Outrageous Fortune

Chance chance

Chance Chance

Catch your dream tonight

 

『Chance』（神谷明）

"Chance"(Kamiya Akira)

This is one of those books I got "started on" like three different times, every time reading the same first few pages again and me only really getting into the right mood the last time, but it went pretty fast once I got past that first part.

Disclosure: I translated Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead.

Mystery novelist Hiwatari Miyabi is one day driving along the highway, when there's an explosion at the nearby nuclear powerplant in Komaura. While he is quite some distance away, he can't help be somewhat worried whether he was affected by the leaking radiation, though he does not have himself checked. Three months later, he finds himself visiting a casino with his editor to discuss his planned book. It is the eleventh of September 2011, and they happen to catch the news of the terrorist attack in the United States while at the casino. There Hiwatari notices a man with a distinctive yin-yang-patterned tie, whom he remembers having seen twice before this week while outside, though he doesn't know him. They watch the yin-yang tie man, who is losing money continuously at the craps table: a little person is throwing the dice, but for some reason this man has managed to throw sixes consistently after each other: the other man keeps betting against that, but the double sixes won't stop coming. Baffled by how the little person could've beaten the odds of throwing so many double sixes one after another, Hiwatari hopes to interview the man, but the latter tells him to try another day. Later that night however, Hiwatari spots the yin-yang tie man again outside the casino building, but at that exact moment, the gigantic neon dice on top of the building break off, dropping straight on top of the man... throwing double sixes. That same night, Hiwatari suddenly loses sight in one of his eyes, which might be connected to him being near the nuclear power plant three months ago. Having lost sight in one eye, Hiwatari becomes desperate, as he needs his eyes for his work, but at the same time, he reflects back on the last few days, and realizes he had been witness to a lot of coincidences, culminating in the death of the yin-yang tie man. But was it really all a coincidence? What is coincidence actually? That is the matter of Yamaguchi Masaya's 2002 novel Kiguu ("Coincidentialea").

In the past, I have reviewed Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken, Dogura Magura and Kyomu he no Kumotsu, which are known as the sandaikisho, or The Three Great Occult Books, which are considered the pinnacle of the anti-mystery genre in Japan. The three books take on the form of a mystery novel, but at the same time show the limits of the genre, often by taking the genre conventions to the extreme or simply using a detective story as a device to go off on tangents. The term Three Great Occult Books is actually a play on the Four Great Classics from Chinese literature, but give another meaning to the word ki: In Chinese, the same word is used in the context of "outstanding", but in this Japanese instance, the word is used in the meaning of "strange", "occult" or "deviant". Oguri Mushitarou's Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken (1934) for example is in fact Philo Vance on crack, being a "detective story" that uses the murders as an excuse to discuss topics including (but not exclusively) occultism, mysticism, criminology, religions, astrology, astronomy, psychology, heraldry, medicine and cryptography. It basically ridicules the concept of solving crimes based on evidence and logic by presenting incredibly farfetched deductions based on obscure trivia and symbolism of said themes. Yumeno Kyuusaku's Dogura Magura (1935) simply removes a sense of reality, as the protagonist might or might not be a mental patient is presented with contradicting documents, records and accounts about a murder case that might or might not have happened. Finally, Nakai Hideo's Kyomu he no Kumotsu (1964) utterly deconstructs the notion of logical reasoning as a means to arrive at the truth, by having a group of people deduce the most fanciful, yet convincing theories about a death that might not even be a murder, and about a series of hypothethical murders that may or may not happen in the future. All because they think serial murders in faction are fun, so they want the tropes of mystery fiction to apply to real world too. Takemoto Kenji's Hako no Naka no Shitsuraku ("Paradise Lost Inside A Box", 1978) is often considered the fourth book in this series, as it builds on the themes of the aforementioned three books, and it would influence a lot of writers in the shin honkaku movement (of whom most at the time of the publication of this book would just not quite have made it to university yet).

Kiguu is, at least going by the blurb on the back of the book, seen as a fifth book in this series, though there is much less consensus in the mystery world about whether this is the fifth great book, or even whether there is a fifth one in the first place. At any rate, whether one considers it the fifth or not is not really relevant: the matter is that this book at the very least does fit the pattern of the previous mentioned four books, being steeped in anti-mystery themes, and thus being a book that takes on the form of a mystery novel, but isn't really one. So if isn't a mystery novel, what is this book about? Well, I assume it's clear by now: it's about coincidences.

Coincidences and mystery fiction don't really mix well. Van Dine says "The culprit must be determined by logical deductions--not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession", Knox too poses "No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right" and for the most part, most readers of puzzle plot mystery, of mystery novels that are solved through logical reasoning, probably don't like the idea of luck in a mystery novel, as luck or a coincidence aren't topics that allow for logical reasoning. But is that really so? That is the question Yamaguchi asks as he takes the reader on a journey riddled with chance, "the forbidden trope" for mystery fiction, and attempts to tell a mystery story solely about coincidence.

We follow Hiwatari Miyabi as he recounts the many coincidences he has experienced lately, from seeing the same man a few times in one week, to people he gets to know having similar names, to dice falling on the same numbers, or small accidents leading to him bumping into the people he wanted to meet that exact moment. He discusses these coincidences with the many people he meets, from the little person to his editor, his roommate Silphy and a fellow patient at the hospital after he had his eye examined. These discussions on coincidence and luck are the meat of this book, and what this book is really about. The concept of coincidence is discussed in many, many forms, and up to great length, ranging from historical views on coincidence, anecdotes about accidents, philosophical views on coincidence, probability mathematics, synchronicity, quantum theory, yin yang philosophy, and so, so so much more. Yamaguchi basically researched the concept of coincidence from various angles, from social sciences like history and philosophy, to the role of coincidence in "hard" scientific fields, and he shows the reader that in this book. Often, this does lead to really captivating subjects to read about, but personally, I do think very often, the discussions went on far too long, which made this book sometimes a bit tiresome to read. I understand it's probably also intentionally done like that to invoke a certain atmosphere for the book, but I personally would have liked a slightly trimmed down version, for I do think the many ways to look at coincidence are really interesting.

As the book progresses, Hiwatari gets involved with an almost cult-esque organization, and "coincidentally", more people involved with this organization die in seemingly freak accidents. But are they really accidents? While Hiwatari gets more and more entranced by the idea of coincidence, he also can't help but suspect something else might be at play here, especially as a few clues he picked up (...by chance) seem to indicate something might behind all of this after all. This culminates in what is essentially a locked room murder, when two people are found dead in a room that is mostly sealed (the door had been cemented tight, but there was a small ventilation on top of the room, and there was a AC unit). Can this locked room mystery be solved with pure logic, or should Hiwatari somehow just consider the deaths a coincidence? Ultimately though, this locked room murder is of course not the crux of the book: it is just a device to talk about coincidences even more. A few logical solutions are proposed to explain the murders, though physical proof can not be produced now at this stage, but at the same time, how could coincidence then explain how the deaths occured? While we never learn how much is true or not in Kiguu, I do have to say I like the last proposed solution to the locked room mystery in the context of the book. Obviously, coincidence does play a role in this solution, as you can guess from the whole theme of the book, but I genuinely like the set-up to provide for this solution, but it is something you can really only pull off in this book. Memorable however, it certainly is.

Kiguu is certainly a unique read: the book intentionally takes on the challenge of telling a detective story based on coincidence, accidents and luck and the result is a captivating read. It certainly isn't a book you're going to read if you want to read a straighforward, conventional mystery story focusing on logical reasoning, but as a book about coincidence, it's absolutely stunning as the concept of coincidence is examined through so many angles, resulting in a very educative and entertaining read. I do think many of the discussions go on for too long, and while I personally think the locked room murder has a memorable solution, one shouldn't read Kiguu with high expectations for it as a pure mystery story alone. But it's definitely worth a read, and is highly recommended, if you want to try something different for a change.

