in Time", 2001).

Toki no Misshitsu is the tenth entry in this series starring the defense attorney Morie Shunsaku, who more often than not ends up amateur sleuthing. And as you can gather from my feeble attempt at a summary, it's also a very ambitious work, that tries to do a lot. I do have to say that the title can be a bit misleading, as while they talk about sealed spaces and locked rooms all the time, most of the situations aren't really locked room mysteries. The 1876 Escher case for example is called a sealed space because the Kawaguchi Foreign Settlement is a "sealed space" (extraterrorial ground) from which Boemler's body disappeared. The Ajigawa Tunnel murder is considered a "locked room murder" because the suspects were all located at one side of the tunnel and none of them could've made it to the other side of the tunnel without being seen by the reliable witness (i.e. the area between the witness and the victim was "a locked space" for the suspects, but the murder was possible for anyone on the other side of the tunnel). There is another problem presented in the prologue, where Morie is riding on the Aqua-Liner aqua-bus with a certain package, but he can't figure out how his opponent is going to retrieve that package and escape from the police, as the canals and rivers of Osaka basically make any quick escape impossible. The only real impossible crime situation is that of the Udou murder, where the defendant says Udou was attacked by a ghost, and a witness says he saw the defendant assault the victim, but even then it's not really a locked room mystery. So the title is rather misleading.

To be honest, the four "sealed space" mysteries are not likely to make much of an impression if taken alone. The solutions for both the Aqualiner mystery and the Udou murder are fairly simple to guess and I wouldn't be surprised if you had seen similar answers elsewhere. The Escher and the Ajigawa Tunnel cases are more interesting, as their underlying trick is the same if the execution is different, and Morie manages to solve the Ajigawa Tunnel case only because he figured out the Escher case. It has to be noted that once again, their base idea is nothing particularly inspiring, but at least the synergy is here between these cases, and it is interesting to see how two completely different situations, set in very different times, are ultimately built around the same notion, and the way it ties back to M.C. Escher (who makes an appearance as a kid) is pretty neat. I actually thought this novel to be packed way too full (besides the four "sealed space" mysteries, there's even a code cracking section, and more), and personally, I think a novel only focused on the Esher and Ajigawa Tunnel cases would've worked better, as the other elements in Toki no Misshitsu feel far less integrated compared to these two parts. There is not that much synergy between the various parts, so at times the novel does feel like a collection of various mysterious events, rather than one cohesive story (especially as there's just so much going on in this novel across various time periods).

I've mentioned in earlier reviews of Ashibe's work that he loves weaving historical and literary research into his stories: the pastiche stories with famous fictional detectives in his The Exhibition of Great Detectives series (Part 1 and Part 2) are excellent examples of how Ashibe not only shows great understanding of the works he imitates, from writing style to publication history, but you also see how he does a tremendous amount of research in world history, as he also makes connections between his fictional tales, and real world events. His work is always brimming with historical references and explanations, which can also backfire a bit: I thought Satsujin Kigeki no Modern City was going a bit overboard with its explanations of basically everything in 1930s Osaka. With a story set in the three distinct time periods (1876, 1970 and 2001), you're sure to find plenty of references and historical explanations in Toki no Misshitsu too, though I didn't find it as intrusive as with Satsujin Kigeki no Modern City. You are sure to learn a lot while reading this book, but the way Ashibe uses the historical A.G. Esher for his mystery for example is pretty neat and a good example of how to do a historical mystery. It's also clear that Ashibe loves the city of Osaka, and as always, you're always seeing a lot of the Water Capital in various forms. The amount of research in the city's history can sometimes a bit overwhelming and distract a bit from the main mystery plot, but readers into atmosphere will definitely love Toki no Misshitsu, and Ashibe's in general, I think.

I might not be the ideal reader of Toki no Misshitsu, as I freely admit I'm a reader who focuses more on the core mystery plot and less on "story". Personally, I think a tale focusing solely on the two most interesting situations, the Escher and Ajigawa Tunnel cases, would've worked better than the way it is now, with a lot going on. The idea of using Escher and the Kawaguchi Foreign Settlement is quite original though and the idea of a "sealed space" mystery with the tunnel is also interesting, even if the "locked room" moniker is a bit misleading. I do think that people who really like to read "an epic story" will like Toki no Misshitsu as Ashibe really went all-out here, with so much mysteries to be solved in the city of Osaka, spanning a period of more than a century.

Original Japanese title(s): 芦辺拓『時の密室』

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.”

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Hm, it's been some years since I last did a short short post, when I want to do discuss several mystery-related media without having to write a full-length review.

First off, a small preview of The Beautiful Kyoto Flower Arrangement Practioners Murder Case, the newest story of Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo("The Case Files of the 37-year Old Kindaichi"). The first half of this story is collected in the recently released fourth volume, which makes it impossible to write a full review on the story, though I can already reveal I kinda like the main problem. Kindaichi is sent to Kyoto by his PR company to work out a new package tour for foreign tourists, where they'll have the chance to visit a famous family of ikebana practictioners, the traditional art of Japanese flower arrangement and attend a course. The Kyougoku family is the head of the Akaike-style of ikebana, and previous collaboration projects already made it clear the head of the family's infamously hard to work with, a fact Kindaichi and his assistant Hayama also find out the moment they arrive in the Kyougoku home in Kyoto. The current head of the family is actually not a gifted ikebana pracitioner himself, and only became the head of the family after the death of his brother. His twin nieces Kaoruko and Sakurako are the talents of the family, although Sakurako left the house to become a modern flower artist (though she's back now to help ou). Kindaichi and Hayama stay for one night at the house, but in the middle of the night, Kindaichi discovers the dead body of Sakurako lying in the rock garden. The carefully raked pattern in the gravel (which takes up to 6 hours to do) only show Sakurako's own footprints as she walked to the middle of the rock garden to apparently commit suicide on top of the rocks, and she has a motive too as revenge porn pictures of her were posted on social media some weeks earlier. It's hard to say where this story will bring us at the moment: more murders follow, but there's surprisingly little investigation conducted into this neat variant of the footprints-in-the-snow at this stage of the story. I do hope that volume five will contain the conclusion to this story (though I can't imagine it won't).

And as for the main reason for wanting to write a short short today: lately I've been into reading classical shoujo (girls) manga from the sixties-seventies. In my review of Takeshina Ryouko's Piano Sonata Satsujin Jiken, I wrote:

(...) the puzzle plot mystery manga's roots could be traced to the uprise of female manga artists in the 70s who would leave an everlasting impression on the industry. The 70s provided a space for experimentation within the manga format, and it was especially daring female artists who did incredible things there. A while back, I reviewed the animated feature They Were Eleven! for example, based on a comic by industry legend Hagio Moto which incorporated mystery, science-fiction and human drama. The horror genre in the manga format has also been long associated with comics for female readers, as that too flourished in the 70s under the auspices of female manga artists. From there it's not hard to see how horror artists would work their way to mystery manga, as the two genres have much in common.

So I've been delving more into this period of mystery manga. One of the more interesting titles was Yamada Mineko's Alice series. Yamada's one of the members of the so-called Year 24 Group, a group of female manga artists who were groundbreaking in their genre-breaking approach to female-oriented comics in the 70s (see also Hagio Moto mentioned in the quote). The group is named after the fact most of them were born in or around the year of Showa 24, or 1949. Yamada is best known for her science fiction series Saishuu Sensou ("Final Wars"), but she also wrote horror and mystery stories. I believe that most of her mystery-related output is concentrated in her Alice series, which was published from 1974 until 1978 in various magazines. The first story, Run Alice, introduces us to the young girl Alice, whose rich parents (who were never around anyway) have recently died. Her uncle and aunt want to inherit the immense family fortune, and hire assassins to kill their niece. What follows is a comedic adventure with Alice ending up at an all-boys school and become friends with a boy there called Dick Tracy. At this point, it's hardly a mystery stories, but the second story, The Stolen Jewel, is definitely an orthodox mystery story, where at a school party, someone's jewel is stolen. The plot is borrowed from G.K. Chesterton (which Yamada herself explains in a note at the end of the story), but it's a first step into a more classical mystery series.

What makes this series interesting for the reader is that Yamada used the characters of Alice, Dick and their friends in a very diverse manner. Yamada wrote for multiple magazines with different target readers, but Yamada would constantly adapt her characters for whatever story she wanted to write for the magazine. The pilot story is a comedic, slapstick inspired adventure that is very cartoon-like, while the fourth story, Where Did Our Summer Go?, is a pretty deep psychological thriller completely unlike the pilot story. Each of the nine Alice stories is completely unique in terms of atmosphere and as Yamada's artstyle also changed drastically in these four years, most of the time the stories don't even look like they belong together. You have a few classic murder case stories, but also theft cases and a few more psychologically-oriented thrillers. Heck, the very last story is actually a crossover with the science fiction Saishuu Sensou series, resulting in a really weird series 'finale' (it's best read as a spin-off). Overall, the mystery plots of the Alice series are seldom really impressive, but as perhaps one of the earliest proper mystery manga series with recurring characters and setting, it's definitely an interesting title in terms of history. All the Alice stories are collected in the volume Alice to Sannin no Futago ("Alice and the Three Twins"), though I think there's an older volume with the exact same title (other cover) that may not feature everything (and you can also find the various stories spread across different collections, to further the confusion).

One series that has definitely made into the history books on manga is Patalliro! by Maya Mineo. This shoujo comedy series that has ben running since the late 70s is about a short, arrogant and money-grabbing guy called Patalliro, who also happens to be the king of the really wealthy kingdom of Malynera. The core of this series is slapstick comedy, revolving around the wacky adventures of Patalliro, his friends Bancoran (a MI6 agent), Maraich (handsome assassin who married Bancoran) and Patalliro's personal army of "Onions" (handsome men whose uniform/hairdo makes them look like onions). The series is immensely popular with over a hundred volumes, an anime adaptation and was even recently made into a live-action movie-musical (based on the musical that ran before the movie).

Like The Simpsons, Patalliro! can take on many genres: sometimes it's just comedy, sometimes it's science fiction, other times they have occult adventures and of course, there are quite a number of mystery stories. There are in fact so many mystery stories, they have exclusively mystery-themed volumes of Patalliro!. They were on sale a few weeks ago, so I picked a few of the mystery volumes. Considering that Patalliro! isn't mainly a mystery series and that these detective stories are more like And Now For Something Completely Different episodes, I have to say I was quite amused by them. Sometimes the stories take some time to really move beyond the slapstick prologue and get on with the plot, but the story gets going, you'll come across the classic tropes like impossible thefts, locked room murders and whodunnits. None of the stories are truly brilliant, but they're also better than they have any right to be considering that Patalliro! isn't even a mystery series at heart. The plots are admittedly often simple and the experienced mystery reader can definitely quickly pick them apart, but they're well-constructed and they're perfectly fine as a mystery plots in a non-mystery series. For those interested, I know that at the very least, volume 29, 35 and 45 of the bunko releases are touted as mystery-themed volumes and there may be more of them.

