Peril at End House

 迷わずに 瞳信じて 

風のららら…

 「風のラララ」（倉木麻衣）

 

Believing in what I see without any doubts

The wind's lalala...

"The Wind's Lalala" (Kuraki Mai)

Huh, for some reason, I thought I had started on these books much more recently...

Kagami Masayuki made his debut as a mystery author in 1999 with several short stories he wrote for anthologies (collected in 2022 in The Uncollected Works of Masayuki Kagami), but it was in 2002 he published his first full-length novel Sougetsujou no Sangeki ("The Tragedy at the Twin Moon Castle"). He would keep on writing two more novels and a short story collection, all starring the Parisian magistrate Charles Bertrand and his nephew and chronicler Patrick Smith in stories strongly inspired by John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin series. Kagami however would pass away suddenly in 2013 in his early fifties. I read Sougetsujou no Sangeki about two years ago and found it a highly entertaining locked room mystery in the tradition of Carr and since then, I have been working my through the (short) bibliography of Kagami, though it took a bit time as the books that were published during his life are only available physically at the moment, and a few of them usually only trade owners for a price I found way too high (as in, some were usually put on offer somewhere between 50 and 100 euro, or even more). So it has been a game of patience for me, keeping an eye on offers and trying to snatch them up if they were finally offered for reasonable prices.

And that is why it took me a while to finally get my hands on Kaze Hatsuru Yakata no Satsujin ("The Murders at Wind's End House" 2006), the third and last novel written by Kagami. But now I have finally read it! The book is set after the mammoth Kangokutou ("Prison Island"), the approx. 1200 page adventure where Patrick Smith became acquainted with Mary Kaley, a historian. Their relation has been great, which is why she wants Pat to come along as emotional support when she receives word her grandmother, Ingrid Kaley, has passed away. Ingrid Kaley was the widow of Christopher Kaley, the head of Union Mining Ltd., one of the financial powerhouses in the United Kingdom. She ran the company after Christopher passed away, and succesfully too. She herself however never had children, while at one time Christopher had a mistress Ivonne, who gave birth to triplets. Infuriated by her husband's infidelity, but also recognizing how Ivonne could never support three girls all by her own, she insisted Ivonne and the girls come live at their manor in Northern Ireland. Wind's End House is located on a cliff near Giant's Causeway and got its name because all kinds of air currents somehow make their way to that cliff, making it constantly windy. Ingrid turned out to be very caring of the sisters Claudia, Regan and Margaret, while Ivonne, grateful to Ingrid, ran the household for her. However, tragedy struck when the triplets were around five. One day, the gardener saw Ivonne enter the large hedge maze in the garden. Some time later, Claudia too entered the maze, in search of her mother. When much later Ingrid realizes both Ivonne and Claudia are gone, she goes looking for them in the maze together with the gardener: on the ground, which was still wet due to earlier rain, they could make out two sets of footprints making their way to the center of the maze, where there's a small gazebo. But when Ingrid and the gardener arrive there, they find a horrible scene: Ivonne is lying dead on the ground, her throat having been slit open. Young Claudia too lies on the floor, though she turns out to have only lost her consciousness. The police never could figure out who Ivonne was killed, as there were no other footprints on the ground, and there is no other way to make it through the maze.

Many years later, and the triplets have grown into beautiful women with their own families, but they have completely gotten estranged from Ingrid, who officially adopted them after Ivonne's death, but for some reason she started treating the girls differently from before their mother's death, and that relation never improved. There is also a lot of rivalry between the three sisters, who all have one son and one daughter, though Claudia's daughter Mary is adopted, as she was the daughter of a friend who passed away. While Mary could get along with her brother William and the introverted Patricia, her other cousins Cordelia, Stephen and David were outright bullying her, which was the reason Mary left the house to study when she became an adult and never returned. The will of Ingrid however stipulates all living Kaley family members must be present, so Mary finds herself forced to return home, but she brings Patrick along, introducing him as her fiance. While William and Patricia seem nice enough to Mary and Patrick, the latter can't help notice the other three cousins are exactly as Mary had described them. The will is read immediately upon Mary's return. But while Claudia, Regan and Margaret expected Union Mining Ltd. to be split evenly among the three sisters, the will read by the solicitor is more than baffling: Union Mining Ltd. is to be split between the two families who will get married first: whoever of William, Mary, Stephen, Cordelia, David and Patricia get married together first, will inherit the company, leaving the last family with nothing. Furthermore, in case of death or no marriages within the first three months of the reading of the will, the company will pass on toa certain Peter Graven or his living offspring. While the cousins have never heard of Peter, their mothers were petrified when they heard the name dropped, though they refuse to explain who he is. The mothers quickly call their own family meetings, all with the same message: get married to one of your cousins, as soon as possible. Claudia forbids Mary to marry Patrick, stating they can't be left out of the inheritance. Meanwhile, Mary and Patrick also become worried whether Stephen and David won't force themselves on one of their cousins for a fait accompli. When Stephen insults Mary for the ump teenth time, Patrick challenges him to a boxing match, which he wins convincingly, sending Stephen wimpering that night. However, the following day, an ever bigger surprise awaits everyone: Stephen is found.... hanging from a rope... attached to the top of an old grain silo, about twenty meters high! And something has left a gigantic imprint on the ground near the silo. Almost as if... the giant Finn McCool of Giant's Causeway picked up Stephen and hung him from the silo. Or is there a devious murderer at work here who wants the inheritence for themselves? Patrick and Mary don't have much confidence in the local police solving the case, so they can only hope Pat's uncle Charles Bertrand, the famous Parisian magistrate, can come quickly...