Original Japanese title(s): 山口雅也『奇偶』

Sugar & Spice, Malice & Vice

There was a man, 

a very untidy man, 

Whose fingers could nowhere be found, 

To put in his tomb.

I read a lot of series here, but I don't really often "finish" series now I think about it...

Disclosure: I translated Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead. What, you haven't read it yet? Go read it!

Kidd Pistols series

The 13th Detective

The Blasphemy of Kidd Pistols

The Delusion of Kidd Pistols

The Self-Conceit of Kidd Pistols

The Fuckin' Return of Kidd Pistols

The Shameful Conduct of Kidd Pistols

For now, this will be the last time the mohawk-bearing punker police detective Kidd Pistols and his girlfriend/assistant Pink Belladonna will feature on this blog, as the short story collection Kidd Pistols no Shuutai, or as the English title on the cover says The Shameful Conduct of Kidd Pistols (2010) is for the moment the last book released in this series written by Yamaguchi Masaya. The gamebook (Choose Your Own Adventure) The 13th Detective and the first short story collection The Blasphemy of Kidd Pistols first introduced the reader to Parallel Britain, where due to Edward's Law, so-called Masters of Detective are allowed to take over any criminal investigation, which has reduced detectives of Scotland Yard to being mere lackeys of these MD. Kidd and Pink belong to National Unbelievable Troubles Section (NUTS), a section within the Yard which assists MDS like Sherlock Holmes Jr. and Dr. Bull with particularly tricky crimes. Despite his anarchist appearance and sarcastic attitude however, Kidd is actually in possession of a rather sharp mind, and it's usually Kidd who manages to solve the weird cases they come across, because his mind doesn't conform to "rules" and he is used to thinking outside the box.The Shameful Conduct of Kidd Pistols collects the last three stories in this series, which were originally published in 2009 and 2010. Like with the previous stories, these three stories are named and themed after Mother Goose rhymes.

Darashinai Otoko no Misshitsu or The Locked Room with a Untidy Man of a Broken Body opens with a man waking up in a locked study, which looks like it has been ransacked. The man, James Norman, can't quite remember why he's in this room, but eventually he finds a cut up body in a casket in the room, and somewhere else is the cut-off head of the victim. When somebody knocks on the door, he unlocks it from the inside and slowly he realizes what is going on: he woke up in the room of Robert Cohen, a wealthy elderly man of whom he is writing his official biography. Cohen is also quite dead now, with his head seperated from his body, and Norman is of course the number one suspect, considering he was found inside the study/crime scene, which was locked from the inside. The mystery of this story is not as much focused on the how behind the locked room, but more about the curious behavior of the elderly victim before his death, the reason why his study is in such a mess and how come James Norman woke up in the room. The story revolves around a twist which I think is easily guessed at, but I think the execution is pretty good: clever writing and calculated multi-stage misdirection, as well as a nice extra twist at the very end make this a competently written story, even if the major elements feel a bit familiar.  

Leather Men ga Oosugiru or Too Many Leather Men starts with a flashback, when Kidd, Pink and the MD Beverly Lewis (from The 13th Detective) managed to arrest the serial killer Edward Gormon, better known as "Leather Man" as he kidnapped multiple women, skinned them and wore them. Kidd, Pink and Beverly came too late for some of his victims, in time for others, but with his arrest peace returned. Or did it? One year later, there are still sightings of copycats who think it's funny to impersonage the Leather Man. One day, Jill is out jogging and sees her neighbor Ellen and after a very short talk, they part ways, but from a distance Jill sees a hooded figure approaching Ellen, and the two of them go off towards the abandoned factory. Reminded of the stories of the Leather Man still roaming around, she becomes worried and as she finds Frank, Ellen's husband-about-to-become-ex-husband, the two of them go together, but they don't seem to be able to find any suspicious signs in the factory, though Jill swears she saw the hooded figure take Ellen into a car and drive off from the factory. But when Frank and Ellen later visit Ellen's home, they find Ellen safely at home. More sightings of the Leather Man follow however and eventually, a skinned body is found in the factory. Kidd, Pink and Lewis are put on the case as this appears to be the work of the Leather Man, even though Ed Gorman is in prison. The story is rather long, but probably the best of the collection. Some of the twists regarding the identity and motive of the killer may seem a bit dated (even though the story's from 2009), but I think some of the foreshadowing/clues in this story are really clever: I especially like one early on in the story, that is incredibly easy to miss (I did), but the moment you realize the true implication of the clue, you see how it changes everything. Despite the gruesome subject matter involving a serial killer who skins his victims, I have to say this story kinda feels like an Agatha Christie short story to me, in the sense it very much revolves around a twist that makes you look at previously shown events in a completely manner. Not all elements of the story are as strong as others, but still an enjoyable Kidd story.

Sannin no Saiyaku no Musuko no Bouken or The Adventure of the Three Sons of Disaster on the other hand is easily the weakest story of the three. We start with a scene which seems to invoke Saw, Danganronpa or Zero Escape, with James, Jerry and John each waking up in white rooms, not knowing how they got there or what is going on. As they leave their rooms, they run into each other and find they are in some kind of hospital or clinic. Meanwhile, they also run into Kidd and Pink, who also seem to be roaming inside this building without any exits, but they seem less disturbed by their current situation compared to the three J-named men. But what is going on? The surprising truth revealed at the end isn't that surprising, especially not considering this is a 2010 story, and not the mid 90s. It's a very short story too, so on the whole this feels more like an experiment by Yamaguchi to see what ways he could go with this series and while there is an interesting concept for a kind of whodunnit here, the execution isn't as strong as we have seen in some of the more succesful stories in this series.

The Shameful Conduct of Kidd Pistols is certainly not the strongest entry in the series, and it's a shame the final story in this volume, and at the moment the final story in the series, isn't even close in level to the strong stories found earlier in this series, but I am still glad I have read the book. Overall, I have enjoyed the adventures of the cynical Kidd, the rather chaotic Pink and the various MDs they assist in their investigations, and there are some strong short mystery stories found in the earlier collections, especially those that revolve around the theme of people with fixations/curious ways of thinking, and how that influences their actions. Which is I guess a major theme of the series in general. My recommendations are definitely the first two short story collections and The 13th Detective, and if you like the stories/atmosphere found there, I think it's worth it to read the rest of the series too.

Original Japanese title(s): 山口雅也『キッド・ピストルズの醜態』:「だらしない男の密室　―キッド・ピストルズの醜態」/ 「《革服の男が多過ぎる」/ 「三人の災厄の息子の冒険　―キッド・ピストルズの醜態、再び

番外編：Death of the Living Dead Released

Considering my other new translation released this year was Death Among the Undead, you'd almost think this was planned...

One month ago, on Halloween, publisher Ammo announced they'd be publishing my English translation of YAMAGUCHI Masaya's seminal mystery novel Death of the Living Dead soon.  And soon it was, as I can announce now that the book has been released now, both as an e-book as well as in physical form! I already wrote an announcement post last month, so I guess I'm just repeating myself here, but I was asked by Yamaguchi to work on a translation a few years ago, but a revised Japanese edition was released after I had worked on the translation. I was informed that translation advisors/editors worked on my initial translation afterwards to incorporate the revisions, so while the base is my work, I am very grateful to all the other people who worked on the text! I have to admit I haven't seen the final product myself yet, and due to the long timeline behind the project and the extra revisions that had to be made due to the newer Japanese version, I'm pretty excited to have a look at the book myself too finally. It's been quite some time since I last worked on Death of the Living Dead, so I reckon it'd feel fresh even to me!