Anyway, that's it for this Short Short. I'm still busy exploring the world of 70s mystery and horror manga, so I might return to this topic in a more extensive post in the future, and as for Kindaichi, the next volume is scheduled for October (as is the home video release of Detective Conan: Fist of the Blue Sapphire by the way!), so I'll probably review the full story then.

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3巻; 山田ミネコ　『アリスと３人のふたご』; 魔夜峰央　『パタリロ！』第29巻

"I'll bet this is the first time anyone's been buried twice in the same grave."

"Batman: Lord Death Man"

Okay, I'll admit, I'm writing this review almost two months after I read the book. So, yes, the details are a bit vague, and yes, I have little interesting to say about this book.

Ross Harte, PR-man, author and journalist, has made an enemy in millionaire Dudley Wolff, by exposing a scandal that even has the Senate interested and luck has it that the girl he intends to marry happens to be Kathryn Wolff. Dudley uses every trick in the book to make sure Ross won't marry Kathryn. Despite these machinations however, Dudley does not lose sight of his primary goal in life: to examine death, and more importantly, figure a way to postpone the inevitable. He's open to everything, which is why he finances both an experimental biologist who tries to cheat death in a scientific manner, and spirit mediums who attempt the job in a supernatural way. Lately however, some odd incidents have been happening in the house and renowned stage magician The Great Merlini is asked to make sense out of it all (and it just so happens Ross is Merlini's assistant...). The mystery involves a man who has apparently will not stay dead and can appear and disappear from rooms at will, a spirit photograph, the murder on Dudley, a disappearing murder weapon and even an attempt on Ross' life. It's up the Great Merlini to explain the trickery behind all this magic in Clayton Rawson's No Coffin for the Corpse (1942).

I have reviewed Rawson's The Footprints on the Ceiling and The Headless Lady earlier this year (and the short stories in 2015), but No Coffin for the Corpse is the final novel of The Great Merlini series (I have not reviewed the first novel, Death from a Top Hat and don't know if I will because I already saw the film many years back). The basics of No Coffin for the Corpse are very similar to other The Great Merlini stories, with Merlini being asked to determine whether an ostensibly supernatural phenomenon is in fact supernatural, or just a result of human trickery (and often, the supernatural option is preferred). There's an abundance of suspicious characters like pseudo-scientists, mediums and of course parlor magicians who of course also act as suspiciously as possible, and Rawson is sure to use his own background as a stage magician to come up with all kinds of little events and set pieces to entertain the reader.

But I can't help but feel that No Coffin for the Corpse is kinda underwhelming. The main plot, which revolves around the 'man who can't die' and the trickery he performs, including a disappearing weapon, does make up for a tale that manages to pique the reader's interest, and Rawson certainly is able to constantly add new events to keep the tension up. However, ultimately most of the tricks played by the culprit are extremely obvious to see through, exactly because Rawson uses magic tricks and other concepts from the business to create his mystery plots. Of course, that's what he always does, but this time the smokescreen is far too thin. The part with the disappearing murder weapon is signalled far too obviously, especially combined with the crude clewing in this novel and even then, it's not even signalled well, because the logical chain still expects you to make a jump yourself that is founded on nothing but a baseless guess ("character X can probably do action Y that is needed to accomplish act Z, because that would solve the mystery in a clean way"). The mystery of the man who won't die is another of those tricks which might've worked better in any other book, but in a Rawson book, in a novel that is filled with spirit mediums, circus artists and more of those performance artists, it's far too easy to guess what's going on, and there's not much of a mystery, and the mystery that is here, doesn't feel really satisfying, as at times, it almost feels like Rawson's just saying "Oh, and by the way, they know a magic trick so they could definitely do that."

That said, I liked a second, minor murder in the latter half of the novel much better. Merlini has to determine whether a car accident was indeed just an accident, but the clewing here is really good and this super-short part is far better plotted as a mystery I think that most of the rest of the book.

Like I mentioned in the introduction, this has been a rather short review, though I don't think I'd have been able to write much about No Coffin for the Corpse even if I had written this post right after reading the book. Perhaps I shouldn't have read these books relatively close to each other (yes, 'months' is relatively close in my reading diet), but I found No Coffin for the Corpse simply underwhelming, with tricks and ideas that seemed rather obvious, especially if you know you're reading a Great Merlini novel with a certain type of setting and characters. Had the clewing been better, I might've been more impressed, but that too was not exceptionally inspired.

過ぎ行く春を惜しみながら

僕らの幕開けたあの夏

「心絵」(Road of Major)

While lamenting the passing of Spring

Our curtains were raised in that Summer

"Picture of the Heart" (Road of Major)

Huh, who'd have thought I'd be doing another Tantei Jinguuji Saburou ("Detective Jinguuji Saburou") review this year? The long-running detective adventure videogame series had two releases in 2018: Prism of Eyes was the eighteenth entry in the main series, while Daedalus: The Awakening of Golden Jazz was a new prologue spin-off, about a young Jinguuji as he set his first steps in becoming the hardboiled private detective we know from the main series. Neither game was perfect, but as a fan of the series, I'm always happy to see a new entry, as while the brand name is fairly well-known due being around for over thirty years now, none of the games are tremendous sellers or anything like that, so you never quite know for sure whether the series will continue or not.

The Tantei Jinguuji Saburou series started out on game consoles and handhelds and that's still where the main entries are released, but in 2003, a secondary series was introduced with the mobile applications, games designed for garakei feature phones in Japan. If one were to call the main entries "novels", these Tantei Jinguuji Saburou mobile apps were definitely the short stories: far smaller in scale and bringing a linear experience that told hardboiled detective story of about two hours in four acts. This mobile application series was fairly popular: they released twenty-four of them between 2003 and 2010, following their own numbering seperate of the main series. While as "games", these applications were quite limited, the stories they told are usually quite entertaining as human drama-based hardboiled detective stories and there are even some big industry names connected to it: Nojima Kazushige of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy X fame for example wrote a few scenarios for this series, and Kodaka Kazutaka, who would later create the Danganronpa game series, more or less started out his career as a game scenario writer with the Jinguuji Saburou application series. These mobile applications were also later included with the DS and 3DS entries of the Tantei Jinguuji Saburou series, and Prism of Eyes actually consisted mainly out of HD-remakes of these mobile applications. The last of them (Yurameku Hitotose) was released in 2010, so they basically stopped making these games when use of smartphones became widespread.

So I was quite surprised when I learned that the mobile application series would continue on iOS and Android this summer. The new app Tantei Jinguuji Saburou New Order ("Detective Jinguuji Saburou New Order", 2019) was released on the last day of July to provide a main hub in which the new stories are distributed, and of course, the first game was also relased on the same day.It's been nearly ten years since the last Jinguuji Saburou mobile game, but when you play Giwaku no Ace ("The Suspicious Ace", 2019), it's like no time has passed. It follows the familar four-act set-up of the short stories and the development team behind the game also consists of familar names (including a veteran Jinguuji Saburou writer who also wrote Ghost of the Dusk, and character designer Junny). One evening private detective Jinguuji Saburou happens to become acquainted with Hayasaka Masumi on the streets of Shinjuku. Masumi is not only an employee of the baseball club Blue Kicks here in Shinjuku, she's also the (secret) girlfriend of Majima Naotaka, a starter of the team. Majima was praised as an ace two years ago, but since then fallen into a slump. He has been acting suspiciously lately, so Masumi wants Jinguuji to tail Majima to see what is going on. Jinguuji learns that Majima has been seeing Fuwa lately, a former team mate who had to quit baseball after an injury. Fuwa kinda disappeared after his early retirement, so Jinguuji is not only surprised to learn Fuwa is still around, but he also realizes Fuwa has a tie with Katagiri of the Matsuishi Group, a yakuza organization that specializes in illegal gambling. Meanwhile, an anonymous letter has also accused someone in the Blue Kicks of doping, which brings another light on Majima's suspicious activities.

Like I said earlier, these mobile application games are quite limited in scale in terms of story, so there's not very much to write about without spoiling everything. The experience is quite linear and passive compared to the (old) main series entries and the player is mostly just choosing discussion topics or selecting where to go next. The most 'thinking' you'll do is figuring out a PIN code twice. That said, I did enjoy Giwaku no Ace as an accessible, short hardboiled mystery story that uses its four-act set-up in a good manner. New events and clues keep popping up at a steady rate that keep the reader, well not guessing, as the story is fairly simple, but it's definitely enticing. You just wanna know what's really going on at the Blue Kicks, and the story does a good job at keeping your attention for the hour-and-half, two hours you'll be playing this, with each act bringing some new clues and questions. It's certainly nothing more than the old mobile application games brought, but nothing less either. If you're wanting for an old-fashioned Tantei Jinguuji Saburou experience, Giwaku no Ace is exactly what you're looking for.

So no, Tantei Jinguuji Saburou New Order: Giwaku no Ace is nothing special. This is the twenty-fifth entry in the mobile application series and they have always been following the same pattern, so no surprises here. That said, I found the two hours I spent on the game amusing, and it's certainly a worthy entry in this series in terms of storytelling. Giwaku no Ace's baseball setting is a fairly original one for the series (they had one about professional wrestling once) and while the application series has always been more focused on human drama than the main series, I think this entry has one of the more relatable casts of this series. I do hope that in the future, they'll release all of the New Order stories in one package on the Nintendo Switch or something like that, because it's really weird they decided to publish New Order in an episodic format after doing exclusively handheld/console releases since 2012!

Original Japanese title(s): 『探偵神宮寺三郎 New Order』「疑惑のエース」

「もう全部あいつ一人でいいんじゃないかな」

『時空英雄仮面ライダー』

"Man, he can probably do everything all by himself."

"Heroes of Time and Space Kamen Rider"

When the releases of the Detective Conan manga slowed down last year, I decided to look at a few of the episodes written exclusively for the anime series (so not based on the manga by Aoyama Goushou). I haven't written reviews on all the episodes I've seen, which in turns means that the episodes I did write about, were stories worth writing about. Noroi no Kamen wa Tsumetaku Warau and Koureikai W Misshitsu Jiken in particular were absolutely fantastic pieces of mystery fiction, among the best visual mystery stories I had ever seen. Both these stories were written by Ochi Hirohito, who is also credited at times as Ochi Koujin and Uonji Chiko for his work on Conan. Ochi is an important figure for the animated Detective Conan series, as he has multiple roles. Storyboarder, artist, episode director and screenplay writer: he's done it all (and for some episodes, simultaneously). With both volume 97 of the manga and the home video release of the 23rd theatrical movie Detective Conan: The Fist of Blue Sapphire scheduled for somewhere in October or perhaps even later, I decided to watch a few more episodes with screenplays by Ochi while I wait for the fall releases.

