『死者からの伝言をどうぞ』

"Slechts even flitste het door hem heen, dat het geen wijkmoord leek te worden: en dan nog wel in de wijk, waar hij zoveel jaren van zijn jeugd had doorgebracht en na zijn trouwen opnieuw was gaan wonen: Overschie. Dat de moord op de rijksweg was gepleegd, scheen die mogelijkheid al uit te sluiten. Want de weg liep wel dwars door Overschie, maar bleef er tegelijkertijd... buiten. Wat op de weg gebeurde hoorde bij het doorgaande verkeer en maakte van het bestaan in de wijk geen deel uit" 

"Puur geheim op rijksweg 13"

"For a second, it flashed through his mind that this probably wouldn't become a neighbourhood murder. And this was the neighbourhood he had spent many years of youth in and had come to live in after his marriage: Overschie. The fact the murder had been commited on the highway seemed to eliminate that possibility. The road did run through Overschie, but was also... outside it. What happened on the road, was part of the ongoing traffic and not part of the neighbourhood"

"Pure Secret on Highway 13"

 
Still waiting for Japanese books. Still waiting.

Oh, and a happy Reichenbach Falls day! 

We were presented with a classic whodunnit and a locked room murder problem in Cor Docter's first two mystery novels and the final entry in his topographical mystery series, Rein geheim op rijksweg 13 ("Pure Secret on Highway 13"), brings us a dying message, written in red paint and written on the inside of a van parked on the emergency lane of highway 13. The accompanying dead body (that's what makes it a dying message) was found by two thieves who wanted to steal parts from the van, but that plan kinda blew up, with a murder and all. But there are plenty of clues to follow for the police, and with events like a woman falling from a building, a suspicious old man popping up here and there and the escape of a high-profile convict from prison seemingly related to the dead guy in the van, commisioner Vissering has lots to do, and he isn't even sure whether he'll be free for Christmas in a few days!

Rein geheim op rijksweg 13 has similar the same problems to Koude vrouw in Kralingen, but it's a bit more balanced, making it the better of the two. Both novels are a bit disorienting halfway through their stories, because Docter keeps on moving the plot, feeding the reader (and the police) more events and revelations that might or might not be related to the main murder. Sure, an occasional red herring is welcome, but with these two novels the development of the plots felt a bit too arbitrary. Like I said in the Koude vrouw review, at times it feels like Docter is just padding out the plot to fill pages. It's entertaining padding, that I will admit, but if you think about it too much, you'll see that sometimes the way one part of the story connects to another is a bit uneven.

Overall though, Rein geheim op rijksweg 13 is a very entertaining story. The opening pages are captivating, being a narration of how the two thieves stumble upon the body. Already in this part Vissering comes up with some great logical deductions that just ooze Queen-spirit (and the book is about a dying message!). The conclusion is no less impressive, as one might have expected considering the previous two novels.

One of my favourite parts of the series on a whole are the way commisioner Vissering and his subordinate Grijphand work: every now and then one tells the other his theory, with the other acting as the Devil's Advocate. Deductions thus develop through discussion, not unlike the way it's done in the Gyakuten game series or the Revoir series. I personally enjoy this a lot, as ever-changing deductions in the realm of the imagination are at least as fun to read as actual developments in real investigations, in the real world. I felt this element at his best in this last part of the series.

Cor Docter's little series on Rotterdam has been fun though and it's a pity the books aren't available in any other language. But then again, that can be said of most of the books I discuss here... Oh, and yes, this review is a bit shorter than usual, but that's because I mentioned the most interesting points about the series on a whole and such in the earlier reviewy already (leaving next to nothing for this review!).

Original Dutch title(s): Cor Docter, Rein geheim op Rijksweg 13

『赤い部屋』

"Ik geloof niet aan een inspiratie, die zomaar komt. Niet veel mensen hebben Edison goed begrepen, toen hij zei, dat uitvinden 99 procent transpiratie en een procent inspiratie was. Hij bedoelde er mee te zeggen dat je dat ene onmisbare procentje alleen maar kon krijgen, als je voortdurend met een zaak bezig was en je er in verdiepte. Nooit kwam dat ene procentje eerst. Maar de mensen willen graag aan dat soort dingen geloven. Daardoor kreeg je zo'n verhaal als van Archimedes, die in het bad zat, eureuka riep, en ineens alles wist. Of van Newton, die een appel op z'n hoofd kreeg en meteen de wetten van de zwaartekracht noteerde"

"Koude Vrouw in Kralingen"

"I don't believe in inspiration coming from nowhere. A lot of people misunderstood Edison when he said that inventions come from 99 percent of transpiration and 1 percent of inspiration. What he meant, was that you could only get hold of that necessary one percent if you had been working on the case all the time and had studied it deeply. That one percent won't just fall into your lap. But people just want to believe that. That's why you have that story of Archimedes in bath, shouting out Eureka and suddenly knowing everything. Or that one of Newton, who got an apple on his head and jotted down the laws of gravity instantly"

"A Cold Woman in Kralingen".