For those who missed the original announcement post,Yamaguchi's debut novel originally released in 1989 and is one of earliest and definitely one of the best Japanese mystery stories that utilized a supernatural setting to present a fair play puzzle plot detective. It has won several awards for mystery fiction, both during its original release as well as many decades after the release, proving its relevance even now. Set in the United States, this lengthy tale follows Francis "Grin" Barleycorn, a rock punk who after a turbulent time in the old country, returns to his family home: the famous Smile Cemetery in New England. Grandfather Smiley Barleycorn, the person who brought the Barleycorn funeral directing family business to the States and built the empire that is the Smile Cemetery, doesn't have long to live anymore, giving Grin a reason to finally meet his grandfather and his uncles for the first time in his life. Smiley's been in bad health for some time, and his sons are running the company now in his place, but Grin's uncles all have different ideas what to do with the business once Smiley is really  gone. Meanwhile, a strange phenomenom has been plaguing the world: the dead have started to rise. The scientists haven't figure out why yet, there have been several cases across the world where people simply "wake up" from their death and are still able to think, speak and act basically as if they were alive. The only problem: their body is still decomposing. It's amidst these circumstances that mysterious deaths occur at the Smile Cemetery, and it's up to young Grin to solve these deaths, but what's a detective going to do in a world where death isn't as decisive as it used to be?

I read the book for the first time back in 2014, and I was sold immediately. Going through the book again for the translation only rekindled my love for the book. The way the novel makes use of the supernatural element is brilliant, especially considering that this was first released in 1989. Long-time readers of this blog will have noticed that I have developed a love for mystery novels with supernatural elements these last few years, and the concept itself has become very popular in Japanese mystery ficton, but Death of the Living Dead still ranks among the best of the genre. This is also due to the surprising deep way in which the book tackles the theme of death. Sure, mystery novels usually revolve around death, but Death of the Living Dead really delves into the question of what death means for us humans, and there's a lot of discourse and discussion going on the theme of death across the centuries. You'd be surprised how well-researched this book is on the theme of thanatology, without burdening the brilliant puzzler that is at the core of this novel. The book is basically twice the length most books I've translated until now, and it makes good use of the extra page count to present a very tricky plot, but also to talk about everything death.

Anyway, I basically just repeated every single point I already made in my announcement a month ago, so I'll stop right here. Be sure to visit the official website of Death of the Living Dead as I can really recommend this book to any fan of the genre. Death of the Living Dead is funny, dramatic and poignant, but best of all a really clever mystery novel that has been a well-regarded classic in Japan for three decades, and hopefully it'll appeal to the English-reading audience too!

番外編：Death of the Living Dead

2020 saw the release of two new Japanese mysteries translated by me, being Ayukawa's story collection The Red Locked Room and Higashigawa's locked room mystery Lending the Key to the Locked Room both from Locked Room International, as well as a new release of The Decagon House Murders by Pushkin Press. Three releases is definitely not the norm for me though, so I guess most people would assume that Imamura's Death Among the Undead some months ago would be my only contribution to the world of translated Japanese mysteries this year. To be honest, I wasn't sure myself!

I have to admit that even I was caught off-guard by the official announcement that Ammo will be publishing my English translation of Masaya YAMAGUCHI's Death of the Living Dead in December 2021, with the preorders on Amazon for the e-book having started yesterday on Halloween. Originally published in 1989, Yamaguchi's original debut novel was a smash hit by being one of the earliest and definitely one of the best Japanese mystery stories that utilized a supernatural setting to present a fair play puzzle plot detective. Set in the eighties in New England, US, the story follows Grin, a rock punk who after a short period where his life had gone off rails, returns to his family home: the famous Smile Cemetery. Grin is welcomed by his grandfather Smiley Barleycorn, the person who brought the Barleycorn funeral directing family business from the UK to the States and built the empire that is the Smile Cemetery. However, Smiley doesn't have long to live anymore and his sons all have different ideas what to do with the business once Smiley is gone. Meanwhile, a strange phenomenom has been plaguing the world, as the dead have started to rise. For some reason, there have been several cases across the world where people just "wake up" from their death and are still able to act basically as if they were alive, save for the rotting of their corpses. It's amidst these circumstances that mysterious deaths occur among the Barleycorns at the Smile Cemetery, and it's up to young Grin to solve these deaths, but what's a detective going to do in a world where death isn't as decisive as it used to be?

I read the original book back in 2014, and I absolutely loved the work, as Death of the Living Dead used the supernatural setting to bring an absolutely original detective story, combined with both witty comedy as well a surprisingly deeply worked out look at the theme of death. The book has consistently ranked very high in Japanese mystery rankings and has been available in various (mostly Asian) regions already, where it apparently also garners a lot of praise, so it's widely considered to be one of the more important works of early shin honkaku mystery fiction. Yamaguchi had been trying to get the book out in English for a long time, so I was very honored when he asked me to work on the translation. This happened a few years ago by the way, but due to a revised Japanese edition releasing after I had worked on the translation, I was informed that translation advisors/editors worked on my translation afterwards to incorporate the revisions, so while the base is my work, I also have to say thanks for all the hard work to all the people who worked on my text! But that's also why I didn't have exact information on the release window, and me being surprised at the official announcement the book was coming!

It might seem very natural to draw parallels with this year's release of Death Among the Undead which I also translated, but ultimately the works are very different, with the former focusing more on the horror-side, while Death of the Living Dead focusing much more on the question of what death means for us humans, and there's a lot of discourse and discussion going on the theme of death across the centuries, and you'd be surprised how well-researched this book is on the theme of thanatology, without compromising the brilliant puzzler that is at the core of this novel. It's also quite bit longer than the other books I've translated until now, allowing it to go a bit deeper.

Anyway, I can wholeheartedly recommend this novel, not just as someone who worked on this specific release, but simply as a huge fan of Death of the Living Dead itself. It's a fantastic piece of detection that has earned a place in the history of modern Japanese mystery fiction and well worth the read. Be sure to visit the official website of Death of the Living Dead and I hope you'll enjoy the book when it's finally out!

I, Said the Fly

Three wise men of Gotham

Went to sea in a bowl

And if the bowl had been stronger

My song had been longer

Anyone read The Poe Clan? Not a formal mystery tale, but I really like the Cock Robin story there...

After writing three short story collections and one novel about the adventures of the mohawk-bearing punk police detective Kidd Pistols, his girlfriend Pink Belladonna and the crazy murder cases they handled in Parallel Britain on an almost annual basis, author Yamaguchi Masaya decided to pause the series for a while. Which explains the title of the fourth short story collection: Kidd Pistols no Saitei no Kikan or as the English title on the cover says: The Fuckin' Return of Kidd Pistols. This 2008 volume was long-awaited, as the previous book (The Self-Conceit of Kidd Pistols) was released thirteen years earlier, in 1995! Nothing much has changed though in these thirteen years, so we still find ourselves in Parallel Britain, where criminal cases are usually handled by members of the Masters of Detectives Assocation. As the only two detectives assigned to Scotland Yard's National Unbelievable Troubles Section (NUTS), Kidd and Pink are often put on the type of cases that require the extraordinary skills of MDs like Dr. Bull (disciple of Dr. Fell), but despite his anarchist looks and sarcastic attitude, Kidd is actually in possession of a rather sharp mind, and it's usually Kidd who manages to solve the weird cases they come across, exactly because he's a punk who won't conform to rules and is used to thinking outside the box. This fourth volume collects five new adventures with Kidd and Pink.