Detective Conan episodes with scenarios by Ochi Hirohito:
88-89: Dracula-Sou Satsujin Jiken ("The Villa Dracula Murder Case")
184: Noroi no Kamen wa Tsumetaku Warau ("The Cursed Masks Laugh Coldly")
379-380: Hitou Yukiyami Furisode Jiken ("The Case of the Furisode of the Hot Spring Hidden In The Snow Darkness")
603-605: Koureikai W Misshitsu Jiken ("The Case of the Séance's Double Locked Room")
905-906: Nananengo no Mokugekishougen ("Eyewitness Testimony, Seven Years Later")

Episodes 379-380 form the two-parter Hitou Yukiyami Furisode Jiken ("The Case of the Furisode of the Hot Spring Hidden In The Snow Darkness"), originally broadcast on November 22 and 29, 2004. Conan, Ran and Kogorou have a little family trip to the Kotoya Inn, a traditional Japanese inn in the mountains with hot springs. Following the local tradition, all the rooms of the inn are decorated by splendid furisode (long-sleeved kimono). Legend has it that many centuries ago, a woman in the village called O-Hana helped an injured samurai, who gave O-Hana beautiful furisode as a gift. The jealous daughters of the village chief however coveted these furisode, and succeeded in arranging for O-Hana's execution through slander. Thus they manage to steal O-Hana's furisode, but they weren't able to enjoy them for long: one night, both daughters were found dead, wrapped in and covered by the furisode they stole. Fearing it was a curse, the village people decided to worship O-Hana as Furisode-sama to watch over the village, though she also has a vengeful side as a diety as Furisode-Hannya. The village still has a large shrine dedicated to Furisode-sama, but the Kotoya Inn has a small Furisode-sama shrine in the garden too.

At the Kotoya Inn, Kogorou runs into a producer of Nichiuri Television (Kogorou often appears in their programs) and the producer reveals to the gang that they are working on a drama adaptation of a story by the romance novelist Akechi Eri. The producer, Akechi and her publisher's editor have a small meeting here at the inn, together with the three actresses who are to star in the movie: the succesful model Shibasaki Asuka, award-winning artist Anzai Ema and upcoming singer-songwriter Fukatsu Harumi, who all graduated from the same university. Harumi wants a private conversation with Kogorou, and reveals that a friend of her was once accused of drugs dealing and that she committed suicide. However, it appears she was framed and that the real dealers were in fact her two new co-actors in the upcoming drama. She wants Kogorou to investigate the case, but fate strikes first: that night, both Asuka and Ema are murdered under impossible circumstances: Ema is found stabbed lying on furisode in the garden shrine of Furisode-sama, but the only footprints in the snow leading to the shrine are those of Ema herself. The murder weapon meanwhile is found in the hot spring below, together with the body of Asuka, floating in the water surrounded by furisode. In order to enter the hot spring however, one has to pass by the recreation room, which was occupied by Conan and the gang, meaning an invisible murderer must've killed Ema first, left the shrine without leaving footprints in the snow, somehow made it past Conan unseen, and enter the hot spring to kill Asuka, but how's that possible?

While not as strong as Noroi no Kamen wa Tsumetaku Warau and Koureikai W Misshitsu Jiken, this case is pretty good, though I have to say I liked it a lot better the second time I watched these two episodes. As with most episodes by Ochi, the whodunnit aspect is somewhat weak, more like an afterthought with some lucky clue that points directly to the culprit, but the main problem is almost always an impossible one. Two in fact this time: the footprints-in-the-snow problem of Ema's murder in the shrine, and how the murderer managed to get past Conan, Ran and Kogorou to enter the hot spring to murder Asuka. I'm going to use my pet phrase 'synergy' again from my review of Koureikai W Misshitsu Jiken, because that's what Ochi's doing here once again. We have to two distinct situations, but he manages to tie the underlying solution to both problems to one, central idea and use that in several ways to strengthen both impossible situations. Once again, we have two impossible murders that are possible because there are two of them, because both of these situations exist. It's a notion that so very few mystery authors to manage to do right, but Ochi's done quite a few of them by now for Detective Conan. The main idea that ties these problems is at the core very simple and seems even unoriginal at first, but the way Ochi uses it to really integrate the solution to the two impossible situations with the overall story and atmosphere is fantastic, resulting one of the better plotted anime original stories.

Ochi Hirohito wrote another two-parter last year with episodes 905-906, originally broadcast on June 23 and 30, 2018. Nananengo no Mokugekishougen ("Eyewitness Testimony, Seven Years Later") bring Conan, Ran and Kogorou to the Dove Flute Lodge, a small guest house that lately has become popular thanks to the recommendation by the "Beer Prince" Minakitaya Ootarou, an entertainer with an extraordinary love for beer. The unique selection of beer offered by the Dove Flute Lodge makes it a paradise for beer lovers like Kogorou and it's no wonder they aren't the only guests there and the Beer Prince himself happens to be one of the other guests that day. During a conversation with fellow lodgers, an old sentai show called Masked Comet Byun is mentioned. Seven years ago, the show became news when two robbers wearing masks of characters from the show killed a man.

After dinner, the lodge is visited by the police, who found a corpse earlier that day down the river that passes behind the lodge. It is unclear whether the man died because of an accident or by the hands of another party, but he carried a card with Masked Comet Byun, and when shown a picture of the victim, Minakitaya identifies the man as Shuujirou, his old comedy partner before they dissolved their duo three years ago. Shuujirou was working as a shady entertainment reporter nowadays and had visited the lodge too, asking about Minakitaya. Later that night, the lounge room of the lodge is ransacked by someone. The commotion wakes everyone but Minakitaya, so they all go to his room. When they finally break the bolted door open, they find the corpse of Minakitaya lying on the floor, surrounded by empty beer bottles and bottle caps. While he might've simply slipped and fallen on his head, the drawing he made on the floor with his blood, reminsicent of the logo of Masked Comet Byun, suggests foul play. But how could the murderer have bolted the room from the inside, and what has Minakitaya's death to do with the death of his former partner Shuujirou?

Overall, this story is not nearly as intricately plotted as the previously discussed one. There's quite a bit of coincidence working in the background, as unsurprisingly, almost all the characters present are revealed to have some connection to the deadly robbery seven years ago and they just happen to be here at the lodge at the same time. The death of Shuujirou isn't really important, only acting as a motive. The main problem, the murder of Minakitaya in the locked room, is okay: it has a neat solution that is hidden from the viewer through nicely thought-out misdirection, while the hints that point in the direction of how it was done (the direct means and the clues that originate from the way this means was obtained) are somewhat standard in spirit, they work well and give the viewer more than enough of a chance to solve it themselves. It's also a locked room trick that works well in the visual format. The identity culprit is unsurprising however, and as often with Ochi's stories, the clue chain that leads to the murderer is a line separate from the howdunnit line, which is something I find really disappointing considering the care Ochi shows when doing the howdunnit angle. In comparison, his whodunnit reasoning chains always seem like an afterthought, like "oh, better make sure the culprit also makes this one unneccesary mistake after pulling off a super complex plan, a mistake that points directly at them or else Conan can't solve it". The dying message too is rather rough.

Of the two stories discussed today, Hitou Yukiyami Furisode Jiken is definitely the better one. While not as strong as Ochi's best two efforts (Noroi no Kamen wa Tsumetaku Warau and Koureikai W Misshitsu Jiken), this two-parter still provides a well-plotted impossible murder mystery that once again sets an example of how to do multiple mysteries within one story to create synergy. Nananengo no Mokugekishougen is not as strong, but is entertaining enough if you just want to see an anime original story. As far as I know I have seen all episodes with screenplays by Ochi by the way, though I haven't reviewed all of them. Episode 22 (TV Drama Roke Satsujin Jiken / "The Television Drama On Location Murder Case"), episode 596 (Tenraku no Tenraku / "The Alibi for the Fall") and episode 665 (Giwaku no Initial K / "The Suspicious Initial K") are a lot simpler and smaller in scale compared to the other Ochi stories I reviewed, but for those interested in Ochi's writing, it might be worth checking those episodes out too.

Original Japanese title(s): 『名探偵コナン』379-380話「秘湯雪闇振袖事件」, 905-906話「七年後の目撃証言」

One of the tropes most commonly associated with mystery fiction, and one I personally love, is the closed circle situation. For some reason though, I often see it confused with 'an impossible crime' or even 'locked room mystery' even though they are very different concept (they can be used together however). Closed circle situations are also often referred to as the 'island in a storm' or 'mountain villa during a snow storm' tropes, which might make the concept clearer: it refers to a situation when a certain, clearly defined location is cut off from the outside world (in a broad sense of the word), making it impossible to enter or exit said location. This also often includes communication going in or out. Dorothy L. Sayers for example wrote in her '34 review of Christie's Murder on the Orient Expressfor the Sunday Times "Moreover, the problem is of the perfect “closed circle” type, the entire action being confined within the limits of a single coach on the “Orient Express”, with a snowdrift to cut out interference from the outside world." The term itself seems to be used less in the West nowadays than in Japan though, where it's quite common among mystery aficionados to use the term, which might be a reason why people sometimes think a locked room mystery is a closed circle situation.

The merits of a closed circle situation, from a reader/writer's point of view are various. For example, one of the most important reasons is that it effectively defines the range and setting of the mystery. The reader is presented a specific setting with a certain number of identified characters, and no extra characters can enter this location, nor can anyone leave (alive that is). This helps the intellectual game of detective fiction, as the reader doesn't have to worry about secret assassins coming from the outside world to commit the murder and leave, or evidence being shipped away to Duckburg. Often, the reason why the setting was cut-off from the outside world becomes a factor in the game of mystery: the arrival time of the boat, or the exact time of when the snow storm started etc. all give the reader a better idea of where their deductions should focus on (specific periods of time). Being cut-off from the outside world often also means the police can't come, or in the case a police officer is already on the scene, back-up in the form of more officers or for example forensics is made impossible, which often sets things up for a more pure puzzle plot mystery.

For me as a reader, the fact that a closed circle basically says 'the crime happened here, these were the characters present at that time, go figure out whodunnit' makes it a welcome trope. If a mystery story is a game in which the author challenges the reader to solve the mystery, and this is to be done in a fair manner, one of the more basic things to do is of course to explain the limits of the game. You don't want to hear at the end that a character who was never mentioned or hinted at turns out to be the murderer, but a closed circle situation makes that impossible, as the murderer must've been within the closed circle during the act. The closed circle situation also works great with the impossible alibi story: if there are only X number of characters at the location, and all of them have an alibi for the murder, than nobody could've done it. The closed circle also ensures objects (weapons or other tools) can't be conjured out of nowhere (the outside world), thus making it clear to the reader that everything they should know, exists in the pocket universe of the closed circle. Of course, there are also stories that play with this, for example by making it seem like a closec circle situation when there is in fact a means of escape: some might find this cheap, but as long it's properly hinted at, I'd say using a closed circle situation as a piece of misdirection is perfectly fair game.

