Black Orchids

「劇場でいちいち蘭ぁん！て言うのやめてくれる？」

林原めぐみ -『名探偵コナンラジオ　第6回』

"Could you stop yelling 'Raaaaan!' all the time in the movies?"

Hayashibara Megumi (voice actress of Haibara Ai) in "Detective Conan Radio - Episode 6"

I'm kinda bummed that the cover of the short story collection discussed today doesn't match the covers of the previous short story collections in this series (this one and this one)  at all, on the other hand: this cover is definitely much better-looking.

Nikaidou Ranko series
Jigoku no Kijutsushi ("The Magician from Hell") (1992)
Kyuuketsu no Ie ("House of Bloodsuckers") (1992)
Sei Ursula Shuudouin no Sangeki ("The Tragedy at the Saint Ursula Convent") (1993)
Akuryou no Yakata ("Palace of Evil Spirits") (1994)
Yuri Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Lillies") (1995)
Bara Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Roses") (1997)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Deutsch Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Germany") (1996)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - France Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - France") (1997)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Tantei Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Detective") (1998)
Jinroujou no Kyoufu - Kanketsu Hen ("The Terror of Werewolf Castle - Conclusion") (1998)
Akuma no Labyrinth ("The Devil Labyrinth") (2001)
Majutsuou Jiken ("The Case of the Sorcery King") (2004)
Soumenjuu Jiken ("The Case of the Double-Faced Beasts") (2007)
Haou no Shi ("Death of the Ruler") (2012)
Ran Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Orchids") (2014)
Kyodai Yuurei Mammoth Jiken ("The Case of the Giant Ghost Mammoth", 2017)

Ranko is a young woman who has made a name for herself as a brilliant private detective, having solved countless of horrifying murder cases. Her powers of reasoning are not only appreciated by the wider public and the Japanese police force, but occasionally even foreign governments rely on her mind. She first honed her deductive skills as a high school student, when she and her brother-by-adoption Reito (Ranko was adopted into the Nikaidou family) solved the murder case involving the Magician from Hell. Reito has chronicled many of their adventures, among which Ranko's long-standing fight with the superhuman criminal Labyrinth, but also her exploits in solving the baffling case that happened in the Werewolf Castle on the French-German border. Nikaidou Reito's Ran Meikyuu ("Labyrinth of Orchids", 2014), collects three novellas/short stories with smaller problems for Ranko to solve, like a five-layered locked room murder mystery and a mystery that lies in the faraway past.

It's been a while since I last read a book featuring Ranko! I absolutely devoured the Ranko novels in the early days of this blog, despite the sizes of those bricks (most Japanese paperback pockets I read end up somewhere around 350~500 pages long. Nikaidou's books on the other hand usually start at 600, and can go up to 900) and I think I read almost all of them (the ones I'm still missing are either brand new, or not very well received). The books have a distinct old-fashioned atmosphere: they are set in the 70s, but the many (MANY) locked room murders and other impossibilities committed in creepy mansions evoked a Carr-ish world, especially as the Ranko stories more often than not also involved themes like family curses, Western esotericism and medievalism. There was a significant change in story style though halfway through the series. What I described mostly applies in the books up until Jinroujou no Kyoufu (probably still the longest locked room mystery around). Ranko would disappear in Europe for three years at the end of that story, so the books jumped a few years back in time, to chronicle Ranko's intellectual battles against the master criminal Labyrinth, who was basically an artificial human created during World War II who had genetically engineered monsters at their disposal or something like that. And while Ranko still solved some impossible crimes in those Labyrinth novels, they were never as impressive as the ones seen in the earlier books, and her encounters with Labyrinth were often more like science-fiction horror novels with slight elements of the mystery genre, like you'd expect from mid-period Edogawa Rampo, rather than the you-aren't-going-to-get-more-classic-than-this, conventional mystery tales published before Labyrinth's first appearance. The three stories collected in the short story collection Ran Meikyuu are all set in different periods in Ranko's life, and thus also have a different tone to them.