All the short stories in this series are patterned after Mother Goose rhymes, and the title story of this book is themed after one of the best known ones. Dare ga Cock Robin wo Korosou ga - Kidd Pistols no Saitei no Kikan also has the English title Who Killed Cock Robin, I Don't Care and introduces us to Robin Cockrill (Count Manford), and his wife "Lady Dove" Sophia. Dr. Bull is visiting his former student Cockrill, who has a collection of weapons. The Manford Manor consists of a main building flanked on both sides by two towers, but all parts are not directly connected. As impoverished nobels, the manor's maintenance is subsidized, though in return, they have to receive viewers a few times per week. Cockrill's weapon collection is therefore found on the top floor of one of the towers, while the corresponding room in the other tower showcases the family jewelry. While Cockrill and his wife are showing Dr. Bull, Kidd and Pink the jewelry exhibition room, the count explains he's been into Japanese archery lately. But unable to grasp the spiritual aspect of Japanese archery, Cockrill has been having arguments with his teacher Robert Jakuemon Komadori lately, so they made a bet. Jakuemon is to fire an arrrow from the weapons exibition room in the other tower into the jewelry exhibition room to prove his skill. Given that the distance is over a hundred meters, it's very unlikely he could pull it off, and indeed, the experiment seems to fail. As an archer's courtesy however, Cockrill also fires an arrow back to the other tower. When the party decides to go to the weapon's exhibition room however, they find it locked from the inside. The door is broken down, and inside the room they find Jakuemon dead, with an arrow in his body. It seems impossible that anyone could've shot Jakuemon with an arrow as he was high up in this room, but Cockrill seems intent on claiming his arrow must've actually crossed the hundred meters to kill his master. That also seems very unlikely, but how was Jakuemon then killed so high up?

A story that didn't turn out as great as I had hoped it would be. The very limited circle of suspects makes it easy to guess who's probably the guilty party (especially after a certain intermezzo), and once you know that, it's also fairly easy to guess how the impossible murder was committed. The trick behind that is also predictable for fans of the genre. I guess the most interesting part was seeing how the story included the parts of the Who Killed Cock Robin rhyme as a story theme, but as a standalone mystery tale, we've seen much better locked room mysteries in this series.

Alibi no Awa or Bubbles of Alibi is a very short story, set outside Parallel Britain for a change. As the various Masters of Detective have been taking the credit for Kidd's exploits, it didn't take that much pressure for Kidd and Pink to blackmail their boss to give them an extended holiday. While enjoying their vacation in a holiday resort in Australia however, the two punk detectives are asked by the owner (a friend of their boss) to assist in a murder investigation. Chiang was a wealthy businessman who was having a holiday with his adopted triplet sons. Their three brothers each run a different branch of the Chiang empire, but they had messed up big, and Chiang was going to have them know about that really good during their stay here. When Chiang's body was found dead on board of their cruiser, it was only natural his sons became the main suspects, but they have an alibi. While their father remained on the cruiser, the three sons were out scuba diving and at the time of the murder, they were staying in one of the various "underwater houses" of this resort, providing a place for divers to rest up a bit at the bottom of the sea. While the brothers are indeed seen on the security footage of the underwater house, it appears there are always only two of them simultaneously on the screen as they walked around in the house, which gives the police the idea that one of them committed the murder on the cruiser, while the other two pretended to be three for the camera. The solution is very simple, with a simple slip of the tongue, and ultimately, there's very little that makes this short tale stand out.

In Kyouso to Shichin no Nyoubou no Nanabukuro no Naka no Neko or Gur, Seven Wives and Cats in Seven Sacks, Dr. Bull, Kidd and Pink are on their way to St. Ives when they are stopped at the outskirts of Capeville, right in front of the lonely nine-mile road leading to St. Ives. Asking around, they learn that there's a small sect in St. Ives called The Lost Sheep, led by a certain Ferchi. Seven women (and their children) live with him, and all consider them Ferchi's wives. The women's families obviously want to save the women from Ferchi and have formed a little group to watch Ferchi's every step, though legally, there's little they can do. However, today's different, as the team in St. Ives saw him leaving town in his big truck, and more importantly, they saw children in the back in sacks. Having an excuse now to arrest him for child abuse, the group arranges with the Capeville police to have him detained the moment his car arrives there. The nine-mile road from St. Ives to Capeville is just one long stretch, flanked on one side by the Dover Sea, and on the other side by a steep cliff, a remnant of old mining days. With men on both sides of the road, Ferchi has no way to go. But after an hour, Ferchi's truck still hasn't arrived in Capeville, so curious, the men decide to check the road out, only to find a crashed truck around the midway point. While Ferchi and some of the women are around, the group is surprised to learn there's no sign of the children. Ferchi claims there never were children in sacks in his car, and shows that while he had sacks in his truck, they were filled with cats (which they were going to bring to a shelter) and litter sand. The men in St. Ives know they saw and heard children though when the truck left St. Ives though, so where are they know?

Interesting story in the sense that the solution of the disappearing children is fairly simple to think off, especially after one fairly crude piece of foreshadowing, as well as the set-up for the conclusion where Dr. Bull makes a very short lecture about impossible disappearances. But I really like how it's all fleshed out into a full story. The misdirection with the sacks filled with cats is absolutely brilliant and fits wonderfully with the solution of the disappearance. It's a story that is designed to be very fair, I think, with perhaps a bit too obvious clewing, but I've rather have that than a story that genuinely assumes you to think of the most ridiculous things based one minor clue and then pretends it's being fair. And there's even a nice surprising endgame to the story, which makes this tale overall the most consistent and tightly-plotted story of the whole collection.

Nezumi ga Mimi wo Sumasu Toki (When Mice Listen) is another short one. Kidd, Pink and Dr. Bull are enjoying a performance by the band Three Blind Mice, featuring three blind musicians. Their old manager "Cat Fish" who made off with their money some years ago has returned, having learned Three Blind Mice is going to sign a record deal and still in possession of their (valid) contract. During the performance, Cat Fish is killed, but how could any of the three blind man have done that? The trick... is not pure science-fiction perhaps and can work in some contexts, but even despite the admittedly well-intended attempts by Yamaguchi to ease the reader into the conclusion, the trick behind the murder still feels out-of-there. 

Interestingly enough, Chou Kodomotachi no Ansokujitsu or A Sabbath of Super Children feels fairer, despite it actually featuring supernatural elements. In this story Kidd and Pink are reunited with the Master of Detective Beverly Lewis (from The 13th Detective). Beverly has received a letter by "Monday," one of the children living the Royal Research Laboratory for the Supernatural. This institution researches children with supernatural powers like telepathy and teleportation. Some months earlier, Beverly was investigating rumors of child abuse there, though she could not find any evidence to support those claims. But today she found a note by the child with the code name "Monday" in her inbox, where he pleads for help because he will be murdered at five o'clock on Monday. Beverly, Kidd and Pink travel to the Research Laboratory to see Monday and figure out what's going on. Kidd and Pink learn at this Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters that the children here do indeed have various supernatural powers, ranging from mind reading to psychokinesis. When they're finally ready to meet Monday however, they're told he's in his room. They find his brother Sunday in front of the room, seemingly puzzled by the locked door. When they break the door open, they find Monday has died inside the locked room. An alluring story, as it first presents itself to be a kind of locked room mystery with a supernatural angle, but you soon learn that the powers of each of the children is fairly limited and can not be used to straight-out create a locked room murder, so then the story changes into something else: how to use each of the children's special abilities to solve the murder? As a standalone locked room murder, this story is nothing special, but once it moves beyond that, it's a really good story that uses the special abilities to do a very different kind of mystery story (explaining it would be spoiling it too) and both the clewing and the misdirection is really good here.