In-universe, a closed circle situation can occur due to various reasons. In general, I guess you could categorize them in Artificial Closed Circles, Natural Closed Circles and Others. Artificial Closed Circled are of course when a human hand causes the creation of a closed circle situation. Burning down the one bridge that leads to the mountain villa or setting the only boat on the island adrift. It's often, though not always, the murderer who creates the closed circle, for example to ensure their prey, be it specific person(s) or all people, can't escape. For the reader, it's a source of thrills, as you basically have the Jason-at-the-camp situation, not knowing who will die and knowing there's no way of escape. Natural Closed Circles are of those caused by the forces of nature: heavy snow making it impossible to go outside or for a train to proceed, a storm preventing boats from going or leaving the island, mountain tunnels being buried after an earthquake, the standard examples. Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery has a forest fire preventing the Queens from leaving house, while in an early Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney episode, strong winds had made a statue break, blocking off a road and effectively creating a closed circle situation. Sometimes, the murderer played the probabilities in hopes of a natural disaster to help out their crime, sometimes it's just pure coincidence and the murderer decided to go ahead despite the storm outside. This often becomes a focal point in the investigation: why did the murderer commit the murder despite this situation? In the category Others, I'd sort the closed circle situations that aren't strictly physically impossible to leave or enter, but where 'other' reasons keep people bound, for example because a mistake or crime in the past will be exposed unless they stay. In the Scooby Doo, Where Are You! episode A Night of Fright is No Delight for example, the potential heirs of Colonel Beauregard Sanders (one of them Scooby) have to stay on a creepy island for one night in order to inherit. In Arisugawa Alice's Jooukoku no Shiro, a murder occurs on the grounds of the headquarters of a suspicious new religion, and Alice and the others are held captive there, and the whole headquarters is locked down because top management fears news of a murder there would hurt their reputation, while they do want to know who the murderer is, making it a self-inflicted closed circle.

Anyway, what I wanted to ask was, what are some of the more memorable closed cirle situations you have come across. Err, as a reader, I guess. Perhaps it was a unique way to create such a situation, or it led to interesting scenes or deductions? To name a few of mine in no particular order:

- Arisugawa Alice's Gekkou Game("Moonlight Game") had Alice and the other members of the Mystery Club camping on Mt. Yabuki, a dormant volcano which then decided to erupt, cutting them and a few other students on the camp ground from the outside world. It's such a weird and over-the-top way to create a closed circle situation and I'd even say it feels unnatural, but okay, at least you can be sure your cast is seperated from the outside world! If you have read The Moai Island Puzzle ((C) Shameless Self-Promotion), you know Arisugawa loves his closed circle situations for the Student Alice series.

- The South-Korean 2009 movie4 Gyosi Churiyǒngyǒk("4th Period Mystery") was set a school, where two students discovered the body of a classmate in a classroom at the end of the third period. Because these mammoth schools are built to keep all students inside during school hours (security cameras, gates, checking who's absent etc.), and outsiders, err, outside the school, the whole school building effectively acted as a closed circle, as nobody could've in or out in the middle of the school day without attracing attention. It wasn't that great a movie though.

- Imamura Masahiro's Shijinsou no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Villa of the Dead" 2017) and Magan no Hako no Satsujin ("The Murders In the Box of The Devil Eye", 2019) were fantastic novels that used the supernatural to create insane closed circles. Shijinsou no Satsujinhad the cast locked up in a mountain villa that was under attack by... a sea of zombies, as a zombie outbreak had occured nearby. The novel will see a live-action movie adaptation and a manga adaptation this year by the way, and I am sure it will make its way to the English-language market in some format or another. The sequel had a few villagers creating a closed circle situation on purpose, locking the cast in the village of Magan, because it was prophesied that murders would occur in Magan: in the hopes of keeping themselves safe from the prophesy, they created a closed circle that locked the cast up in Magan.

- In the Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo ("The Young Kindaichi Case Files") story Majutsu Ressha Satsujin Jiken ("The Magic Express Murder Case"), something incredibly funny happens, as pointed out in the parody spin-of series. Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo Gaiden - Hannintachi no Jikenbo ("The Young Kindaichi Case Files Side Story: The Case Files of the Culprits") retells the classic stories from the POV of the culprits, with a comedic tone. At one point, Hajime triumphiantly declares they're facing a closed circle situation and that murderer must've been be one of the persons inside the theater: the castle-like building is surrounded by a moat, but by pure coincidence Hajime had broken the drawbridge earlier, making it impossible for the people inside to leave the theater. The scene in the parody re-telling where the murderer is cursing Hajime all kinds of names in their mind is hilarious because it was Hajime himself who lucked out by creating the closed circle situation he happily talks about in the first place!

But I'd love to hear what your favorite closed circle situations are!

Something old, something new,
something borrowed, something blue

(Bridal rhyme)

One reason I don't often do anthology reviews is because I'm never able to fit all the tags I want to use within the character limit. So if I do an anthology review, it's likely of a relatively short one.

Disclosure: I am a member of the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan. I didn't vote for the stories this year though (or for any year since I became a member.... I read far too few new releases each year...)

The Honkaku Mystery Award is awarded every year to the best mystery novel published in the year as chosen by the members of the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan. One of the qualifications to be eligible for the award is that the story must have been published as an individual, standalone release, which is of course seldom the case with short stories and essays, which are usually first published in magazines or other publications (short story collections are exceptions of course). That is why the top-rated short stories and essay of the year are usually collected in a special anthology edited by the the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan. Until 2018, this annual anthology was titled Best Honkaku Mystery [Year], and contained up to ten different stories, as well as one essay on mystery fiction. However, the format was changed for 2019, and with that, the title too. Honkaku Ou 2019 ("The King of Honkaku 2019") is not only published in the muuuuuch handier, but smaller pocket format, it loses the essay and is also somewhat shorter than the previous releases, but its goal is still the same: to collect the best-rated mystery short stories of the year within one anthology.

Golgotha by Amemura Koustarts with the arrival of a letter by Akihiro's uncle Nakamitsu Eiichi, who says he'll be travelling for a while and he wants Akihiro to baby-sit his house for a while. Akihiro has only just arrived at this house out in a small village, when the phone rings. The man on the other side seems surprised by the fact Akihiro's answering the phone, and asks some questions about who he is and where his uncle is. The man also drops some names that don't ring a bell with Akihiro, but the man says he'll swing by right away. The man has a curious conversation with Akihiro, apparently hinting at something without really pushing the matter, and eventually leaves Akihiro with a present: a mystery novel titled Labyrinth By The Sea by Horinaga Saiun. A note was wedged between the pages, which says "Doorplate". Akihiro learns his uncle's house used to belong to the author Horinaga Saiun and starts digging in the life of the writer, slowly uncovering the trail the mysterious man has been laying out for Akihiro. Golgotha is more a thriller than a puzzle plot mystery: the mysterious visitor keeps feeding Akihiro small hints that seem to point towards something, but it's not like the reader is challenged to solve the puzzle themselves based on these hints. It's an okay thriller story, but perhaps not the story I had expected as the opening story of this anthology.

Gyakuen no Gogo ("Gyaku-en in the Afternoon") is part of Nagaoka Hiroki's 119, a series on firefighters (119 is the emergency number for fire and ambulance services). The "Gyaku-en" in the title refers to the sad happening when children die before their parents and the parents have to arrange for the funerals of their own kids. That is exactly what Yoshikuni Satoshi has to do, as his twenty-four year old son Yuuki died in the line of duty. Both men were firefighters and knew the risk of their profession, but Satoshi couldn't have imagined his son would fall off the fifth floor of a building while attempting to save a woman in her apartment. The story is set at Yuuki's funeral service, where Satoshi tells the people gathered (mostly collegues) about what kind of child Yuuki was and how proud he is of him. However, as Satoshi's speech continues, he starts focusing on the incident that took his son's life, and by the time he's showing pictures of the apartment of the woman who Yuuki failed to save, the reader is fully aware something's wrong with Yuuki's death. A very nicely clewed story, with clues that are hidden very naturally in the text, but which really take on a different meaning once you arrive at the conclusion. The main hint that sets things off is rather mundane if taken fully on its own, but it works surprisingly well as a 'jumpstarter' for the rest of the reveals. I do find it kinda hard to believe that one character would do that in such an impulsive manner, but okay, I guess it was also kinda hinted at.

Tomoi Hitsuji's Biwa no Tane ("Loquat Seeds") stars Tsutabayashi, a young man with violent deaths hiding in his past, who still seeks redemption and hopes to find forgiveness from the people hurt. While Tsutabayashi tries to keep quiet about himself, his rare family name often often rings some bells with people, and he has been forced to quit his job more than a few times because his "colleagues" started to shun or harass him after finding out. That is also the reason Tsutabayashi at first didn't feel like informing the police when he discovered the body of a murdered high school student, a new victim of the serial killer who has been terrorizing the city. He does do his civic duty however, and to his surprise, he finds him invited by the division manager of his job. The man learned about Tsutabayashi's past due to an acquaintance at the police, but does not seem to be planning to ask him to quit his job. His son was a classmate of the victim found by Tsutabayashi, so they have a talk too, but while everything seems to end peacefully here, Tsutabayashi's past ends up exposed to his workplace, and he's forced to quit anyway. It's at this point Tsutabayashi decides he should try solve the murder on the student, as a way of redemption. The story was originally written for an anthology with "twist endings" as its theme, though I have to say the twist ending was kinda telegraphed too obvious. The rest of the story is also rather straightforward: some of the clues are literally "the killer dropped their personal belongings at the scene of the crime", so that's not really surprising. The underlying themes of the story are good though, and perhaps this story is best enjoyed for that.

Toda Yoshinaga's Negaisasa ("Wish Tree") is set at the end of the Edo period and stars a patrolman called Toda Souzaemon. His prey, a notorious swindler, leads Souzaemon to Maruya, one of the better known "establishments" in the entertainment district. The swindler had been using his earnings to spend several nights with Peony, the top girl of Maruya, but of course, he never should've stayed for so long at one place, as that's how Souzaemon managed to catch him. Souzaemon becomes interested in Peony himself, not as an object of lust, but as an adversary in the game of Igo, so he too starts visiting the girl. Maruya itself has been in financial problems lately due to the useless spendings of Tomizou, who married into the family of O-Sen to become master of Maruya. Tomizou became obsessed with Shiroinugami, a deified form of a white dog from England which died near Mt. Fuji and whose deaths Tomizou happened to witness. Since then, Tomizou has been using all his money on dog idols and import from the West like sofas, tables and coffee. O-Sen plans to kill her husband, but wants to make it seem like it was Shiroinugami's curse that did it and sends a fake threatening letter. On Tanabata (July 7), the day the dog was born, her husband conducts a strange dancing ritual to appease Shiroinugami. Souzaemon is asked to watch Tomizou. Tomizou is surrounded on three sides by four-part panels, while Souzaemon sits in front of the open side. Souzaemon doses off slightly due to the long ritual, but then Tomizou suddenly falls down, having been stabbed by a sharp instrument. But how could that have happened: Tomizou was surrounded by the three panels (which are undamaged), and Souzaemon was sitting in front of the open side, and while he was drowsy, he surely would've seen someone carrying a weapon appear right in front of him. The way this impossible murder was committed can be guessed quite easily, but it fits really well with the historical setting of the story, making it quite memorable. It's definitely a good example of how a good background story/setting can elevate a plot idea.