The first story, Dorogune Hakase no Akumu ("The Nightmare of Professor Dorogune"), is set before the events in Jinroujou no Kyoufu, when Ranko was still a university student, but already a famed detective. The police wants her help in an absolutely puzzling case: Professor Dorogune, who had used his fortune to research supernatural phenomena in search of a way to revive his dear dead wife, had been found murdered inside a building, behind four locked doors, with only the victim's own footprints on the snowy path leading to the building in question! Fuyuki Mayako claimed she could teleport and control objects with her psychic powers, so the professor had the building especially designed to test her powers of teleportation, promising to bestow upon her a fortune if she was the goods. The building was basically designed like four squares laid within each other, each one smaller than the next, like four Matryoshka dolls. You'd need to go through four doors, each door leading deeper into the next square (and deeper inside the building), to reach the center square (room), which was where the professor was found dead one morning, with a knife in his back. But as all four doors were locked from the inside (with even the keyholes blocked by handkerchiefs stuffed inside), and only the footprints of the victim himself were found on the only path leading to the building, it seems that only Mayako, with her powers of teleportation and psychokinesis, could've committed the murder!

Okay, let's get the obvious out of the way first: YES, the premise of this story is absolutely amazing. A four-layered locked room mystery, plus missing footprints in the snow? So basically a five-layered locked room mystery? This is what I want to see in a Ranko story! And now you're expecting me to say how disappointing the solution was and how it didn't live up to the set-up, right? You'd be right, but only partially. What Nikaidou does here is use tricks and solutions that are in no way new or original on their own: even beginning readers of the genre might have come across these ideas. But Nikaidou does show his craftsmanship in the way in which he uses those familiar ideas, as he combines very basic tricks with confidence and expertise to create this five-layered impossible murder situation. The result however is a story that fails to truly surprise at the conclusion, as almost all of the crucial parts of the solution are so recognizable. On the other hand, one have to admit that Nikaidou certainly showed skill in how he used these familiar elements to craft a locked room mystery that's still absolutely stunning in terms of premise, and far more than average in turns of clewing. I would have preferred a completely original solution of course, but at least this story manages to solve this five-layered locked room in a plausible manner, and doesn't resort to really bad solutions.

Ran no Ie no Satsujin ("The Murder In The House of Orchids") is set after the events in Jinroujou no Kyoufu and Haou no Shi, when Ranko has returned from Europe back to Japan, as a single mother raising her son Aran. She runs an art gallery in Karuizawa together with Reito, now a married man and also a news journalist. Ranko had stopped her work as a private detective so she could focus on raising Aran, but with Aran two years old now and her sister-in-law Noriko around, Ranko is starting to feel the need for mystery solving again. It's Noriko who has a mystery for Ranko: her friend Kaori is engaged with Karai Shinji, son of the famous artist Karai Leonard. Leonard was a true prodigy, but also very loose in his relations with women, often fooling around with his models. Twelve years ago, when Shinji was still a child, Leonard died due to cyanide poisoning, though it was deemed suicide. Some days later, Shinji's mother called her sister saying she had killed Leonard, and she too took her own life with cyanide, inside a locked room within the orchard house in the garden. While the scandal had been suppressed, the deaths (and possible murders) of his parents has weighed heavily on Shinji's mind, preventing him from taking the next step in his relation with Kaori. Kaori wants Ranko to find out what happened twelve years ago to ease Shinji's mind, and as Ranko is also asked to sell Leonard's remaining work through her gallery, she and Reito make their way to the House of Orchids and start digging in the past.