Weird to see actual supernatural powers in this series by the way, though I have always had slight problems envisioning what's possible and not in Parallel Britain. It's supposed to be mostly the same as comtemporary times, but in the videogame adaptation of The 13th Detective (which was how I first got into the series), you also had a talking intelligent robot and stuff like that, so I always imagined Parllel Britain to also be slightly more advanced than ours, or at least a bit different.

Kidd Pistols no Saitei no Kikan is on the whole not a bad collection per se, but I do feel it misses a genuine standout story. The previous volumes all had at least one story that was really worth reading and then some others that were good as "side dishes" to that main course, but this fourth volume doesn't really have a highlight story that feels as a pure must-read. Again, I wouldn't label this volume as a bad mystery collection, just too tame, especially compared to earlier volumes. But anyone who has come this far and is still having fun with Kidd and Pink should also read the fourth volume,  and with only one more volume to go, I'll obviously continue reading the adventures of Kidd and Pink.

Original Japanese title(s): 山口雅也『キッド・ピストルズの最低の帰還』:「誰が駒鳥を殺そうが - キッド・ピストルズの最低の帰還」/「アリバイの泡」/「教祖と七人の女房と七袋の中の猫」 /「鼠が耳をすます時」/「超子供たちの安息日」

The Dutch Shoe Mystery

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe

She had so many children, she didn't know what to do

She gave them some broth without any bread

Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed

I have these cloth book covers I use whenever I read Japanese bunko-format pockets: it keeps the books clean and these cloth covers are more pleasant to hold in your hands while reading. While bunko pockets should have the exact same dimensions, meaning you can use the covers for all bunko pockets, the bunko pockets from Kobunsha tend to be like one single millimeter too high for my cloth covers, so I can't use them. Which is really annoying.

We return to Parallel Britain in Yamaguchi Masaya's 1995 short story collection Kidd Pistols no Manshin ("The Self-Conceit of Kidd Pistols", 1995). The introduction of Edward's Law in Parallel Britain changed the history of criminal investigation: the right to investigation was given to the members of the Master of Detective Assocation, which in change turned Scotland Yard into mere errand boys for these detectives, the main reason why Scotland Yard is now mainly manned by young punk hooligans just trying to earn an easy pay check. Kidd Pistols and his girlfriend Pink Belladonna too appear more like members of a punk band than police officers, but these two form Scotland Yard's National Unbelievable Troubles Section (NUTS), which is usually assigned to the detectives who have to handle the kooky cases like locked room murders or other odd incidents. While Kidd and Pink get to work with the best detectives in Britain, like Dr. Bull (disciple of Dr. Fell) and the famous Swiss detective Mercule Boirot, it turns out that Kidd isn't just a punk: being able to think out of the box, not being constrained by the rules allows him to solve the cases that baffle even the best detectives. In the third short story collection, we follow Kidd and Pink in several cases patterned after Mother Goose rhymes set both in the present as well as the duo's past.

All the stories in this series feature an official English title, so the title page of Kidd Pistols no Manshin - Kidd Saisho no Jiken also says The Self-Conceit of Kidd Pistols - The Kidd Pistols' First Case. This is a fairly short story, that is more about fleshing out the characters than really providing an interesting mystery plot. In the first part, we have Kidd Pistols himself narrate the story, telling us how he grew up in the slums of London as the son of a good-for-nothing Irishman and a somewhat too enthusiastic London housekeeper. By seventeen, Kidd has already left his home and was working part-time at the punk/B&D fashion shop Monde, where he also met Pink (whom he first described as looking like "a Dutch wife"). It was a bad neighborhood, but it was home to both of them, so the fact that there had been a mysterious series of suicides around here bothered them. Curiously enough, the people who died followed the pattern of the nursery rhyme tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man. But when Kidd's own father too dies under circumstances that seem to suggest suicide, he's not convinced this is just a coincidental series of suicides and he starts to harbor suspicion towards the people from the World Church of Absolute Truth which has been active around this neighborhood lately. Buuuut, like I said, this is not really a mystery story. There is some kind of locked room mystery here, but Kidd's theory is never confirmed in any way, and the punchline of this tale basically makes this cynical modern horror story that explores the background of Kidd, rather than the puzzlers we usually see in this series.

This story forms a set with the last story of the volume, Pink Belladonna no Kaishin -  Bondage Satsujin Jiken or The Reform of Pink Belladonna - The Bondage Murder Case, but this one is like a much better version of the first. The first half is once again mostly monologue where Pink tells her background story, which isn't directly related to the mystery plot of the second half. Though for people who have read Yamaguchi's excellent Death of the Living Dead, there's an interesting revelation here about Pink that explains why I was always mixing up those two characters. Anyway, this story also explains why the PlayStation videogame Cat the Ripper, based on the Kidd Pistols novel The 13th Detective, had a hilariously confusing bad ending scene where the nameless protagonist is tortured by Pink in a SM mistress outfit: this story explains that Pink was being trained in Germany to become a high-class bondage mistress for a short period. After that, she ended up in the north of London in the punk/B&D shop Monde, where she became best friends not only with Kidd, but also the young prostitute Demi. Demi recently got a new client who was into SM and tonight she was going to meet with this client again. Pink would be going to a concert with Demi after Demi was done, but when Demi doesn't appear, Pink decides to go to Demi's work room where she stumbles upon a horrible sight: Demi's pimp was knocked out lying on the floor, but Demi herself had been tied up, her face horribly beaten up and her genital organs cut from her body. A bloody message on the walls by "Jack" invokes images of Jack the Ripper of course. Pink vowes to avenge her friend and find the 'client' who killed Demi. Guessing who did it is rather easy due to the limited number of suspects, but the story does a good job at tying the underlying plot to the Mother Goose song in question in terms of theme. It also makes use of the theme of bondage in a clever way to create a mystery plot that is not only well-clewed, but also gives a good reason why it was Pink who figures the case out. You don't need to have expert knowledge on bondage, but it does make sense that Pink would be the first to realize why that item was used like that.

Sarawareta Yuurei or The Kidnaped Ghost, and Shitsuji no Chi or The Blood of the Butler are both very short stories that seem to invoke Agatha Christie's short stories. In the first story, Dr. Bull is asked by his old friend Brandon to help Ann Peebles, for whom he has acted as a loyal manservant for decades. Ann was a famous actress, whose infant son Jimmy was kidnapped twenty years ago. Even though she paid the ransom money, Jimmy was never returned and with that, she lost the only child she'd ever have. Jimmy remained on her mind since, and recently, a fraud spirit medium has been trying to close to Ann, which obviously worries Brandon. Dr. Bull swiftly sees through the medium's tricks, but then Ann gets a phone call by a voice who says they're Jimmy, singing a song only Jimmy and Ann would know. This is followed by a ransom note telling Ann to pay ransom money for Jimmy, exactly like the letter twenty years ago. But why would someone pretend to have kidnapped the ghost of Jimmy? In The Blood of the Butler, Mercule Boirot, Kidd and Pink run into car troubles in the middle of nowhere on the way back from solving a case, but they are offered a lift by Marshe, a journalist on his way to the manor of Henry Tarbot, Earl of Workshire. Marsche is writing a series of articles on that old British tradition, the butler, and he has it from good sources that Tarbot's faithful Langdon is the quintessential butler. Arriving at Tarbot Manor however, they find that Langdon is not all the butler they had expected him to be, and other minor incidents seem to bug both the detectives and Marsche. Ultimately, both The Kidnaped Ghost and The Blood of the Butler revolve around one major piece of misdirection, making the reader assume one thing while it's actually the opposite. Once you notice what that is, it's pretty easy to figure out what's really going on. So very like Christie's short stories.

