Three Doors to Death

"That is so, monsieur. I ask of you if you have any knowledge of a man named Li Chang Yen?"

"The Big Four" 

I have to admit... I really love Christie's The Big Four, not despite, but because it's so deliciously silly.

What translated fiction does the translator read? Though I read mostly Japanese mystery fiction, I do occasionally read non-Japanese mystery fiction, and like everyone else, my choices are also limited by the languages I can read. So it is always a relief when mystery stories are translated to a language I can read. The Japanese publisher Hayakawa is one that focuses mostly on translated mystery fiction. One important source for translated short stories is Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine: this magazine originally started as the Japanese version of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but after their licensing deal stopped, they switched over to the current name. Each issue features both serialized stories as well as complete short stories, and the last few years, Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine has been focusing a lot on Chinese-language mystery fiction, even featuring a fixed corner with a new translated story basically each issue. Today, I will be discussing works of two young modern-day authors who have been influenced by Japanese mystery fiction, one known as the Chinese Ellery Queen, and the other as the Chinese King of Locked Rooms, with all stories translated to Japanese by Ai Kousaku.

Shi Chen is a well-known Chinese mystery novelist who is strongly influenced by Japanese shin honkaku mystery fiction and his works have earned him the nickname of the Japanese Ellery Queen. He also runs his own mystery-fiction based book shop in Shanghai. Despite these credentials, his list of translated works in Japan is still criminally short, and none of his novels have made it across the sea, so for now, I'll have to do with short stories. Rinshitaiken wo Shita Onna ("The Woman Who Had A Near-Death Experience") was originally published in 2015 and features Shi Chen's detecting duo who had only debuted that very same year: the mathematician Chen Jue and his Watson, the historian Han Jin. In this story, Han Jin draws his friend's attention to a remarkable article by Professor Guo, who has devoted his life to researching near-death experiences. A few days ago, he manages to interview a woman who had been announced dead, but could be resurrected 40 minutes later. The woman does have vague memories of what happened after she was supposed to have died: some of the motifs are quite familiar and are mentioned in many such experiences, like the sensation of passing through a tunnel or across a river, but the woman had even more memories. The moment Chen Jue reads this account however, he suspects a hidden murder might have been committed, and he starts contacting the right people in a hurry to locate the hospital where the woman is staying. What in the woman's near-death account set off the alarms in Chen Jue's head, and what is the murder he fears may have happened?

A very interesting set-up for the story! The story is fairly short, and can be divided roughly in two segments: the first third or so, we deal with what feels a bit like some of the second period novels by Shimada Souji featuring Mitarai Kiyoshi, where the reader is first confronted with a fantastical experience or dream, which is then analyzed and shown d to be some kind of metaphore for an acual event. In this case, the generally "stereotypical" account of how the woman started passing to the other side contained clues that allowed Chen Jue to guess something's not completely all right. While the clue are there, one could argue that Chen Jue's reaction to those clues was a bit strong, as this only works if you can assume that every single detail is absolutely correct, while I wouldn't even trust my own memories of certain details even if I have been completely awake and focusing at the time, let alone if I was near death! The second half has Chen Jue examine the murder, for of course, he was indeed right and the near-death account did lead them to the discovery of a corpse. This then leads to a Ellery Queen-style second half, where we also discover only a select group of people could have committed the murder on the victim, and you're asked to deduce who it is by eliminating the other suspects based on the known facts. This process is done fairly well, though I do really think one certain condition that allows the reader to cross off some suspects, feels a bit unconvincing. While I do like the deduction process introduced here, it's just that... surely there would have been a better alternative to introduce a similar line of reasoning without that object? Because it just seems so unconvincing to me there would be no better/easier/more convenient substitute for that object, and it makes this part of the deduction process feel very artificial, even though I do like the general idea of what Shi Chen was going for. But yes, this is definitely the type of story I would expect from someone with the nickname of the Chinese Ellery Queen, and it does make me very interested to see how he'd a full-length novel!