Chibiman to Jumbo ("Chibiman and Jumbo") by Shirai Tomoyuki is the nastiest story of the anthology. Susumu is the poor slave of the three fat speed-eater brothers Mogura, Moguri and Moguru, who in order to maintain their speed-eating empire Munch Land, are willing to torture and kill people on a whim (actually, they enjoy killing and eating them too just for fun). But what they don't need is exposure. Some days ago, Munch Land held a Sea Roach Speed-Eating Contest between Moguru (stage name Jumbo SP) and Chibiman, a female speed-eater. They had to eat a bucket full of sea roaches (with some "Throw-Up Pauses" planned in between). The contest seemed to be going in Chibiman's favor, but then she suddenly started to convulse, and dropped her head in the bucket of sea roaches. To the audience, they lied that Chibiman was just feeling bad, but in fact she had died. The three brothers first agreed to kill off Susumu and make it seem like he had cannabalistic tendencies by stuffing Chibiman's remains in his stomach, but Susumu pleads for his life, saying that Chibiman was clearly poisoned and that the poisoner might be after the brothers too. Susumu is given one day to find out who killed Chibiman, but he has quite a problem to solve: why was only Chibiman's bucket of roaches poisoned, was she really the intended victim and what was the motive for this murder? This is a really weird, distasteful story with gangster speed-eating brothers who are apparently in a habit of killing and eating people, and Susumu himself is hardly a hero, making filthy jokes and kicking women in the stomach so hard they have to throw up too. It makes it really hard to care about any of the characters in this story. The core mystery plot is fairly complex though: the motive for poisoning the sea roaches is really original and probably the best part of the story, but I thought the way Susumu suddenly realizes who the murderer was, was a bit too sudden without much build-up.

Tantei Daihon ("Detective Screenplay") was written by Ooyama Seiichirou as a homage to Abiko Takemaru's Tantei Eiga and follows the same basic idea: Playwright Kasuga Sousuke barely survived a fire in his home, and while he's in the hospital, the members of his theater troupe are left with the little that remains of their upcoming murder play. The policeman who rescued Kasuga from the fire only found a partially burned scenario, so the actors have a start of a murder mystery that happens on a remote island, but not the solution. As they discuss the story, each of the actors comes up with a solution that indicates their own character as the murderer. Madoy's FGO Mystery: The Meihousou Murders I reviewed earlier this year was also clearly inspired by Abiko's novel by the way. It's by far the shortest story in the anthology, but Tantei Daihonis still a surprisingly tightly-plotted story with several fake solutions. The final solution is clever: if you just follow the clues "straight", you're likely to run into a wall, but once you figure out the true meaning of a certain passage in the screenplay, everything is turned upside down, allowing you to arrive at the correct solution. I love this type of whodunnit setups, where you can cross out most of the suspects if you simply carefully follow each clue, but there's one final clue that asks for a bit more imagination in interpretation, which can turn everything around. Short, but satsifying.

To be honest, I have the feeling previous Best Honkaku Mystery anthologies were not only beefier, but also more satisfying as puzzle plot anthologies. Honkaku Ou 2019 in comparison is not only shorter in page count, but fewer of the stories really fitted with my own personal interest: stories like Golgotha and Biwa no Tane are for example thematically strong examples, but seen purely as puzzle plot stories I find them on the whole somewhat disappointing. Nagaoka Hiroki's series on firefighters seems interesting though. As the short story form is still going strong in Japan, I think having these anthologies that collect stories from different magazines is really great and some of the previous Best Honkaku Mystery anthologies I read had some fantastic stories, but the selection for this year was not exactly what I had been expecting.

Original Japanese title(s): 本格ミステリ作家クラブ（編）『本格王2019』: 飴村行「ゴルゴダ」/ 長岡弘樹「逆縁の午後」/ 友井羊「枇杷の種」/ 戸田義長「願い笹」/白井智之「ちびまんとジャンボ」/ 大山誠一郎「探偵台本」

'My favorite is Detective Conan. Especially that girl. The sister of that darker-skinned boy.'

-- 'Sh-she's not his sister, she's his love interest!'

"Satako & Nada"

I suddenly recalled this game when I was writing my review on some Detective Conan episodes last time...

Most of the mystery games I review for this blog are, unsurprisingly, developed in Japan. Lately, many of them have also seen Western releases, or will soon see them: I wasn't that surprised when it was announced WorldEnd Syndrome would go west or a franchise like Danganronpa, but the original announcements of Western releases of for example 428, Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P and Daedalus: The Awakening of Golden Jazz, those I hadn't anticipated. One common point linking these games however is that these are game-original franchises. I have also reviewed games based on an existing manga or anime licenses, and while certain licensed titles (especially action games) tend to come to the west, that's often not the case for mystery adventure games. I doubt the games of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo or Tantei Gakuen Q will ever be officially released outside Japan, nor the entertaining Detective Conan& Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo crossover game, but I know of at least one game based on an extremely popular mystery anime that made it to the West.

As far as I know, the Nintendo Wii title Meitantei Conan - Tsuioku no Mirage ("Detective Conan - Mirage of Remembrance", 2007) is the only Detective Conan game to have been released in Europe, where it was released in 2009 as Case Closed: The Mirapolis Investigation in English and other language market-specific titles like Detektiv Conan: Die Mirapolis-Ermittlung in German (it was never released in the North American region). Kogorou has been invited to attend a pre-opening event of the Mirapolis, an amusement park and adjoining hotel set on an island in the sea. Conan, Ran and the Detective Boys have come along too to attend the ceremony and at the hotel, they also run into Hattori and Kazuha. The Mirapolis is the dream project of the ambitious businessman Kai Tadaki, who is known as the modern-day Oda Nobunaga. During the opening ceremony speech, Conan notices a suspicious woman who is seemingly trying hiding her face with a pair of sunglasses, and later discovers the body of the same woman, killed in the hotel pool. Some suggestive newspaper articles among her belongings suggest she was up to no good. Kai wants to keep things quiet as his amusement park hasn't been opened yet, but when more murders occur and the hotel is cut off from the outside world, it's up to Conan and Hattori, and the player, to solve the murders and apprehend the murderer.

At least, that's if you choose to struggle through this game, as while it's the only Detective Conan to have seen an official release in the West, it's probably also the worst of the mystery adventure games based on Conan, and obviously, most of the Conan games are mystery adventure games. When you first start the game, you might think it looks sorta okay: it uses music from the animated TV show and the original voice actors also do a good job of recreating the familiar atmosphere. The player controls Conan directly, and while the graphics weren't that good back in 2007 either, it was pretty funny to run around (or use Conan's skateboard to roam around) the gigantic Mirapolis hotel, a massive building with twelve floors, an annex building and garden. That is: it's fun until you realize most of the game is spent on wandering around said hotel. 90% of the game, you'll be walking around the hotel to find one of the suspects or one of your allies to talk to in order to collect information and clues. Each time a significant event happens, all these characters end up somewhere else in the hotel, so the character that might've been in the hotel lobby, might suddenly be wandering near the restaurant for no apparent reason. There's almost never a reason for a character to be at their specific location at that specific time, so you're basically playing hide-and-seek each time, trying to find all the relevant characters in a GIGANTIC hotel for that specific act of the story. It's boring, mind-numbing and the fact that the ONLY background music track used here is the Detective Conan Main Theme doesn't help: I love the theme and always look forward to the newest remix when a new movie is released, but it isn't really a track that should be put on repeat forever and ever and ever as you wander around the hotel.

What makes this an awful mystery game however is the fact that the mystery solving aspect of the game has some severe design problems. Like most of the Detective Conan games, you are faced with specific questions and mysteries as you progress through the story ("How was X done?"). The clues and testimonies you collect throughout the game can be used to answer those questions. While Detective Conan games are always also designed for children to play (so never insanely difficult), The Mirapolis Investigation goes even one step further. Or back. For some reason, the player seldom really needs to answer the questions. What trips up most players, is that when for example Conan asks "Why did that woman hide her identity with sunglasses?", the answers you have to pick aren't the clues and testimonies that actually answer the question, you have to pick the clues and testimonies that say basically the same thing as the question, like the remark of a character that "it appears that woman is hiding her face." This happens all the time, where you as the player aren't trying to solve the mysteries, but just reiterating the mysteries and questions asked by the game, by picking the clues and testimonies that say exactly the same thing as the question posed. It's really difficult getting the right answers, exactly you're always one or two steps ahead of what the game wants you to pick, and that's even when you know this is happening. The result is a game that is frustrating to say the least, as first you have to spend most of your time lost in the hotel, hoping to come across the one person you need to provide you with the last clue that allows you to proceed to the next act, and then you're constantly asked to answer questions, where they don't want to hear the actual answer, but some factor of two or three logical steps backwards. The Mirapolis Investigation is always several steps behind and while sure, it's a game for children, allDetective Conan games are, and none of them go throug the logical steps in solving a mystery as slowly as this one.

The story itself isn't particularly interesting either. There's a part where someone is killed inside an ice maze (one of the attractions), which sounds amazing in theory, but err, yeah, it's not really that impressive here. It's the type of story you'd expect from a standard, anime original episode, but nothing that truly impresses. There are also a few minigames you can play in the arcade in the hotel, but they are even worse than the main game. I guess that one interesting thing about this game is that Kai is voiced by Koyama Rikiya: he would become the second voice actor of Mouri Kogorou in the anime, so both the first Kogorou (Kamiya Akira) and the second Kogorou (Koyama Rikiya) co-star in this game. There's also an important secondary character in Moe, a maid working at the hotel who's an aspiring detective. While she doesn't appear in any consequent Detective Conan games as far as I know, she does remind of the college student Gotou Akie, a game-original character who's an aspiring detective appearing in three of the later "music-themed"Detective Conan adventure games: Kako Kara no Prelude (DS/PSP, 2012) and returning in the two 3DS games Marionette Symphony (2013) and Phantom Rhapsody (2014).

If you choose to play the game in English by the way, it defaults to the English dub translation, so Case Closed, Jimmy instead of Shinichi etc. I remember I played the game in German to get the original Japanese dub and names.

Anyway even if you're wanting for a Detective Conan game, I really can't recommend Case Closed: The Mirapolis Investigation. I played it when it was first released in Europe, and again a few years back, but that second playthrough only confirmed my first experience with the game: it's simply a bad adventure game. You can easily skip this one and if you're really curious, I'd say just watch some playthrough on the internet (preferably by someone who knows how to properly edit a Let's Play video and has trimmed all the boring stuff). To close off with a somewhat more positive note: Anyone played a mystery game based on an anime/manga that you really liked and want to mention?