Kutsu no Naka no Shitai - Christmas no Misshitsu or The Body in the Shoe - The Locked-Room at Christmas is by the far best story in the collection and and starts with a Christmas invitation for Dr. Bull, Kidd and Pink to the house of Tania Shoemaker, the wealthy old woman in charge of the famous shoe manufacturing company. The four prodigal sons of Tania have also returned for Christmas (to badger her for money), but last night, she noticed some of her jewelry had been stolen. She has called Dr. Bull here to scare the thief into confessing to the theft and says she'll be waiting for the thief to come clean and return her jewelry that night. Tania does not sleep in the main building of the house, but in the annex: the building in the shape of a shoe was once the very first shoe shop she ran in East End, but has been moved brick by brick to its new location as a reminder to Tania where it all started. That evening, snow falls and when everyone wakes up on Christmas Day, the detectives notice there's only one single trail of footsteps in the snow that walk from the main building towards the large shoe building outside: the footsteps of Tania when she retreated to the annex last night. The detectives and the secretary go to the annex to bring her breakfast, but they open the door only to find Tania hanging from the ceiling. At first, they think it's suicide, but the fact that Tania was stripped naked and whipped after death makes it clear it's murder. When they find youngest son George in the room next door, having died of an overdosis of sleeping medicine, they think that he killed his mother and then committed suicide, but the medical examination shows he died before his mother. But how did the murderer of Tania escape the shoe-house without leaving their footprints in the snow?

Interestingly, this story was adapted as an episode for the interactive television drama Tantei X Kara no Chousenjou! ("A Challenge from Detective X!"), which ran for three seasons between 2009 and 2011. Similar to programmes like Anraku Isu Tantei and Nazotoki Live, viewers were encouraged to participate and solve the mysteries themselves. Viewers could register to receive a new part of a mystery story daily via e-mail, which always ended with a Challenge to the Reader. Participants could then submit on a form who they thought the murderer was and why. Later the corresponding episode would air with a live-action drama enactment of said story, which would include the actual solution. The adaptation of The Body in the Shoe aired on May 20 2009 as the final episode of the first season, but interestingly, this was the only episode in the whole series to not feature a live-action adaptation, but an animated adaptation. It's pretty short, but it tells the story pretty well and I guess larger-than-life characters like Kidd and Pink work better in animation (with a distinct, American indie comic style) than with real-life actors. Anyway, like I said, this is the best story in the volume, and I think it's an excellent example to explain why I am more a fan of mystery stories that focus on the logical process of determining who it was, rather than the more howdunnit-focused approach you often see with locked room mysteries. While this story revolves around the no-footprints-in-the-snow variant of impossible crimes, the trick the murderer used is incredibly basic and not even remotely original. If you'd focus on this howdunnit part alone, this would've made for a very disappointing story, but what Yamaguchi does really well here is plot out the path that shows whodunnit. The plotting has some great plotting to show why the murderer acted like they did. By focusing on all the actions the murderer took, including the very basic no-footprints-in-the-snow trick, you can guess what the circumstances were that made the murderer act like they did, and by determining the motive/cause behind each and every action taken, you can determine the identity of the murderer, because all thoses causes/motives only hold for them. It's a great way to mix up the impossible crime trope (which often focus on howdunnit) with the reasoning-focused mystery stories as seen in Queen's work (and in more modern times, authors like Arisugawa, Ooyama, Aosaki and more). This is also why I think it works great for an interactive mystery show like Tantei X Kara no Chousenjou!, as ultimately, the story focuses more on the actual 1+1=2 logical processes behind explaining the crime, which works a lot better if you want people to write in (as it's easier to 'grade' the submissions).

While the previous volume seemed to focus a lot on one single theme, the stories in Kidd Pistols no Manshin are more varied. While the first volume has definitely been the most consistent volume until now, the third volume has been interesting offering stories that explore the protagonists' backgrounds more or some shorter tales (whereas those in the second volume were all really long). That said though, I think the "conventional" The Body in the Shoe is definitely the stand-out story of the volume and the only one in this book that really matches the line of quality set in the first volume and partially the second. While definitely not a bad mystery collection, Kidd Pistols no Manshin should not be considered the entry volume for this series, as a lot of it works because there have been two earlier volumes that featured different kind of stories/stories of different lengths. Then again, most people do tend to read things in order unlike me. Anyway, only two other collections left, and I'm definitely going to stick around to see what other kooky adventures Kidd and Pink will have.

Original Japanese title(s): 山口雅也『キッド・ピストルズの慢心』:「キッド・ピストルズの慢心 -キッド最初の事件-」/「靴の中の死体 -クリスマスの密室-」/ 「さらわれた幽霊」/ 「執事の血」/ 「ピンク・ベラドンナの改心 -ボンデージ殺人事件-」

Law and Disorder

"A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason."

G.K. Chesterton

And still I can't help but imagine Kidd and Pink looking the way they were portrayed in the videogame Cat the Ripper (based on the novel The 13th Detective), even though the game's artstyle is err.... really "unique."

The mohawk-bearing punk Kidd Pistols and his assistant Pink Belladonna are back in Yamaguchi Masaya's short story collection Kidd Pistols no Mousou ("The Delusion of Kidd Pistols", 1993). While these two like lawless members of a punk rock band, they are in fact the two police detectives that make up Scotland Yard's National Unbelievable Troubles Section (NUTS). The exploits of famous detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Gideon Fell led to the creation of Edward's Law in the world of Parallel Britain: members of the Masters of Detectives Assocation have the authority to command any official investigation the very first 72 hours, which also means that Scotland Yard has been delegated to a small supporting role. NUTS is responsible for the really kooky cases that happen in Parallel Britain and in the past, Kidd and Pink have worked with famous MDs like Sherlock Holmes Jr. (one of many who claim to be the son of the great detective), Dr. Bull (disciple of Dr. Fell) and others. In this second short story collection, Kidd and Pink come across three Mother Goose-inspired cases which are totally nuts, and Kidd once again proves he's actually much more than just a punk with a unique hairdo.

I really love these type of covers for short story collections, incorporating the key elements from each story. So yep, this volume is about a tower, an ark and a garden. I say short stories by the way, but the first and last story are quite long, closer to short novels than a long short stories.

Kami naki Tou also carries the English title Tower without God and starts with Dr. Bull, accompanied by Kidd and Pink, visiting Lord Spedding. For some reason, someone has been causing all the apples in his apple garden to drop on the ground. Spedding suspects it's the work of his neighbor Dr. Dumpley, who bought part of Spedding's land for his research lab. Dr. Dumpley's dream is to create an anti-gravity device, but it seems things aren't going well and his lab might close soon. This afternoon, Dumpley is to be interviewed by the Albion Journal by the journalist Clark on the thirty years spent on Dumpley's research, joined by the science fiction writer Soars as one of the interviewers. Dr. Bull is also interested, so they too join Soars, with Clark running late. They find Dr. Dumpley at a high tower, which used to be part of the Spedding estate. Dr. Dumpley lectures the group on gravity, but when confronted by Soars about whether he has actually accomplished anything these thirty years, Dr. Dumpley replies he'll show them he has found the way to escape gravity. He tells them to wait outside the tower, while he prepares his experiment at the top of the tower. While "Ride of the Valkyries" plays loudly, Clark arrives and when they talk things over, they suddenly become scared that the doctor might commit suicide because of thirty years of failure, and run inside the tower. The group find the doctor fleeing inside a room at the top of the tower. They hear something horrible break, and when they break inside the room, they find it empty, with an open window. Below the open window they see the glass dome down there was broken. They quickly go back downstairs, fearing to find the doctor dead, but they see no body, only some blood. They look around to see if he could've crawled somewhere after that horrible fall, but then Clark falls off the tower right in front of Kidd. Once they go to the top of the tower, they find the dead Dr. Dumpley on the roof, his head broken like Humpty Dumpty. But how could the dead doctor have jumped out of the window on the top floor, broken the glass dome below, and then ended up on the roof of the tower?