I don't mind reading Dutch novels (I really don't!), but I really hope my stacks of Japanese novels will arrive soon here. It's been over a month now, so they should arrive one of these weeks. Then it's back to reviews of mostly Japanese fiction and a translation of a short story once in a while!

Cor Docter's Koude vrouw in Kralingen ("A Cold Woman in Kralingen") is the sequel to Droeve Poedel in Delfshaven and is once again a 'topographical mystery', a detective novel set in a particular region, where the local characteristics, history and culture are to be an integral part of the plot. This time Docter brings the reader to Kralingen and we're not the only ones interested in this part of Rotterdam. The society Precious Kralingen is a club where members gather to talk about the past of Kralingen. At least, that is what they claim to do, because all the lectures they give are nothing but a smokescreen for their real objective, which is... precisely what? The reader doesn't know and the members of Precious Kralingen sure aren't going to tell him. So when a locked room murder happens after one of Precious Kralingen's fake lectures, the members are afraid the police will investigate the exact activities of the club. They decide to blame the victim's son for the murder, but the son makes a run for it and falls out of the window. Convinced they can now present a easy case, complete with victim and murderer, they inform the police, but commisioner Vissering isn't fooled that easy. Especially as this case appears to be connected to another case he has been investigating.

The first half of this novel is great. The members of Precious Kralingen fabricating their solution and trying to force it on the police is similar to the events of Natsuki Shizuko's W no Higeki, or an episode of Columbo. Indeed, the way Vissering in turns slowly manages to find out what really happened at the meeting, by pouncing on the weak points of the members' stories and the psychological weak links of the group, is exactly what our favourite lieutenant liked to do. Here, Koude vrouw in Kralingen is very exciting and the pages fly by as you see the fake solution slowly crumbling.

But the latter half of the novel is weird. And I don't mean the pleasant kind of weird. For example, one part of the puzzle is solved mainly because a guilty party presented himself/herself to the police for no real reason. Well, the book was probably nearing its page limit and Docter had to wrap that subplot up some way, so he summoned a Deux Ex Machina to solve that part of his novel. It really comes out of nowhere and sorta cheats the reader. I am not a big fan of the decalogue and the twenty rules, but heck, when I read an orthodox detective novel, I do want a resolution to the puzzle that is logical and rational. It has to be hinted at in a fair way. You can't have write 150 pages about a problem and basically have someone appear just before the ending saying 'it was me' and have it over with!

The same holds for the locked room mystery, but to a lesser extent. The problem of the locked room isn't even relevant to most part of the story, because the members of Precious Kralingen tried to hide that fact for the police. The solution to the problem is... not implemented well in this novel. I have to admit though, the solution isn't the most elegant one I've seen, and is one of those solutions Edogawa Rampo would have used as one of many, many tricks for his more pulpish novels which only work if you don't think too long about it, but it works and isn't unfair. But, on the other hand, while the solution is thus fair in the sense that it can be done, I am not sure about how fair the presentation was. Here we have a locked room problem which is only discussed briefly at the beginning and the ending of the story and the inspirational 'hint' that led Vissering to the solution works in hindsight, but I really don't think that that is enough to be really fair to the reader. This solution, in my mind, needs one extra hint, one extra stage in the deduction to be fair to the reader. Now we have a solution which is realistic and somewhat original, but presented in a way which won't leave the reader satisfied.

I didn't think Koude Vrouw in Kralingen was as enjoyable as Droeve Poedel in Delfshaven overall, but the great beginning  does make it a read worthwhile for those who can read Dutch. And a review of the final book in the series will be up soon. I already finished reading it, but as always, there's quite a lag between reading and writing.