Sun Qinwen is an author I have discussed in the past already, as I reviewed his first novel Lindongzhiguan ("Coffins in the Cold Winter") last year. He in turn is known as the Chinese king of locked room mysteries and a successor to John Dickson Carr. While his first novel was published under his own full name, he had already published many short stories before that novel under the name Jiding. Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine has featured three of the Jiding stories these last few years, two of them I'll be discussing now. Both stories star Wang Jiayi, a police detective, as the narrator. He's a fairly intelligent detective himself, but he also finds the university student Xia Shi to be more than a match for him: he met the young woman at a party for fans of mystery fiction and has since become smitten with her, though at the moment, they are just friends. In Namida wo Noseta Dangan ("A Tearful Bullet"), Wang Jiayi is visited by a woman whose father recently passed away, as she found a strange entry in her father's diary which seems to indicate somewhere a crime has happened. The diary entry is dated just before his death, and her father, who worked for a renovation company, writes about he and a new part-timer had been sent to a manor to renovate a basement room which had been locked for many years, with the key missing. They managed to break the door open... only to find the skeleton of a man lying in the room, with the basement key next to them. The hole in the skull, and the bullet they find in the wall seems to suggest this man had been shot. But the door was locked from the inside: so it couldn't have been a murder (for then where did the murderer go), nor a suicide (for then where is the pistol?). The owner of the house however wanted to hush things up, and offered the father and the part-timer a lot of money to keep quiet and to seal the basement again. As a murder might have taken place, Wang Jiayi starts investigating and finds out where the father had been working before his death. The owner of the mansion however of course denies a body was found in his basement, stating they just sealed the basement because the damp environment caused by the nearby lake made it not suitable for use anymore. Wang Jiayi suspects he lies, but then this man dies too: he had been fishing and was seen by a witness to enter a hut alone and he was about to prepare his fish when he suddenly keeled over in his kitchen and was dead. Because nobody was seen to have entered the hut besides the victim, it seems this was just an accident, but is that truly the case?

This story deals with two locked room situations, one in the past (the basement) and one in the present (the house owner). I do have to admit I find it disappointing the two locked rooms aren't really connected thematically: while there is something that connects the two situations, it's not like one side works as a strong clue/misdirection for the other per se, so they feel very disjointed. The present-day murder is more of a joke solution I think, it's basically unhinted and then the solution is sprung upon the reader, and it's not a really exciting solution in any way. The past death has a rather surprising solution I liked a lot: the basic idea is a bit simple, but original, and what I like best is how Sun clewed the solution here. There is another layer of mystery that only becomes apparent later in the story, but I wasn't really a fan of that; it works better in the original Chinese I can tell, but in the Japanese translation, it's difficult to convey the exact same idea without feeling a bit unnatural simply due to cultural differences.

Konchuu Koushukei Shikkounin ("The Insect Hangman") has Wang Jiayi investigating the mysterious death of an insect researcher, while also dealing with the fact Xia Shi seems to have attracted another suitor in the form of an old classmate. Wang Jiayi and Xia Shi are hanging out at a McDonalds when Wang is approached by his old classmate whom he hasn't seen in years. The man is working at an insect research facility, and he invites the two to visit. They accept, but they find the director is missing. They start looking for him and arrive at a small storehouse, which is being used as a temporary place to keep their stag beetles as they are moving. They try to open the door, but find the door has been taped tight from inside. When they finally brreak the seal open, they find the director dead inside, with the window and the door all sealed with duct tape, and the glass cases where the stag beetles were kept all thrown on the floor, broken into pieces. The director himself is found sitting with his back against the wall opposite the door, having apparently strangled himself by tying a rope around his neck, fixing the rope against the wall, and then having his body weight do the rest. But why would the director, who loved insects more than anything else, have broken all the cases with the stag beetles?

The story starts with a reference to Carr's He Wouldn't Kill Patience, the famous taped locked room mystery and the tale also has a very short "lecture" on the taped locked room, so you can easily tell what the theme is of the story. As you might guess, this locked room mystery revolves mostly around a mechanical trick that allowed the murderer to kill the director in a room of which all exits are taped tight. The solution is a variation on a solution I had already encountered before, using a similar mechanic, but the 'props' used to create the taped situation are different, and in that way, the story feels original enough. One could argue it is questionable how practical this trick would truly be if executed, but the idea makes enough of an impact to be memorable I think. What I really liked however was that Sun didn't decide to only focus on the howdunnit: the threads he added to support the whodunnit and whydunnit of the mystery do really help make this story feel much grander, despite it being a relatively short story.

I had already read a novel by Sun Qinwen, and while I don't think the short stories I discussed today were better than the novel, they were definitely interesting enough to keep me interested in his output, so I will be sure to read more of them if more of his work becomes available in a language I can read. Shi Chen was the new experience for me, and his story was certainly enough to make me interested in trying out more of his work, as you can recognize the influence of both Ellery Queen, and modern Japanese shin honkaku authors in this short story and I am very curious to see how his longer stories turn out. So I do hope more of both authors will be translated soon!

Original Chinese title(s): 時晨 "濒死的女人 時晨", 文孫沁 "载着眼泪的子弹" , "昆虫絞刑官"

Secret at Mystic Lake

 "Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water"

"Be Water, My Friend"

First one of the new year!

The one thing I do hate about writing about Japanese translations of Chinese mystery novels is how I always have to look up the readings of each single name in Chinese and how to transliterate them into pinyin, as obviously, in the Japanese translations, they usually simply use the original Chinese characters and transliterate into Japanese pronouncations. It's not a lot of work, but I always have to get that out of the way before I can actually get started on the post...

