Dead Man's Hand

"It's good to be the king."

"History of the World: Part 1"

To be honest, I really dislike writing posts on books I feel... very indifferent about.

Disclosure: I translated Norizuki Rintarou's short story The Lure of the Green Door.  

A group of four gather in a karaoke box. While at first, this might seem like a normal gathering of friends, we soon learn the four barely know each other. But they have one thing in common: they all have someone they want dead. The four agree to exchange murders: by trading murders, they can secure an alibi for themselves when the person they want dead is murdered by someone else for them. Of course, they will have to commit a different murder in return. By having four people exchanging murders, they hope to fool the police completely, as a simple 1 - 1 trade might be discovered. They use a pack of cards to decide who gets which target and the order in which the murders have to be committed, as well as exchanging basic information about the intended victims with the would-be murderer. And in time, the game starts. Inspector Norizuki gets involved in one of these murders, but the discovery of a playing card leads to his son Rintarou realizing a murder exchange might be hidden beneath the murder. Can he and his father figure out who the murderers are in Norizuki Rintarou's 2011 novel King wo Sagase ("Find the King")?

King wo Sagase is at the moment the latest novel in the Norizuki Rintarou series featuring the same-named Norizuki Rintarou, a mystery novelist who sometimes assists his father Inspector Norizuki in difficult cases, mirroring the Ellery Queen/Inspector Queen dynamic. While a few short story collections followed afterwards, this is still the last long adventure of Rintarou, and also the last book I hadn't read of the series, so I guess I finally caught up, even though the Norizuki Rintarou books are among the first I ever discussed here.

The theme of the book is a murder exchange... which strangely enough a rather common theme in Norizuki's writings. The short story [Libra] Shukumei no Majiwaru Shiro de ("At the Castle where Fates Cross") is about a murder exchange too and is apparently a kind of proto-version of King wo Sagase, while one of the earliest non-series Norizuki's I read, Double Play, also tackles the same theme, While not about a murder exchange, I also have to think about the short story Abekobe no Isho ("The Switched Suicide Notes"), where the wrong suicide notes are found with the wrong people. You do get a sense that Norizuki likes... people swapping things.

This book does take on a different form than most Rintarou stories and the other novels, because it is about a murder exchange, and therefore takes an inverted mystery form in at least the first third/half of the book. We are told about the meeting of the four conspirators right away, and see them dividing the playing cards that decide who will kill who and in what order, after which we follows some of the murderers committing their crimes. When Inspector Norizuki and Rintarou become involved, it doesn't take them too long to start suspecting some kind of exchange is going on based on the clues they found, and I have to say it was this part which does feel a bit rushed, because okay, how swiftly would you usually really connect two or more seemingly unconnected murders by suspecting a murder swap? But I guess the realization has to come at one point for the book to shift gears, as from this point on, we focus more on the Norizukis investigation into the suspected murder exchange.

It's here the book takes a surprising turn. The book starts out as an inverted mystery story and we as the reader already know there really has been a murder exchange, but some things in the criminal plan go wrong, which quickly allows Inspector Norizuki and Rintarou to focus in on the murderers, who of course wish to escape the claws of justice. They come up with a plan to fool the Inspector, and this is basically the main mystery of the book: we already know who the murderers are and the murder exchange, which was the "initial" line of defence, has been exposed, so now they have to come up with a new line of defence using the cards they have been dealt. This becomes a more conventional puzzle, but I wasn't really a big fan of the overall plot, I think. I'm not really sure why. I think part of it is that it feels very much like a puzzle: a lot of the mystery demands of you to remember the real names of the four murderers, their nicknames they use among each other and the cards they were given at the start of the story and at times it really just feels like a sudoku-esque puzzle where you need to determine symbols A/B/C. And after reading other murder exchange stories by Norizuki, I guess some of the surprise of the twist lacked impact, as a lot of it did feel familiar in terms of themes. There is an interesting twist in theory, but it's basically portrayed in a rather cumbersome manner, and after at least two other stories with the same theme, little of King wo Sagase really surprises.

Perhaps someone who hasn't already read Norizuki's other murder exchange stories will enjoy this one better, but for me, King wo Sagase was just too short, with too many elements that feel too familiar to really impress me. In general, I also think the short stories with Rintarou are better as puzzlers, so I guess that this book was fighting an uphill battle with me, but while it's my last Norizuki Rintarou novel for now, it's sadly also probably my least favorite, not because it's actually bad, but having read all the other works in this series, it just doesn't manage to surprise as much, nor does it provide a deductive chain as entertaining as other Rintarou stories do manage to offer. I'm glad I have read all the Rintarou books now though, and I hope new short stories will come!

Original Japanese title(s): 法月綸太郎『キングを探せ」