The story itself mentions it already, but Ran no Ie no Satsujin is very much inspired by Christie's Five Little Pigs: the plot of an investigation into the suspicious death of a womanizing artist a decade or so ago by asking the witnesses to recall the day of the death is basically the same. Unlike Christie's story though, that focused on the psychology of the suspects, Nikaidou's story is built on a core involving a locked room mystery (the death of Shinji's mother inside the locked orchid house), combined with a poisoining plot (of Leonard). I find it difficult to judge this story. My main gripe is that the story is very, very long and as the basic structure mirrors Five Little Pigs fairly closely, leaving few surprises there, and as the narrative's mostly talking about events that happened many years ago, things move very slowly. The locked room mystery is workable and very cleverly clewed, but has trouble standing out amidst the constant talking about the past, and has trouble actually leaving any impression because it's snowed in between the boring parts. The poisoning part of the story however is basically impossible for anybody to solve, at least, not with a chain of reasoning with a solid foundation, as no way anybody is going to connect those dots. There are some good points to it, but I wouldn't call it fair.

Aoi Mamono ("The Blue Monster") too is also set after Ranko's return from Europe, but while Ran no Ie no Satsujin was still mostly a story that relied on classic mystery tropes like the locked room mystery, Aoi Mamono is much closer to the Labyrinth stories, with a rudimentary mystery plot mixed with grotesque science-fiction/horror elements in the tradition of the Sherlock Holmes' story The Creeping Man. Ranko is working on a case involving wild dogs attacking and killing two Caucasian men in Kamakura. Meanwhile, two children adopted by Doctor Moro'o plead for help with the police, claiming the doctor, known throughout the town for his ecccentric behavior and strange experiments, has gone mad and tried to kill them. While Ranko does use some kind of logic to explain the strange events portrayed in this story and it's arguably based on hints in the text, one can best read this as some horror story, as it's nothing special as a mystery story. The weakest link of the collection.

As a short story (novella) collection, Ran Meikyuu actually manages to give a fairly good idea of the sort of stories one can expect to find in the Nikaidou Ranko series. The opening story, while quite smaller in scale and not as impressive in terms of originality, does remind of the earlier Ranko stories, with her working on fairly baffling impossible crimes that you'd expect from the Golden Age. The second story in turn fits the scale of the other short stories in this series, while the final story is very reminiscent of the weird horror-science-fiction-mixed-with-detective-plots later in the series. The first story is by far the best, and while I'd consider none of them timeless classics, I have to admit I enjoyed reading about Ranko again, so I might go after the couple of books I haven't read yet in the near future.

Original Japanese title(s): 二階堂黎人　『ラン迷宮』: 「泥具根博士の悪夢」 / 「蘭の家の殺人」 / 「青い魔物」

Prism of Eyes

So in my review of Ashibe Taku's Double Mystery, I noted how it used the format of a physical book to bring an interesting experience: you could start from either side of the book, and it had a sealed section, which required you to cut the pages open yourself to reveal what was inside. With the ever-rising popularity of e-books, I really appreciated how the novel made use of certain qualities of the physical book which e-books couldn't imitate easily, and I mentioned a few other examples of neat ideas I had seen in physical mystery books in the introduction to the review that weren't likely to be seen in e-books soon.

The e-book as a format however is of course unlikely to disappear from our lives, as it has also brought mystery readers a lot of good. E-books, and modern print-on-demand services, have allowed rare out-of-print stories to come back alive for prices lower than a human sacrifice and your soul, and with issues like stock out of the picture, the price of e-books in general have also gone down. A handy e-book reader will allow you take a lot of books with you without actually having to carry the physical weight of each individual book, and handy features like being able to change font sizes, or to use dictionaries and set bookmarkers help the overall reading experience too. There are some other things an e-reader can't do of course (like easy borrowing and lending), and I do think that cover art has worsened a lot since the uprise of e-books, but that is a matter for another day.

For many I think portability is also a factor, as not only can an e-book reader carry more books, it is usually a bit smaller than a physical book too. As I mostly read Japanese books however, I find that Japanese pockets are usually even easier to take with me. Most Japanese novels I purchase are in the bunko format (A6), and that's a format that can easily fit in my coat jacket, and even when packed in the train or metro like a can of sardines, I can read with one hand and hold a hanging strap with my other.