If there's one theme in Kagami's work, it's John Dickson Carr: he has written many straight pastiches of Carr's work (most of them found in The Uncollected Works of Masayuki Kagami), but his Charles Bertrand series too is obviously modelled after the Henri Bencolin series, with the detectives in both series sharing the background story of being French spymasters turned magistrates and having an American narrator. The first book, Sougetsujou no Sangeki, was specifically inspired by Castle Skull, and there are probably many Carr references to notice if you are more of a Carr reader than I am. That is why to my surprise, Kaze Hatsuru Yakata no Satsujin, despite its very British setting of Giant's Causeway, is modelled strongly after Yokomizo Seishi's Inugamike no Ichizoku. We have the family patriarch passing away, leaving three rivalling sisters and their families. We have the reading of the will, where the patriarch says the family business will be left to whoever first gets to marry (in this case, a marriage between cousins). There's the "extra" clause in the will, that stipulates the fortune will got an unfamiliar name or their offspring in case any of the primary candidates will die. And of course, like in Inugamike no Ichizoku, this will and all its crazy conditions sets off a series of horrible deaths, which formally start when Stephen is killed, but might already be announced early, as Mary got a threat letter telling her not to return to Wind's End, and when Patricia picked up Mary and Pat from the station, their car was sabotaged too!

But while the structure of the book follows Inugamike no Ichizoku, the crimes that occur at Wind's End, a large manor with a giant hedge maze in its garden, as well as an old mostly unused silo, are definitely still Kagami's bread and butter of Carr-ish impossible crimes. We have a murder at the center of a hedge maze in the past, where the murderer apparently entered and left the maze without being seen and without leaving any footprints in the soft ground. This is repeated in the present, when Patrick goes meet someone in the maze, but right in front of his eyes, this person shrieks and is found killed with a knife, even though Patrick saw nobody near the victim, and the only footprints leading to the center of the maze belong to the victim, and himself. We also have the death of Stephen, who apparently was hung from the very top of the silo, fifteen, twenty meters up high by the giant Finn McCool and later in the book, there's a death in a bathroom, but no murderer could've approached the third floor bathroom, because a witness had been cleaning out the storeroom and an old sofa had been blocking the corridor. That said, most of the impossible crimes in this book aren't that amazing on their own: the present-day maze murder is comprised out of cliched tricks, the bathroom murder is basically solved the instant a certain piece of evidence is found and the past maze murder is both somewhat unbelievable, and not properly clewed. That leaves the silo murder, which is indeed a rather alluring one: how could anyone hang Stephen from the top of the silo, given... Stephen is an adult male, and the silo is nearly twenty meters high. The giant imprint on the ground next to the silo, resembling a giant feet, seems to suggest the giant neighbor Finn McCool from Giant's Causeway came to pay a visit, but... that is of course not the case. I think most of the readers will have some idea of how it was done, considering it's just such a unique setting which limits the possibilities a lot, though I think Kagami did a good thing at setting up the clewing for this solution, and it is not just the best of all the impossible situations in this book, but simply a very entertaining idea on its own too.

I do think the book is actually both at its best and worst when it comes to playing around with the character relations and their motivations. Like Inugamike no Ichizoku, a lot of the mystery is created because we have a lot of characters with their own agendas, and their actions complicate the matter a lot. I think more than in previous books, Kagami managed to use his large cast of characters to make the mystery more complex. In some cases, this works out really well for this book, but in other cases, you really wonder why some characters did the things they did. One character does something that, okay, I can somewhat understand what you did that before the first death, but why not explain yourself once you see people are dying? The three sisters do things that serve as important events that inform the actions of other characters, but... why would you do that? Right that other event happened? For some reason, the husbands of the three sisters also barely say or do anything in the book, even though they are supposed to be there too as their children are getting murdered and their wives are going crazy from grief... So at times, Kagami succeeds in making the mystery more complex and alluring by playing these characters off each other, but at other times you really don't see why some characters do what they did, even though it has important implications to the plot. I wonder if Kagami had lived to write more books, he would have managed to develop the way in which to use characters to contribute to the mystery, and create more synergy between the characters and his impossible situations.

There were a few other smaller points that did bug me though. Like... did we just gloss over a pretty major crime at the end? And why can't Kagami properly write out English(-sounding) names? I was so convinced that thing with the initials was a hint, but that was just Kagami making a language mistake... Oh, re-reading my own review of the first book, I have to repeat again that despite Kagami writing in the shin honkaku tradition, he really tries to stay very loyal to his mission of writing stories extremely close to what Carr wrote in the 1930, taking the challenge of doing a Golden Age mystery novel on those terms alone, so no narrative trickery, no fantasy or sci-fi background, no focus on comedy, no Late Queen Problems or meta-discussions on the state of honkaku mystery fiction.So despite the book being very much like Inugamike no Ichizoku, you don't hear any snarky remarks about that.

But when Kaze Hatsuru Yakata no Satsujin works, I think it works really well, and overall, I did enjoy the book a lot. After the very grand Kangokutou, I appreciated the somewhat smaller scale of this story (similar to the first book, though a bit longer), and as a Carr and Yokomizo-inspired impossible murder story, it is constructed in a very confident manner, as you'd expect from an author who specialized in writing in the tradition of Carr. I do think that ultimately, I liked the first book the best, with probably the most memorable locked room murder in all of Kagami's writings and while it's the shortest book too, I think it makes the best use of its page length. All three books are worth reading though, especially for Carr fans.

Original Japanese title(s): 加賀美雅之『風果つる館の殺人』