Original Japanese title(s): 『名探偵コナン　追憶の幻想（ミラージュ）』

When I was writing my article on closed circle situations last time, I made special mention of the two novels by Imamura Masahiro: Shijinsou no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Villa of the Dead" 2017) and Magan no Hako no Satsujin ("The Murders In the Box of The Devil Eye", 2019). Both these novels were excellent mystery novels that were perfectly fair as whodunnits, but which were also embracing fantasy and supernatural elements, using them to create unique closed circle situations. Zombies and prophecies which are destined to become true might not exist in our reality, but in Imamura's novels these elements were used to create mystery plots that were highly original, but still at least as fair as anything Carr or Christie ever wrote (in fact, I think Imamura isn't alone in being a writer who is actually capable of playing an even fairer game than those two authors in terms of presenting the clues directly and clearly to the reader). This got me thinking though, as I also often hear people say that supernatural elements or even modern technology cheapens the experience of a mystery story as supposedly, it's not fair to the reader. Followers of this blog will know that is an opinion I completely disagree with, as the supernatural does not, by default, make a mystery story unfair, in the same way realism does not make a mystery story fairer by default.

One of the foundations of fair play in mystery fiction is consistency in the rules that govern the fictional world of a specific story. If a story is set around a highly realistically portrayed Rome during Cicero's time, but the killer used a scoped sniper rifle, that's not fair. I don't expect a knight in medieval times to use a knife that fly on its own into a victim and back. If the story is set in our world, in contemporary times, the murderer shouldn't use a TARDIS to escape a locked room. None of the above would be considered fair. But if a story is set in a fantasy world where people can use magic, the use of magic to kill someone is of course fair game. The point of course is that a) we as the reader must be aware of the existence and properties of the magic used and b) it must be consistent with the world presented. So if we're told there is such a thing as magic in this world, and that there is magic spell which can allow one to conjure a door out of a locked room, then using that magic is fair. Then it's up to the author of the story to properly hint at how the deed was done, and how to make the mystery alluring. The Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorneygames have some terrific examples here. Professor Layton vs Gyakuten Saiban (2012) for example is set in Labyrinthia, a walled city where magic exists, for example magic that can conjure magic out of nowhere or magic that can create portals between walls. But these spells are properly introduced to player in the form of a grimoire, and the spells also have distinct and well-defined properties that tell you how they can be used, in the same sense that you need to pull a trigger to fire a gun, and it's handy to have it loaded too if you want to it to be lethal. Each spell in Professor Layton vs Gyakuten Saiban must be cast in a certain way, and the mysteries in this game revolve around how these spells were cast and used for the murders. In Gyakuten Saiban 6 / Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice (2016), certain characters are spirit mediums, who can physically channel dead spirits in their body, and this too is used in a perfectly fair manner to create original mystery plots. Not only do clearly defined rules make these elements fair, these type of stories usually play the game a lot fairer than "realistic" mystery plots that either rely in obscure trivia (that might be real) or even mysteries that rely more on misdirection, as these type of mysteries usually place all cards on the table exactly because they are more prone to be accused of being unfair.

I myself love mysteries that use supernatural ideas. The zombies in Imamura's Shijinsou no Satsujin were not only an exciting element, they were also used very wisely. The murderer makes use of the zombies more than once, but never does the murderer's knowledge of the zombies come out of nowhere: zombies are a new sight for everyone (characters and reader), but the reader can, just like how the murderer did, deduce the relevant properties of a zombie (don't be bitten) as the story progresses, making it a perfectly fair mystery. Another mystery novel with zombie-like characters is Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead (1989), which takes place in New England in a world where as of late, dead people start rising from their graves again. While here too the exact reasons as to why the living dead exist aren't explained to the reader (nor to the in-universe characters), all the revelant properties that pertain to the core mystery plot are shown to the reader, and if you don't manage to solve the puzzle presented here, you certainly can't hide behind a "but zombies aren't real" excuse. Technically advanced mysteries are of course also fair game, I think. Asimov's Robot series can't be left unmentioned of course, and especially The Caves of Steel does a great job at presenting a consistent science-fiction world with robots and tube transport, while also being an excellently fair mystery novel that uses its self-defined rules for robots in a clever way.

But I have the idea that many mystery authors and readers alike still struggle with modern technology, let alone with supernatural or science-fiction elements, even if at the core, none of that has a direct link with a mystery being fair or not. I still hardly see mystery stories that do clever things with readily handy consumer technology, even though it's an integral part of our lives. Detective Conan is one of the exceptions and it's even more noticable as it's been running more-or-less non-stop since it started in 1994. More recent stories have seen technology like tablets and cell phones used in clever ways to create mysteries (some of the impossible) and you really can't call them unfair. Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo too has seen some clever use of modern consumer technology: the final story in Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R, Kindaichi Fumi Kidnapping Murder Case (2017) has the police tracking the alibis and movements of several suspects through the GPS records of their smartphones, which allows Hajime to figure out how the trick was done, while 2011's The Game Mansion Murder Case was interesting in the sense that it used a certain piece of consumer technology I myself personally hadn't used before, so I wasn't really familiar with it when I first read the story, but by the time the live-action adaptation of this story came, this element was far more familiar to most readers, I think.

Some also see security cameras as a hurdle for interesting impossible crimes, while a good mystery author can work perfectly with that to create a fair and interesting mystery. Mori Hiroshi's Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider (1996) (drama) is not completely fair in the sense that it does rely on something people not familiar with computers might feel is cheating, but most of the trick behind how the murderer managed to escape an underground room with surveillance cameras aimed at the door and the hallway to the elevator is still quite daring. Kishi Yuusuke's The Glass Hammer too has an interesting angle for an impossible crime involving cameras: the director of a company developing new solutions to nursing care had his head bashed in inside his offices, but the cameras installed in the top floor hallway show nobody entering or leaving the office, while the windows can't be opened either. The only one "capable" of committing the murder was a new nursing robot in his office, but safety protocols and the fact it can't perform very detailed tasks also rule the robot out as the murderer (picture above is from the scale model of the crime scene shown in the drama adaptation). Ooyama Seiichirou's Me no Kabe no Misshitsu in the game Trick X Logic was also a great example of the security camera helping out to create a good impossible crime: we follow all the suspects and the victim during the day and there's a camera that confirms the movements of everyone, but still the murderer managed to kill the victim, and have the victim moved from one room to another, even though none of that is shown on the camera.

Anyway, I'd like to hear some your favorite mystery stories that make good use of their science-fiction, occult, supernatural or fantasy setting that present a good puzzle plot mystery, or even "just" modern technology in a clever way.

Deep into that darkness peering,

long I stood there, wondering, fearing

"The Raven" (Edgar Allan Poe)

You know, I think I'll even manage to sneak in a fourth Toujou Genya review before the end of the year.

Toujou Genya series
1) Majimono no Gotoki Tsuku Mono ("Those Who Bewitch Like The Evil Spirits", 2006)
2) Magatori no Gotoki Imu Mono (2006)
3) Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono ("Those Who Cast A Curse Like The Headless", 2007)
4) Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono ("Those Who Sneer Like The Mountain Fiend", 2008)
5) Himemuro no Gotoki Komoru Mono ("Those Who Stay Inside Like A Sealed Room", 2009)
6) Mizuchi no Gotoki Shizumu Mono ("Those Who Submerge Like The Water Spirit" 2009).
7) Ikidama no Gotoki Daburu Mono ("Those Who Turn Double Like The Eidola", 2011)
8) Yuujo no Gotoki Uramu Mono (2012)
9) Haedama no Gotoki Matsuru Mono (2018)

Earlier this year, I reviewed Ikidama no Gotoki Daburu Mono, which was the second short story collection in Mitsuda Shinzou's excellent Toujou Genya series. I apparently never read things in order, so this time, I'll be reviewing the first short story collection featuring the horror author/amateur detective Genya: Himemuro no Gotoki Komoru Mono ("Those Who Stay Inside Like A Sealed Room", 2009). Chronologically though, I'm completely vindicated with this choice: whereas Ikidama no Gotoki Daburu Mono (seventh entry in the series) was set in Genya's younger student days, the four stories collected in Himemuro no Gotoki Komoru Mono (fifth entry) are set after Genya became a professional writer and run parallel with the longer novels in this series (the second story in this collection for example is set just before the second novel). The style of the stories in this book is also slightly different from the second short story collection. In these stories, Genya usually arrives at the scene after everything has already happened and is asked to solve the case by the people involved, as opposed to being on the scene by coincidence, which is what usually happens in both the novels and the stories in the second short story collection. The stories usually therefore start a bit slow, focusing more on exposition and the horror elements of the plot, with Genya usually only appearing very late in the story. That said though, this is definitely a Toujou Genya book, so expect impossible crimes, deep insights into yokai and other supernatural folklore, many false solutions, and a nice touch of horror.

Kubikiri no Gotoki Saku Mono ("Those Who Cut Like The Cut-Throat") is set in Kubikoujichou, a little town in the outskirts of Tokyo where many former Kazoku (aristocracy) live. One year earlier, the peace in town was disturbed by a series of murders on women, who all had their throats slit by some mysterious figure. The murders all happened in a cul-de-sac alley between the manors of the Kote and Azumime families, with a small shrine at the end of the alley. Considering the social position of the people here, there was little gossiping among the people living there after the first murder and thus people underestimated the danger, leading to a second, third and even a fourth victim. Some witnesses even stated that there was nobody else in the alley when the murders were committed, as if a ghost had done it. By the time of the third victim already, the police was of course desperate to find the murderer and they had their eyes set on Kote Akitada, the grandson of Kote Akimitsu, who had fought in World War II and returned a broken man, wearing a mask to hide his hideous injuries. When the police confronted him, he fled and committed suicide in the same alley, slitting his own throat. Many months later, and Akitada's former fiancee Takako has two new admirers, even though she is still mourning for the loss of her life. Kurimori Atsushi is the son of an acquaintance of Takako's father, who is staying as a house guest for the moment, while Kote Akiyoshi is the ne'ver-do-well younger brother of Akitada, who has fallen in love with Takako too. Takako however has not moved on, and is still bringing flowers and mourning the death of Akitada and the other four women in the alley each week. At first Akiyoshi tried to accost Takako during her visits there, but after some commotion involving the triangle of Takako - Akiyoshi and Atsushi, they agreed Takako would be left alone when in the alley. However, this didn't last too long. One day, Takako goes inside the alley, soon followed by Akiyoshi. Suddenly, both Atsushi and Miyo, a young girl living opposite the alley see a mask fly out of the alley, indicating all's not well. When they arrive in the alley, they find Takako dead -- her throat slit. The only other person in the alley is Akiyoshi, who however has no weapon on his body and a police investigation in the neighborhood show he couldn't have thrown into the gardens on the sides of the alley. The only explanation possible seems to be that a ghostly apparition must've done it, the same ghostly apparition Miyo saw several times earlier perhaps, of a white human spirit taking off into the sky from within the alley.