Original Dutch title(s): Cor Docter, "Koude Vrouw in Kralingen"

『犬のみぞ知る DOG KNOWS』

"Je had van die typische wijkmoorden, met een merkwaardige beslotenheid als in the boeken van John Dickson Carr of bij een treinmoord van Agatha Christie. Dikwijls voelde je bij het begin van het onderzoek de sfeer al aan: die van een bekrompen moord in de enge ruimte van een wijk, en dan moest je daar ook de dader zoeken, of de moorden, waarbij meteen de namen van personen uit andere steden of geheel andere delen van de stad opdoken. Dit leek zo'n gesloten wijk-moord, gebonden aan de onzichtbare wanden van het rayon"

"Droeve Poedel in Delfshaven"

"There are those typical neigbourhood murder cases, with a weird sense of 'closedness' like in those books of John Dickson Carr or a train murder by Agatha Christie. Usually, you'd sense the atmosphere at the start of the investigation: that of a cramped murder in the narrow space of a neighbourhood, where you'd have to find the murderer, or that of those murders, where names of people from different cities or parts of town pop up immediately. This however was one of those closed neighbourhood murders, bound to the invisible walls of the rayon"

"Sad Poodle in Delfshaven"

Because this is a review on a Dutch mystery novel on a blog that is usually mostly on Japanese mystery novels, I predict that this post will have a horrible view count.

A crying poodle with traces of blood in his mouth attracts the attention of the local beat cop, which in turn leads to the discovery of its owner's home. Note that they only discovered the owner's home and not the owner himself, who seems to have disappeared. And probably not voluntary, because there are definite signs that a fight had happened and that blood had been shed. The dog's owner, Vledser, is/was a money lender, which is a fairly dangerous occupation within the world of fictional crime, so commisioner Vissering of the Rotterdam police fears the worse. The only clues? The testimony of the neighbor who overheard some kind of conversation last night and some pages with handdrawn maps left in the room.

'A topographical mystery', is what Cor Docter calls this novel, a detective novel set in a particular region, where the local characteristics, history and culture are to be an integral part of the plot. In Droeve Poedel in Delfshaven for example, this concept comes alive because the story introduces the reader to several places that are related to the local history. I myself know next to nothing of Delfshaven and Rotterdam, so this 'topographical mystery' has a function not unlike the Japanese genre of the travel mystery: mysteries that are set in a particular region with plots strongly related with local folklore/history. In fact, these travel mysteries are usually relatively light on actual, orthodox mystery, but they work a strange mixes between mystery, tourist guides and history books (see also reviews of novels by Nishimura Kyoutarou and Uchida Yasuo). Note that travel mysteries do imply travel, ergo, the detective is usually not at work on home ground. And in a less positive note, travel mysteries also imply fairly easy mysteries of dubious quality. Matsumoto Seichou's Ten to Sen for example features an inspector travelling all over Japan with the local infrastructure playing a big role in the plot and is strictly abstractly seen very close to a travel mystery, but both historically (as it predates the term) as well content-wise, you'd have difficulties finding anyone who would typify as a pure travel mystery.

And as for the contents of Droeve Poedel in Delfshaven, I like it! Readers might have noticed that I don't really read Dutch mysteries, and even then they're set in the Far East (see van Gulik and Aafjes), so it was kinda strange to follow a Dutch policeman investigating a disappearance (which, yes, does turn into murder), but I had fun reading this. Docter has a pleasant way of writing, by which I don't just mean his choice of words, but also in the way he structures the developments of his story: every chapter you're given some new hint, some new events that piques your interest, tempting you into that feeling of 'well, just one more chapter then', until you realize you're at the end of the book already.

The way Vissering works is also one of the more memorable points of the story: he and one of his men Grijphand discuss the case, basically one proposing a deduction while the other acts as the devil's advocate, thus using each other as sounding boards. It works, because different from the Great Detective (TM) a policeman has to work with his colleagues in principle, thus such discussions are what you'd expect. But what makes these discussions good is that Vissering and Grijphand work on an equal status here, with rank playing no role here. It is probably in the big picture just something very small, but it was definitely one of the factors that made this book good for me.

The ending features a nice twist on a familiar trope of the genre, but I especially like the hint Docter left pointing to the solution. So simple, staring you in the face at at least two places, but I had no idea. It was at that moment that I really started to love this book: at first it felt like a Dutch police procedural which was written great (on a linguistic-structural level), and then suddenly every suspect is gathered in one room and Vissering reveals a solution which show this book is definitely part of the Great Tradition.

There are two other books in this series it seems, so I am definitely going after those in the near future. 

Original Dutch title(s): Cor Docter "Droeve Poedel in Delfshaven"