I still do most of my reading in the physical format, with occassionally an e-book in between, but lately, I have noticed that my reading when dealing with e-books is less than ideal, and I wonder whether more people feel the same. While this is not exclusively something that has to do with mystery fiction, it does influence my reading of the genre. My biggest problem is that I simply remember less of what I've read when read something in e-book format. I simply don't absorb the text as good as when read from actual paper. I miss details, I seem less engaged when reading from my e-reader. When I read a physical book, I find it much easier to remember what I read, and also where/when. When you have an actual book, with pages you have to turn around, you have all kinds of things that help you remember story details and the flow of a story: from page number to the 'feel' of how many pages are left, to how many pages away you were from the chapter opening or the next chapter, or whether you read it on the left or right page (and where) and other physical markings like that one crease in the page. "Oh yeah, that happened on the right page, about halfway through the book" or "That was one or two pages after the chapter opening, right?". But when I read an e-book, it all becomes one big mess of indiscrete, nondescript words projected on a display, and I just can't read a book as well as I can with a physical book. As all "pages" on a e-book reader are projected on the same display, each page just... becomes one muddy image in my head and this extends to my memory of the story itself. With a proper mystery story, with proper foreshadowing and clewing, this is of course something less than ideal, and in general, I find myself less immersed in actually solving a mystery when in e-book form. Especially as times passes by, I notice that the memories of books I read on an e-reader some months ago, are less vivid and detailed than those of the physical books I read in the same period.

I also really miss being able to easily page through a book. I find myself going back and forth in mystery novels more often than in other books, as you'll often want to check on previous statements (which again, I can more easily remember where those passages are in the first place in physical books), but also diagrams and other useful pages. And yes, you can place bookmarkers in an e-book, but I find just placing my fingers between the two pages and flipping back and forth much more convenient than calling up a digital page one at a time, also e-books don't really allow you to check and compare two (or more) pages as quickly as in a physical book. I'll do some super-sneaky stealth-marketing here and mention The Decagon House Murders, The Moai Island Puzzle and The 8 Mansion Murders here. While I obviously worked on the translation of those books on my computer, on a screen, my own first reading experience with these books was in physical form. All three novel feature a number of floorplans and other diagrams and personally, I can't imagine myself actually checking the plans in detail and flipping back and forth if I had read these books as e-books, even though I most definitely did when I first read them as physical books and consider it part of the reading experience of these mystery stories. I've been reading the Toujou Genya novels by Mitsuda Shinzou lately, and there too I found myself constantly going back to the pages with the family trees ('cause Mitsuda has some CRAZY family trees in his book), but I might not even have bothered in e-book form because it's just not as convenient. The same with character name lists by the way: many books I read have such handy list, and I have to check them regularly as I am horrible with names, but again, I hate doing that in e-books. And you can imagine how I feel about foot and endnotes!

By the way, and this has nothing to do with the readability of e-books, but as I already mentioned The Decagon House Murders: people who have read the novel, will know there's one single sentence that turns everything around. In the Japanese version (which reads from right to left), this sentence was printed as the sole sentence on the right-hand page, so you needed to flip the previous (left-hand) page over to read that one sentence (it was the last sentence of the chapter, so the rest of the page was blank). It had a really crazy effect. I was sadly enough not able to reproduce this effect in the English translation due factors like word count and text mark-up, so I had to settle by placing that sentence at the very end of the left-hand page, which made sure the reader wouldn't see that sentence until the very last moment, as they were unlikely to see the sentence while flipping the previous right-hand page over. These games with the page layout to place certain sentences at certain spots on the page are of course also something an e-book can't really reproduce perfectly, due to the ability to change the number of words on a page and the font size.

So in general, I find myself only using my e-book reader for mystery stories if I have no other (reasonable) choice. I mean, if I can get a book for cheap digitally while a physical copy runs into the three digits, sure, I'm not going to complain, but I do notice that reading mystery stories on an e-book reader is significantly less enjoyable to me than in physical form, and I really do think it's a shame. I wonder if more people have trouble with reading e-books, or perhaps whether they find reading from an e-reader actually preferable (in terms of pure reading experience)?