Miyo looks for advice from the famed writer-cum-amateur detective Toujou Genya (well, he's being duped into solving the case by his editor), who of course comes up with a solution to the case. At least, eventually, he does that, because as per series custom, he'll go through a lot of theories and hypotheses, which he rejects himself, before he arrives at the true solution. The explanation of the impossible murder (there was only one other person in the alley, who couldn't have hidden his weapon while someone outside the alley couldn't murder Takako by slitting her throat) is... original and perhaps fair if you'd happen to know about a very specific tradition, but otherwise it's pretty hard to guess, even if Mitsuda tried to leave some other hints behind for the reader. It's an interesting trick to visualize, that's for sure, and it's indeed interesting to know it actually has a real-life basis, but very few readers will be able to make those connections and figure out how it was done in advance. Mitsuda does a great job at proposing plausible solutions, and immediately shooting them down again with again plausible explanations as always. Some readers might find it tiring to keep going through Genya's theories only for him to reject them immediately the following page (as do some characters in the stories), but Genya's method is always used in a way to properly eliminate the other possibilities before arriving at the proper solution, and elements from the fake solutions are always incorporated in the final solution, making these stories excellent study material to show how to properly write a reasoning-based puzzle plot mystery.

Maiyoga no Gotoki Ugoku Mono ("Those Who Move Like the Mayoiga") first introduces the friends Mie and Tomiko, two teenage girls who travel across the region peddling medicine and other wares. As per custom, these young medicine peddlers travel together for their own safety and for example to split the bill when they have to rent a room at an inn, but mind their own business when they're in a village. Two days ago, both the girls found a home each who'd put them up for the night, but Mie's benefactor kept her longer in the home than she had wished (the husband was out to take care of his parents, therefore the wife was happy with Mie's presence in the home). Eventually, the girls agreed that Tomiko would go on ahead early to the next village, Shimomatsu Village, as Mie didn't expect to make it until later that day and that they'd meet the day after in the temple grounds of Oosugi Shrine in Shimomatsu Village. When they finally meet up and talk about the day they spent alone, they realize something very odd. To make your way from Uematsu Village to Shimomatsu Village, one has to pass by a peak characterized by two trees. One of them is called the "Tengu's Seat" by the people in the region. When Tomiko went across the peak in the morning yesterday, she saw nothing on the mountains beyond Tengu's Seat. Mie however said she distinctly saw a decrepit house on the mountains beyond Tengu's Seat. A third traveller then joins the girls' conversation, saying when he crossed the peak in the afternoon (after Mie had passed it), he saw no house there. This reminds the three of the folklore stories of the Mayoiga, a half-decrepit house that can appear out of nowhere and can either bring fortune or misfortune to its visitors.

Eventually a fourth traveller also joins, and the four discuss the various legends of the Mayoiga, as well try to find an explanation to why some of them did see a house beyond Tengu's Seat yesterday, and some didn't. This story is truly unlike any other story in the series, focused mostly on discussing various legends and the disappearance of the house being a fairly 'vague' problem compared to women being killed in locked rooms or crime scenes without footsteps left in the snow, but this is a pretty ingeniously plotted story, with the clews sprinkled across the various elements of the story. The 'disappearing house' trope in mystery fiction often has either a psychological, or a technical solution to it ("they didn't see it" or "it was literally moved/destroyed"), but this is a nice example of a solution that combines both types and especially the psychological aspect of the solution is brilliant, as well as really well hinted at through the bantering of the girls.

Sukima no Gotoki Nozoku Mono ("Those Who Peek Like The Gap Fiend") introduces the reader to Kanou Takako, who has recently started as a teacher at the Goji-Chou Municipal Goji Elementary School. We learn that Takako is the latest in a family line where the women have a tendency to be haunted by the "Gap Fiend", a yokai which manifests itself whenever the Kanou women stare into the gaps/crevices when a door isn't properly shut. Through this opening, the women tend to see things they shouldn't or want to see, and little good has ever come from their powers (in her teens for example, Takako saw how her crush, and her best friend got hooked up in secret). As strictly taught by her grandmother, Takako has learned to always properly close the doors around her, but one night, when Takako's doing the late evening round at school, she inadvertently stares into the darkness of an door ajar again, and sees... the school head being chased by a figure dressed like a demon, both running around. When she snaps out of it, she tries to bring it up to the head guard of the school, and when he makes a call to the school head's home, they learn the man has been killed. As the school is somewhat close to the victim's home, the teachers who were at the school that night are also considered suspects, as everyone besides Takako seems to have a grudge against the now dead school head: the school head had actually beaten one of his pupils to death during the war (a friend of some of Takako's colleagues) and was of course part of the completely crooked, hypernationalistic school system during the war and recently, it appears the victim had actually been sexually abusing his pupils at this new school. Reasons enough for wanting him dead, but it just so happens that Takako can vouch for the alibis of each of her three colleagues and the guard, as she saw them that night at set times as she made her rounds. It should be no surprise that the true murderer is indeed among those with a perfect alibi, but the solution Genya proposes is so silly, it can't be taken seriously. In some contexts, this solution might work, but it seems very questionable in this particular situation.

The title story Himemuro no Gotoki Komoru Mono ("Those Who Stay Inside Like A Sealed Room") starts with the arrival of the mysterious woman Yoshiko at the Imari home. The women suffering from amnesia suddenly appeared in the back garden of the Imaris, bringing back the young Tsukishiro who had gotten lost there. Imari Iwao obviously felt a bond with Yoshiko, as his previous two wives too were called Yoshiko. The first Yoshiko gave birth to his first son Iwao, the second Yoshiko was the mother of Tsukishiro. At first father Iwao was only entertaining Yoshiko as a guest, who seemed to have a talent for kokkuri-san, a type of table-turning. Iwao's two brother-in-laws (brothers of the first and second Yoshiko) immediately suspected this third Yoshiko was nothing more than a charlatan, but despite their precautions during the seance (tying Yoshiko to her seat; the two brother-in-laws holding the writing utensil where kokkuri-san would manifest), the seance turns into a success, with an unknown force moving the writing utensil and writing short, but cohesive answers on paper to the questions asked from the spirits. Eventually, Iwao married the third Yoshiko as his third wife, who started a whole kokkuri-san business inside the two-storied storage of the house. One day, Toujou Genya appears at the house, hoping to learn about the mysterious red box of the Imaris, which is said to kill the women in the family. In fact, it is even believed Iwao's first two wives died because they opened the cursed box. Genya obviously is also interessed in kokkuri-san, but just as they are preparing for the seance, an expression of surprise takes over Yoshiko's face and she quickly shuts the door of the storage and locks herself up inside. While everybody is surprised to learn Yoshiko has thus locked everyone outside, they figure she might have some reason to do so, but the hours pass by and eventually a locksmith is called to open the old, but sturdy door of the storage (all the windows were also locked from the inside). Inside, Genya and husband Iwao find Yoshiko lying dead on the second floor; stabbed in the stomach by a knife which was kept here. As all the windows and door were locked from the inside, it seems no third party could've snuck inside to kill Yoshiko, but there are other clues that indicate this wasn't a suicide, with for example a second knife missing from the crime scene. Genya has to figure out how this death occured in this sealed storage, and why Yoshiko looked so surprised moments before she locked herself in.

By far the longest story of the whole collection: I think it's almost as long as the previous three stories together (it takes up about half of the book). Genya is confronted with two problems: how was the original kokkuri-san seance done, and how and more importantly, why did Yoshiko die in a locked storage? The seance itself is fairly easily debunked, though it has to be said that Genya never states Yoshiko was a fraud: he only points out to the possibility it could have been done in a certain way. Supernatural elements are not explicitly denied in this series and we often get hints that there are truly yokai, ghosts and fiends active in this world: they just aren't related to the murders at hand. The death of Yoshiko is probably not exactly what most readers would expect from it. Genya actually goes through the trouble of doing a locked room lecture (ha!) to examine all the ways in which their current situation can apply to the known variants and he at the end realizes it's none of the above, but his explanation is not really different from one of the formerly named variants. The how of the locked room mystery is infinitely less interesting than the why though. The explanation of why Yoshiko suddenly looked surprised coupled with how the rest of the story unfolded is not only emotionally impressive, it's really well-hinted at through the psychology and actions of the other characters. There might be few direct clues to the solution of this case, and it's really long, but the core is definitely impressive. Genya also throws around with false solutions like they're nothing, but again, they are necessary steps to arrive at the true solution.

Himemuro no Gotoki Komoru Mono is far from a dud, but perhaps the least interesting in the Toujou Genya series I've read until now. That says more about the exceptionally high quality of the series in general than something about this particular book though. The stories here are fairly good, and some really well-plotted with multiple (false) solutions, really sly clewing and even some surprising motives, but the other short story collection is definitely better. Had this been my first step into the series, I'd probably have been far more enthusiastic due to its tone and the depth of how the mystery plots are structured, but having read a lot more of this series I'd say it's an entertaining, if perhaps somewhat unbalanced book (with one very long story accompanied by three shorter stories, one of which somewhat silly).

Original Japanese title(s): 三津田信三『密室の如き籠るもの』:「首切の如き裂くもの」/「迷家の如き動くもの」/「隙魔の如き覗くもの」/「密室の如き籠るもの」

Last year, I wrote an article on glasses in mystery fiction, looking at the various ways in which spectacles could be used in a mystery plot. I ended the article with a note that "I doubt this post will turn into a series about all kinds of objects (...)" but now one year later, I think it's about time to write about another object often seen in mystery fiction: clocks, watches and other timepieces.

To first quote myself from the glasses article:

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.

Objects and items are usually created with a certain purpose in mind: sometimes it's for decorative purposes, more often it's for more practical needs, and sometimes it's a bit of both. The primary purpose of clocks, wristwatches and similar objects is of course to tell, or measure time. And time is oh-so-important in mystery fiction. When the investigator is looking for the person whodunnit, they always look at means, motive and opportunity, and opportunity is related to time: who was physically capable of committing the crime, being at a certain spot at a certain time? The alibi in mystery fiction is a concept of time: the proof of being present at certain location at a certain time. But also think of locked room mysteries: it's no coincidence that many of the locked room lectures include categorizations/possible solutions that say that the real time the murder occured is either earlier or later than assumed. Time is an integral part of mystery fiction, and you need clocks to tell time.

The first time you think of when I say clocks in mystery fiction, is probably the image of a damaged wrist or pocket watch, the time stopped at the exact time the time-keeper was broken. The watch of the victim has stopped at 22:00, so he must have been struggling with his murderer then, and broke his watch when he fell on the floor, meaning the murder happened at ten! Of course, no reader of mystery fiction is going to believe this as is. Nowadays, in-universe characters and readers alike are savvy enough to know that the "broken watch" can be easily faked by the murderer to make it seem like the crime was commited at a different time. The notion that clocks indicate the time, but don't actually measure time as independent element is of course the crux of the dilemma. You can measure the outside temperature, and then convert it to different measurement units. Time itself isn't measured by a watch, it does not measure "time" first to convert it to a second/minute/hour scale. A clock just runs at a certain rhythm, allowing us to create a time unit for us to use. So clocks are often used to fake alibis, and often the mystery of course shifts away from "clocks" to "how was the trickery with time" done. That said, clocks can still be an important part of such a mystery story. Let's say a witness saw a certain act happening at a certain time, having checked on their own watch. A trick could be that the murderer managed to changed the time on that watch, making the witness think they saw the act happening then. An excellent example of this idea is Ayukawa Tetsuya's short story Itsutsu no Tokei (The Five Clocks, 1957) where the alibi of a suspect seems iron-clad, as a witness spent the whole evening with the suspect and having checked the time on five different clocks over the course of that evening.