Kidd always manages to solve the case before the real Masters of Detectives do, and that's, according to himself, because he's punk: he doesn't confirm to the assumed and presumed 'normal' and is willing to bend to see what lies behind the normal. And that's definitely what you must do here. Part of the mystery relies on the psychology of the characters, especially that of Dr. Dumpley, and it's pretty crazy to follow that. Like Chesterton said, "A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason" and some of the weird happenings to occur during this story can only be explained if you venture to understand the sane logic behind the insane behavior of Dr. Dumpley, and that can be difficult. Yamaguchi does set most of the idea up fairly well, but it still requires the reader to 'anticipate' how the madness works. That said, if you look at the core parts of the mystery of how Dr. Dumpley and Clark died, I have to say you can definitely just solve that by 'normal' logic. Parts of the impossible crime are somewhat standard and predictable, but I think there's one nice piece of misdirection regarding how the murderer managed to get inside the tower that works really well.

In Noah no Saigo no Koukai (Noah's Last Voyage), we have another mind with rather unique ideas. John "Noah" Claypole is a dying, but wealthy man who has become obsessed with the idea of the Great Flood and the Ark of Noah. He has built his own Ark in Scotland, and he wants his family (prodigal son Sidney, his soon-to-be wife Martha and eight cousins) to live on the ark. He even changed his will, demanding all of his eight cousins, no exceptions, to spend at least one month on the ark if they hope to inherit. His cousin Ronald, a scientist, is Noah's biggest opponent, saying the whole idea of the Great Flood is nuts. On the stormy night before Noah and Martha's wedding, some of the family have already gathered on the ark: Ronald and his twin brother James, Sidney (who has had a sex change), the family butler Bunter and also Dr. Bull, Kidd and Pink, who were invited by Ronald to see how he would persuade Noah. The ark is already loaded with countless pairs of animals, and because the house staff and food too has already moved to the ark, dinner is also to be held on board of the ship. But before dinner is served, a gun shot rings and when they barge into Noah's room all the way on top of the ark, they find Noah dead of a heart attack, and Ronald dead of a gunshot in his chest. No weapon can be found inside the room however and the window is locked. The door had been under observation, so no other person could've entered the room, so what did happen here?

Again, I'd say the mystery can be divided by two parts. It really helps if you can follow some of the insane, but sane logic of some of the characters, but it is not absolutely necessary if you want to solve the mystery. The main clue that points to the identity of the murderer is fairly straightforward and comes relatively late in the story, but it does involve a good piece of misdirection and can be missed quite easily. But like with other Kidd Pistols stories, part of the fun, and also the frustration, lies in comprehending the thought processes some of the characters entertain. The focal characters in these stories are always crazy in a certain way, though they do follow a kind of own logic due to their fanatical belief in something. In the first story, it was Dr. Dumpley's obsession with gravity, and in this story, it's Noah's obsession with surviving the Great Flood, versus Ronald's mission to prove Noah wrong. These characters often hold lectures on their pet peeve for several pages long, so unless you happen to be interested in the topic, these segments can become a bit boring, but these parts always come back to explain part of the mystery.  Here too, you'll not understand the actions some characters take unless you follow their logic, which are definitely clewed, but usually only make sense after the fact.

Eigou no Niwa also has the English title The Eternal Garden - The European Garden's Mystery, and has Kidd and Pink join the Belgian detective Mercule Boirot, who has been invited to the annual garden treasure hunt of Lord Radford. The gang however learns that Lord Radford has not been seen since yesterday and that the last time he was seen, he had apparently been shot in the garden ruin (a building in ruins as a garden piece). One of the gardeners heard a shot and saw him lying inside, but when he returned with help, there was nobody there and not a trace of any crime having taken place. Radford however is still missing today, even though his guests have arrived. Thinking it may be some prank that has to do with the treasure hunt, they decide to read the first clue and follow the trail Radford laid. After solving several riddles, the group arrives at a grotto with a tomb, and inside they do not find a treasure, but the decapitated body of Lord Radford.

The first half of the story consists of riddles for the treasure hunt, but don't expect to solve them yourselves: they all have to do with elements that exist in the garden, but you as the reader only learn of their existence after the characters have solved the riddles. It should be no surprise that once again, this story requires the reader to at least attempt to dive into Lord Radford's mind, but I'd say that this is by far the most difficult in this story: we never see Radford alive, so we don't really hear much from himself. Even based on his riddles, I'd say it's really difficult to guess what the plot wants the reader to guess. The identity of the murderer is plotted better: some of the clues are really nicely hidden and I like the reason given for the decapitated body. However, I'd say this story is faaar too difficult to solve unless you understand what was going in Lord Radford's mind compared to the previous two stories. In all three stories in the collection, it's the seemingly insane actions that make up a part of the mystery, but it's especially crucial in The Eternal Garden - The European Garden's Mystery, whereas in the other two stories, you can still figure out a good deal of the mystery without understanding the 'insane' part of the story.

Kidd Pistols no Mousou is definitely an interesting mystery story collection. The way the stories delve into 'insane' characters and the obsessions they have regarding certain topics is unique: it showcases an almost encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly random topics and makes great use of those topics to create larger-than-life characters who end up setting up murder mysteries which you're unlikely to find in any other series. What does make this collection a bit disappointing is that all three stories feature similar characters and one certain plot point which is repeated throughout all three stories: they definitely feel a bit similar at the core. Had they not been collected in the same volume, this might've been obscured a bit, but it's really noticable when read one after another.

Original Japanese title(s): 山口雅也『キッド・ピストルズの妄想』: 「神なき塔」/「ノアの最後の航海」/「永劫の庭」

The Wild Brood

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）」

The Old Cat And Mouse Game

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

I've been to London to visit the Queen. 

Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you do there? 

I frightened a little mouse under her chair. 

Several years ago, I reviewed Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead (1989) which I lauded as a fantastic debut novel that managed to mix the logical reasoning school of Ellery Queen, with a plot featuring something as fantastical as zombies.  It was absolutely amazing how Yamaguchi's first novel could be so polished and brilliantly planned, as the combination between fair play, logical reasoning-based mystery plot and the setting of a world where recently the dead had started rising from their graves was surprising, original and most of all, excellently executed. Turns out though that Death of the Living Dead wasn't really his first book, though there's a weird story behind that.

For two years before Death of the Living Dead, Yamaguchi Masaya had already one book published. The catch here is that 13-ninme no Tanteishi, which also carries the English title The 13th Detective, wasn't a "normal" novel, but a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, or gamebook! Published in JICC's "Adventure Novel" series, The 13th Detective had the usual staples of the genre: at set points in the story, the reader is required to make story-related choices, which lead to branching storylines. In a normal novel, the protagonist might for example be destined to take the left turn in the maze, but in a gamebook, the reader will be given the choice to go left, right or back, each choice leading to a seperate outcome (going for the left option might send you to page 122, right to page 250, and going back to 57 for example). The 13th Detective had the reader on the trail of a serial killer, and depending on your choices you might find out who the murderer is, or be murdered yourself (or you might get stuck in a different bad ending, like giving up on the case because you get married). It was The 13th Detective that caught the eye of the influential editor Togawa of publisher Tokyo Sogen, which eventually lead to Yamaguchi's debut with Death of the Living Dead. In 1992, Yamaguchi was offered the chance to once again revisit The 13th Detective, as he rewrote the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book into a form that is closer a normal novel (but more about that later). I read this novelization, mostly because the original gamebook is crazy expensive as opposed to the fairly easily obtainable novelization.