In the suburbs of Shanghai lies the manor of the Lu family. Their spacious house used to be a state library and is located inside a former park, with a large lake next to the house. While the park and the lake had originally been left open the public when the former family patriarch bought everything, they eventually closed it off. After the patriarch's death, his widow (and second wife) Wu Miao remained the de-facto head of the clan. The sons Lu Ren (son of the first wife) and Lu Yi and Lu Li went their own directions, and still live in the same house with their own families too. Lu Ren in particular was well-known in society, as he was a philanthropist acting as the representative of the Lu family. One chilly winter morning, Lu Ren's grandson found a strange object near the semi-basement storehouse outside. When his father Lu Wenlong realizes his son was playing with an umbilical cord, he immediately goes to the storehouse. However, the entrance to the semi-basement storehouse is below ground level, and the stairs that lead down have been flooded due to the heavy rain the last couple of days. As the stairs lead two meters down and there's tonnes of water blocking the door right now, it has been impossible to open the door the last two days. But wanting to know what is going on, Lu Wenlong borrows a water pump to get all the water away, and when he enters the storehouse, he finds his father lying dead on the dry floor! He's been suffocated, and his mobile phone lies broken on the floor. As you can't suffocate yourself, it's obvious this is a murder, but the odd thing is that Lu Ren's estimated time of death is just one day earlier, so after the stairs had been flooded. Even supposing Lu Ren had gone inside the storehouse himself before the door was blocked by rain water, how did the murderer then get inside to kill Lu Ren, and get outside again? 

When later another member of the Lu clan is murdered in a locked room and another umbilical cord is found, the voice actress Zhongke, who rents a room in the Lu house, becomes terrified and wants to leave Shanghai and quit her job, but that fortunately for her, she is also personally chosen by the popular manga artist Anzhen to become the main voice actress in the upcoming animated adaptation of his most popular work. Anzhen also happens to work for the police as a sketch artist, and has in the past helped solve crimes. Not wanting to lose her, Anzhen declares he will solve the series of murders in the Lu household to relieve Zhongke of her fears. But will it really be so easy to solve this mystery in Sun Qinwen's Lindongzhiguan (2018)?

Sun Qinwen is a Chinese mystery novelist born in Shanghai, who is known as the Chinese king of the locked room mystery. Originally debuting in 2008 with a short story, he continued specializing in the short story format, publishing with the pen name Jiding. It wouldn't be until 2018 when he would publish his first full-length novel with Lindongzhiguan, under his real name Sun Qinwen. I had heard his name mentioned before in the comments of this blog, so I had been interested in his work for some time, but his work was not available in a language I could read (except for one short story translated to Japanese, but only via Kindle). Fortunately, 2023 finally brought us a Japanese translation of this novel: Gentou no Hitsugi ("Coffins in the Cold Winter") was translated by Ai Kousaku, and marks the first time Sun Qinwen got a major release in Japan. And I sure hope more follows.

One thing I immediately noticed was that this was a very straightforward mystery novel, with "obvious" mysteries in the form of locked room murders. You might think this is a strange thing to notice, considering everything I read for this blog is... mystery. However, the last few years, I have read a handful of mystery novels that were originally written in the Chinese language (usually as Japanese translations), and oddly enough, few of them were actually clasically-structured mystery novels. Part of it might be because I had read a few of the Taiwanese Soji Shimada Mystery Award winners: those novels played more with mysteries that were built on intertwining narratives/consciousness/memories of events. That is a reflection of Shimada Souji's own preference, I suppose, as he acts as the final judge for that award and he himself too soon moved away from classically structured puzzle plot mysteries and started focusing a lot more on memory/narrative-focused mysteries. Lu Qiucha's Yuan Nian Chun Zhi Ji was awesome, but very deeply imbedded in classical Chinese philosophy while Chan Ho-Kei's The Borrowed (13.67) was great too, but could differ in tone greatly depending on the story, so Lindongzhiguan in comparison felt very refreshing as a Chinese mystery that really just did nothing but be a classic puzzle plot mystery, focusing on a clear impossible crime. And it was a good one too!

The first murder, in the semi-basement storehouse, is defnitely the most memorable one. The premise of a room that is sealed by water is really cool. And yes, it is a huge design flaw if you have a storehouse to keep food safe so you can survive in times of (natural) crises, but the stairs can get flooded, blocking the door of said storehouse. But anyway, as normal and essential water is for our usual life, it's probably hard to imagine right away how much water is needed to flood a stairs that go two meters down ground level, and the sheer weight that body of water has. But as the storehouse was found dry when Lu Wenlong discovered his father's body, it is also clear the murderer didn't just open the door and let the stairs flood again after committing the murder. The phone that was broken by throwing it on the floor also indicates the murderer had actually been in the storehouse, so how did they get in, and out? The solution could've been hinted at better I think: basically the detectives find something while looking for something else, and that something is a major clue to solving the water locked room. I like the solution though! It is a bit silly, but the right kind of silly because a locked room murder isn't realistic in the first place, and just visualizing it is really funny. Practically speaking, I am not completely sure how feasible this is, but I don't care, this is the kind of imagination I like to see in mystery fiction!