To give another example of clocks fulfilling a role as indicators of time in mystery fiction: the fifth novel in Ayatsuji Yukito's series on Houses is about the Clock House, which includes a wing with a collection of 108 watches. A group of people is locked inside this wing and of course murders happen. Considering the setting of the Clock House, you can safely guess that time has something to do with how the murders were committed, but the trick done here is brilliant, in your sight but oh-so-easy to miss. And it makes great use of the notion of clocks as indicators of time. Norizuki Rintarou's short story Shiramitsubushi no Tokei (Leave No Clock Unturned) goes even further: the protagonist of the story finds themselves in a windowless room with 1440 different running clocks, each indicating a different time down to the minute (12:00, 12:01, 12:02 etc.). Their task: to find the one single clock in the room that is indicating the current time (as they are running!) It seems an impossible task, but Norizuki shows how this puzzle can be solved by pure logic and dedication.

In the above examples, I'm talking about mostly analog clocks, but man, if I were to go into the topic of digital clocks (especially those on security camera footage), I could be here writing all day. I guess that if I were to mention one single example, it'd be Ooyama Seiichirou's Tokeiya Tantei to Download no Alibi, a short story about an alibi of the main suspect being built around the fact he downloaded a certain song that was only available for download for one day, with digital time-stamps and a receipt proving his alibi.

Talking this much about time almost makes you forget that a clock or timepiece is on its own a physical object too. And yep, that also means that you can use a clock in other ways than just read time. A clock can of course be used as a murder weapon for example, though people who have played the videogame Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo - Hoshimitou - Kanashimi no Fukushuuki (The Case Files of Young Kindaichi - Stargazing Isle - The Sad Monsters of Revenge, 1998) will know to be careful with this. In this game, you play the murderer and have to avoid making mistakes or Hajime is instantly on your trail and if you choose to kill that one victim by bashing his head in, it's wiser to use the ornamental duck than the clock which will break and indicate the time of death... Grandfather clocks might be easier to crush a victim under. But there are other uses for clocks as physical objects in mystery fiction. In Yokomizo Seishi's Inugamike no Ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951), some people doubt whether the war-injured Sukekiyo is really Sukekiyo, as his face is covered completely in bandages. One of the characters cleverly has Sukekiyo pick up her pocket watch: his fingerprints are preserved nicely on the glass inside the pocket watch. More 'general' uses for watches in mystery fiction are for example watches as personal items: the scene where Sherlock Holmes deduces about the owner of a certain pocket watch is quite famous. But a culprit for example might have dropped their own watch on the crime scene, or broken it there, leaving pieces of glasses on the floor which they must hide (similar to what I mentioned in the glasses article).

More unique uses of a clock as something else but a time indicator are to be found in for example Detective Conan (where Conan's wearing a stun-gun wristwatch which allows him to shoot a small needle with a strong sedative to knock someone out) or in Death Note, where a watch is revealed to be hiding a certain other object in one of the better known scenes of the series. In these instances, the watch is a disguise for something else. Clocks featured in some Christie novels like, obviously, The Clocks and The Seven Dials Mystery, but I thought they were more props there than actually related to the core plot.

One of the more memorable uses of a clock in mystery fiction is probably the clock as a location. Edogawa Rampo's Yuureitou (The Phantom Tower, 1937) was based on Kuroiwa Ruikou's same-titled Yuureitou (1899-1900), in turn based on A Woman in Grey, a 1898 novel by Alice Muriel Williamson. Part of Rampo's story is set in a creepy clock tower with secret passages etc. This would later inspire a young Miyazaki Hayao (of Studio Ghibli fame) to have the climax of his first animated theatrical feature, Lupin III: The Castle of Caglistro (1979) also set at a clock tower. His climax scene also formed an inspiration for the final scene in Disney's 1989 animated feature The Great Mouse Detective (and in turn also the climax in the Batman: The Animated Series episode The Clock King). While a location might not always be directly connected with the core mystery plot, the clock tower as a setting for a treasure hunt-type story works quite well in my mind.

Anyway, I have written more than enough about clocks in mystery fiction today. I didn't really think too much about the topic, so it's not really going in-depth on all the ways clocks could be used in mystery fiction, but the article should work as an introduction to the topic. My glasses article was more interesting, I personally think, so take a look at that time if you hadn't yet. Anyway, always happy to hear about the examples you might think of regarding the theme of clocks in mystery fiction.

「死体の入れ物といえば、これに勝るものはない」

『ここに死体を捨てないでください！」

"There was nothing better than that to put a dead body in."

"Don't Dump Your Bodies Here Please!"

Oh, wow, it's been this long since I last read a book in Higashigawa Tokuya's Ikagawashi series? Man, at one time I was reading at least one of these books a year....

Koko ni Shitai wo Sutenaide Kudasai! ("Don't Dump Your Bodies Here Please!" 2009) opens with a a phone call from Kaori's younger sister Haruka, which turned Kaori's day complete upside down. It was still early in the day when an unknown woman suddenly barged into Haruka's apartment, and in her sheer surprise and fear, Haruka accidently stabbed the woman with her fruit knife. Unwisely, Haruka fled her room, leaving the body behind. By the time she had come to her senses, she found herself in another prefecture and called to her sister for help. Figuring that the police isn't likely to believe her younger sister's story, especially as she fled the scene of the crime, Kaori declares she'll take care of everything for her younger sister. Kaori learns her sister did really tell her the truth, as the dead body is still lying in Haruka's kitchen. Going through the victim's wallet, she learns the victim was called Yamada Keiko, a woman who had no connections whatsover to Haruka. Kaori decides she needs to move the body away from Haruka's room, and dupes the young man Tetsuo into helping her. Tetsuo drives a truck collecting large recyclable trash, and they decide to use the old contrabass case he collected to hide Keiko's body in. They drive off in Keiko's car, and after wandering around the edges of town to find a place to dump the body, they decide to drive the car, with Keiko inside, into the allegedly bottomless Moon Crescent Lake on Bonkura Mountain outside Ikagawashi City. It's only after they've sunk the car the two realize they're now stuck on the mountain without a car and after a long, long time of being lost, they find refuge in an inn with hot springs on the mountain. What should've been the end of a long night however is just the beginning, as it just so happens a certain private detective, his asssistant and their landlord have also arrived at the same inn, as they are looking for a client who never showed up for her appointment: a certain Yamada Keiko.

Like I said, I read a lot of the Ikagawashi series in the earlier days of this blog, but my last review related to this series dates from 2014, when I reviewed the TV drama Watashi no Kirai na Tantei ("The Detective I Don't Like"), based on the books of this series. Like most of Higashigawa Tokuya's series, the Ikagawashi series is a humorous detective series, which combines snappy dialogues and slapstick comedy with proper puzzle mystery plots. This series is particularly unique in that it basically has no fixed main detective character, and the series is therefore titled after the city where these cases take place. The overly self-confident private detective Ukai Morio, his slow-witted assistant Ryuuhei and their landlord Akemi (who doesn't like poking around as a detective, but simply needs to make sure Ukai pays his rent) are often at the center of things, but usually Inspectors Sunagawa and Shiki also end up as focus characters, and any of these characters is able to solve (part of) the mystery at hand.

Koko ni Shitai wo Sutenaide Kudasai! too has three perspectives for the reader. First we have Kaori and Tetsuo, who dumped the body and are then treated to several surprises at the inn. First they find that a weird middle-aged man (Ukai Morio) is asking around about Yamada Keiko, and with time, Kaori and Tetsuo even start to suspect Ukai, Ryuuhei and Akemi killed the woman in Haruka's room, not knowing that at the exact same time Ukai and Akemi arrive at the conclusion that Kaori and Tetsuo must've done killed their client who never showed up! And then there's the police, who have their own suspicions too. A lot of the comedy is derived from seeing the same situation from various perspectives, but that's of course also the way the reader will eventually solve the puzzle. Several other incidents occur in this novel besides the mysterous death of Yamada Keiko: the following day, the owner of the inn they're all staying is found dead, ostenstibly drowned after he fell into the river during a midnight fishing session. There are also suspicions of foul play, but it seems that most of the viable suspects have a perfect alibi, as they were watching a live soccer game of the national team together, making it impossible for most of them to go all the way to the man's fishing spot and back in time. Kaori and Tetsuo are also confronted with another surprise: they happen to come to Moon Crescent Lake the following day again, but not only learn it isn't even remotely 'bottomless', they are unable to find the car they dumped despite the super clean and clear water of the lake! But why did somebody remove the car with Keiko's body from the lake and how?

Koko ni Shitai wo Sutenaide Kudasai! keeps the reader from start to finish entertained by juggling between these various characters and showing everything from various perspectives, and this structure definitely helps out the underlying mystery plot, as it'd be a bit simple if left on its own. Some of the elements are somewhat easy to guess, for example the matter what Yamada Keiko was doing in Haruka's apartment anyway, though the death of the owner of the inn, and the disappearance of the dumped car are linked in an interesting manner with a somewhat original solution, though I do have trouble imagining how practical this trick would actually be. There are some neat, but obvious clues left here and there and overall, this is a very fair mystery novel that isn't too hard and can be quite satisyfying to read.

Oh, and a small note, but don't you just hate it when they suddenly change the style of covers suddenly? The earlier pocket releases of this series featured a very different style, but at some point they changed it to have these comic characters, and republished the older novels too with the new covers. The thing is: I think these new covers are really fun. So now I have the four older pockets in the old style, and only this novel in the new but better style...

Koko ni Shitai wo Sutenaide Kudasai! is also the last novel in the series for the moment by the way. It is followed by three short story collections, but I am not sure when I'm going to read those books. Parts of them were already used for the drama adaptation, so I am already familiar with almost half of them. Koko ni Shitai wo Sutenaide Kudasai!for me however was a safe, familiar return to a place I know well. It's perhaps not the best novel in this series (it isn't), but it's a consistent and funny mystery novel that does everything you'd expect from a novel in this series.

Original Japanese title(s): 東川篤哉『ここに死体を捨てないでください！』

Movie Madness

番外編： A Smart Dummy in the Tent

The Hidden Inheritance

Just Bourbon

The Wild Brood

Alice’s Evidence

Scissor Man

Famous Mistakes

Once Upon a Crime

The Triple Hoax

Till Death Do Us Part

Strike-Out Scare

The Twin Dilemma

Le Cercle rouge

Update on Crime

The Great Hotel Murder

Seeing is Believing

Gates of Gloom

The Clocks

The Vanishing Game