Oh, by the way, I reviewed the two Choose-Your-Own-Adventure gamebooks of the Famicom Detective Club series last year, if you're interested to hear how the gamebook genre would work with a mystery plot.

The 13th Detective is set in "Parallel Britain", which is not a world where Brexit didn't happen, but a world that is sorta like ours, but slightly different in some key elements. For example: World War II appears to not have happened yet, and Shakespeare's Hamlet was in fact a comedy. A fundamental change in society is the fact that all the fictional detectives we know do exist in Parallel Britain. The successes of Sherlock Holmes and his successors like Poirot, Dr. Fell and Ellery Queen led to Edward's Law: 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. Masters of Detectives earn points based on their exploits, with the prestigious title "Emperor of Detectives" appointed to the very best of them, making them the head of the association. The far-reaching authority granted to the Masters of Detective Association has made it the de-facto crime-fighting institution in Britain, while Scotland Yard has been reduced to a mere supporting role, with many of the "police detectives" being nothing more than punk hooligans or gang members who simply try to earn a bit of easy money as a cop.

The last few months, there have only been two topics of discussion in Parallel Britain. One is the upcoming Detective Centenary, which is to celebrate the publication of A Study in Scarlet, the first published record of the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Many celebrated detectives, including Holmes' son and former Emperor of Detectives Sherlock Holmes Jr., are to attend the festivities. But fear also reigns in London, for a series of murders on detectives has been going for almost a year now. Eleven famous Masters of Detective have already been murdered and the two links between the various murders are that the murders are all modeled after verses of a certain thirteen verse long Mother Goose rhyme, and that there's always something connected to a cat left behind at the crime scenes. This has earned the detective-murderer the name of Cat the Ripper, and it is said that whoever manages to catch Cat the Ripper, will become the next Emperor of Detective once Lord Browning finishes his term. 

And that term has ended more quickly than expected, because the unnamed protagonist of The 13th Detective (1993) awakes in the office of Lord Browning, who himself has been murdered by a strange blade-like weapon. The protagonist suffers from amnesia, and can't remember who he is and why he's in Lord Browning's office together with the Lord's body, but the police, in the form of mohawk-wearing punk police detective Kidd Pistols and his rainbow-haired assistant Pink Belladonna, figure the protagonist's condition, and the strange dying message "CAT IS" left by Lord Browning, written upside down, are both moot points, as the office of Lord Browning was locked from the inside, and the only person who could've committed the crime is the protagonist. And given that the Lord was working on the Cat the Ripper case, and there's a cat-related objected left behind on the scene, it appears the protagonist is in fact Cat the Ripper. The protagonist manages to escape from Kidd and Pink and enlist the help of a Master of Detective, who under Edward's Law now has 72 hours to figure out who really killed Lord Browning.

It's here where the reader is clearly reminded that The 13th Detective was originally a gamebook. For even though Yamaguchi rewrote the book to omit most of the choices the reader had to made in the original, the most important choice is still intact here. The reader is given the choice between three different Master of Detectives to enlist at the end of the first chapter, leading to three distinct "routes" to the end. The reader can hire Dr. Henry Bull (disciple of Dr. Gideon Fell and expert on locked rooms and strange weapons), the hardboiled private detective Mike Dashiell Barlowe (specializing in organized crime and drug crimes) or the model-turned-detective Beverly Lewis (who has successes with solving dying messages). Each route will focus on a different aspect of Lord Browning's murder, and will lead to very different adventures and revelations for the protagonist and his detective of choice. The three routes all converge at the end for the conclusion by the way, so you don't need to be afraid you won't figure out who Cat the Ripper is by choosing the wrong detective (even though bad endings are a staple of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure gamebook genre).

The three routes are what both make The 13th Detective a fun, but also flawed experience. To start off with the good: few books are as insanely varied as this book. Yamaguchi explains that he simply wanted to do everything in the original gamebook, which is why this story features a locked room murder, a protagonist with amnesia, an odd murder weapon, a dying message, an alibi-deconstruction plot, a code to be cracked, even a gimmick like opening the story with the confrontation scene with the murderer.... The 13th Detective is packed with tropes from mystery stories and I'm not even mentioning the references to other fictional detectives in the world of Parallel Britain. Each of the three routes are written in distinctive styles: if you choose Dr. Henry Bull, you get a Carr-like story that even features a mini Locked Room Lecture, while Barlowe's route will have you go through scenes that are familiar to the hardboiled mystery reader. Some of the ideas featured in this novel, especially the dying message "CAT IS" turns out to be an entertaining, original take on the trope

But the downside of this variety is of course that on the whole, many of the ideas feel a bit underutilized. They may not be bad, but as the book needs to handle a lot between the covers, most concepts and ideas are only given a little bit of time to develop, which often makes the book feel both hasty and superficial, even though anyone could see many of those ideas could've been explored much deeper if it hadn't been so densely packed. The rewrite from Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book to regular novel is far from perfect either. Because there are three routes, a lot of text is actually copy-pasted between those routes, as it concerns vital information for the base plot. Kidd Pistols and Pink Belladonna's report on Lord Browning's murder for example is exactly the same for all three routes, repeated three times, as it is necessary information for all three routes. In a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, shared sections are quite common, and one can imagine that in the original gamebook, the police's report is a seperate section, which would end with "If you're working with Dr. Henry Bull, proceed to page XX. If you're working with Mike Barlowe, proceed to page YY. If you're working with Beverly Lewis, proceed to page ZZ." In this novelization however, the same section is simply repeated across all three routes and that happens several times. Yamaguchi also didn't cut away the game-over sequences/alternative routes from the original gamebook. In this novelization, the protagonist sometimes makes a wrong choice that leads to a bad ending like him dying, but then it's brushed off as simply a "dream". It's incredibly artificial here to keep those fake endings in the novelization, and they don't really serve the plot in any way but to remind you that The 13th Detective was originally a gamebook (note that looping stories/stories with "bad endings" can result in good mystery stories, like with Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P, but The 13th Detective is not a good example of that).

The 13th Detective was also turned into a PlayStation videogame titled Cat the Ripper - The 13th Detective in 1997. It's notorious as a pretty bad adventure game, with horrible art design (which is also horribly animated), horrifying "music" (two or three tracks of maybe seven notes long) and terrible game design (incredibly convoluted puzzles and instant death traps). In fact, the only redeeming factors are its voice actors and the base story, which is actually quite faithful to The 13th Detective, save for the convoluted puzzles. I first learned about The 13th Detective by watching a Let's Play of this game, and while the game was definitely a so-bad-it's-almost-good type of game, I did recognize the entertaining mystery story beneath the weird appearance, which is why I decided to read the book.

The 13th Detective is technically also part of Yamaguchi's Kidd Pistols series, which apparently stars the mohawk-bearing punk hooligan police detective and his assistant/girlfriend Pink and the mysteries they encounter in Parallel Britain. I haven't read any of the other books in this series, but they're supposed to be all short story collections, each of them patterned after Mother Goose rhymes (like The 13h Detective). The 13th Detective is a special case within this series, being the only novel and also the only one to feature Kidd Pistols in a smaller role instead of as the lead.

Despite The 13th Detective's obvious flaws, which mostly derive from the fact it was originally a gamebook with several routes for the player to play through, I really did enjoy the book. It's brimming with love for the classic mystery genre and is a good mystery novel on its own too. It's very clear though that it's basically a rewritten gamebook, so the reading experience can feel very unnatural at times, but if you can get through that, you're presented with a mystery novel that is both unique and fun.

Original Japanese title(s): 山口雅也　『13人目の探偵士』