A second murder occuring inside the house, in a bedroom, is relatively simple. Someone is murdered inside their bedroom, while someone else had been sitting in the hallway in front of that room. After a loud cry, the door is unlocked from the inside, and when the witness goes inside the room, they find the victim lying dead beneath the bed, but sees nobody else in the room. The solution is an interesting variation of a trick I have seen somewhere else, but in a completely different context, and used for a completely different purpose. I quite like the idea here, but at the same time, I don't think it works quite well here: the location of a bedroom simply doesn't seem convincing enough for this trick to work, it'd need a different kind of room to really be convincing, I think. I do wonder if Sun Qinwen came upon the idea by reading that one comic I was thinking of, for I do think this is a great example of how to completely transform a trick. Visually, it reminds of that comic, but it leads to a completely different purpose and execution. Like, I can imagine how reading the comic could've jogged Sun's mind to arrive at this different conclusion. 

The third murder is absolutely horrifying when you realize how it was done. Or perhaps, the murder itself is already horrifying, as it involves a decapitated corpse. Outside in the park, next to the lake, were three suspended cabins with glass floors. They were suspended above the lake, to give the feeling of floating above the freezing water and were originally open for rental when the park was still open to the public: most of them were removed after they closed the park, leaving only three for private use. One of these cabins had been dropped into the freezing lake by burning the metal suspension wires with acid. Inside the cabin however, a decapitated man was found. The cabin itself however had been locked with a padlock by someone else, and she swears the victim had been alive and well when she left him there (as part of their SM play), and that she had the key with her all the time. So how could the murderer have gone inside the cabin to murder the victim, and why did they also drop the cabin into the lake? Some of the logistics of this murder seem a bit iffy, but man, I love the main idea of this murder, and specifically, the reason why the victim ended up without his head. Imagining the scene is just terrifying, and incredibly memorable. Again not really a fan of how Sun Qinwen drops hints regarding the howdunnit however, he has cool ideas for locked room murder tricks, but the way he clewes the path to the solution to them often feel like the clues come out of nowhere, or Anzhen asks the police to check something very specific simply because he just happens to think of it, without a real prompt.

The whodunnit aspect becomes more prominent at the end of the book, and it's a mixed bag. Style-wise, Sun Qinwen does seem to follow the Queen school, with a lot of emphasis on deductions surrounding the actions the murderer took at the crime scene, and comparing those conclusions to the pool of suspects. Some of these conclusions are ones we see fairly often in this style of mysteries, so you might already recognize them as "oh, this is going to be used to identify the murderer" as soon as the element is introduced in the story. Not really a big fan of the ones we see more often, though there was a more interesting at the very end, though I like it more for the idea than the actual execution. I think the idea is really cool, but it needed much more robust clewing to feel fair in hindsight. As I read it now, I can kinda see how Sun Qinwen thought he had indicated that clue enough, but even then, it still doesn't feel convincing enough to feel "fair" in hindsight. I also don't think the identity of the murderer works completely. Ultimately, a lot of the plot also depends on luck, especially of having certain characters act in that particular way at that certain time, and the exact dynamics behind some of the locked room murders (the exact things and order the killer did to accomplish the murder) and while I can wave that away one time, each of these murders had a lot of these aspects, so it feels like the plot is constantly giving the murderer lucky brakes just so the mystery could work, rather than the murderer actually planning out an... executable plan with little room for failure. So there is stuff I like when it comes to how the plotting does allow for Queen-like deductions, but not all of it really works, and the identity of the murderer seems to raise a few more questions than answers when it actually comes to the matter of executability.

The book works quite well as an introduction to Sun Qinwen's works by the way. There are some minor references to his other works (thanks, translator's notes!), and we also learn bits and pieces of Anzhen's own past, and how he might be involved in a bigger mystery himself too, it is a great first work to read. The story that ties into the umbilical cords is also pretty awesome, somewhat reminsicent of Mitsuda Shinzou's work in the way it ties into old family ceromonies and things like that, with a touch of horror, though I think it was very underplayed here. It should have been used far more strongly, as it has so much potential!

So on the whole, I did really like Lindongzhiguan. The locked room mysteries shown in this book have exciting elements, which at least do convey to me why Sun Qinwen would be seen as a major locked room murder specialist in China. While I don't think his whodunnit angle in this book works completely, it too has elements that are inspired, so I do hope to read more his work in the future. A short story collection in particular would be very, very welcome!  

Original Chinese title(s): 文孫沁 "凛冬之棺"