Double, Double

"Wait a minute, let me get this straight: Twice came in and shot the teller and Jim Fell."

- "No, he only shot the teller, Jim Johnson. Fell is ill."

"Okay, then after he shot the teller, you shot Twice"

- "No, I only shot once"

"Twice is the hold up man"

- "Then I guess I did shoot Twice."

"Police Squad!"

Though the uprise of e-books is certainly noticable in Japan, it's always been a strong place for physical book releases, which is why it's not that uncommon for publishers to go just a bit further than a standard book release. For example, it's not that rare for manga (which are usually printed in greytones) to include one or two pages printed in color on better quality paper. Or for us mystery-readers: the fold-out map! Sometimes, when a diagram for a mystery story is just too large to be printed on one page, or too detailed to for a normal two-page spread (because it's hard to tell what's on the inside margins), publishers will print the diagram on a double-sized page with a fold. Other neat little things I've seen with physical releases is for example the use of different fonts for different narratives within a novel (something not possible with a lot of e-books as usually you can't have different fonts for different sections within one e-book), or even the use of different-colored paper for different narratives (the Japanese deluxe edition of the fantastic horror-manga The Drifting Classroom uses different colored pages depending on whether the part's about Earth, or the other world). The latter is of course something that no e-book can even hope to replicate, and while my experience with them is fairly limited to standard releases, I don't think many publishers working with a print-on-demand model can really pull something similar off.

One of the more interesting things I've seen Japanese publishers pull off are the 'sealed pages': in these releases, two pages are left uncut during the printing process, resulting in a sort of envelope which "seals" all the pages between those two pages. So it's up to the reader themselves to unseal them by cutting the pages open. I've seen this used in two novels in Higashino Keigo's Kaga Kyouchirou series for example (though technically, the sealed pages for both Dochiraka Ga Kanojo wo Koroshita and Watashi ga Kare wo Koroshita are for the post-novel commentary and not part of the novel itself), but also in the gamebook Famicom Tantei Club: Kieta Koukeisha for example. There's something really exciting about these sealed pages: the act of actually cutting open these pages to reveal what's inside feels special. Are you really ready to do this? Once you've cut them, you can't go back! It gives a book a once-in-a-lifetime experience and obviously, buying the same book used (and cut) won't give you the same sensation as cutting the pages yourself.

Ashibe Taku's Double Mystery (2016) is an interesting novel that also makes use of the sealed pages, but in an even more alluring way. As the title suggests, Double Mystery is about two mysteries, told in two distinct stories. The gimmick behind this book is that you can start from either side of the book: if you start from the normal side (that is, from right to left), you'll start with the whodunnit Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel. Should you however choose to start from the 'back' (from the left side), then you'll start with the suspense story Non-serial Killer. Anyway, you can start at either side, but both tales end in the middle of the book, where you'll find the solution to both stories within a set of sealed pages, which you of course are invited to cut open and read once you have read both stories.

Books and literature are a prevalent theme throughout Ashibe's work: sometimes it's a bibliomystery, sometimes it's a parody or pastiche of some Golden Age detective, and at other times his stories feature countless of references to literature or historical events and facts, but "texts" are something you always have to keep in mind when reading Ashibe's work, and as a fellow bibliophile, I certainly am often very much entertained by his stories. So the concept of Double Mystery, a mystery novel that actually makes use of its own medium as a physical book, allowing you read from either end and with sealed pages in the middle, is something that makes me very excited. I can imagine someone less into "books" as a medium might simply shrug and consider it's a mere gimmick, but I absolutely love mystery tales that actually make use of the unique characteristics of the medium, be it books, audio dramas, videogames or basically anything. In that regard, I'd give Double Mystery full points, as you simply don't see these kind of attractive ideas often anymore in today's market.

As the two stories come together in the middle, and the solution to both stories are sealed within the same set of pages, it doesn't take a genius to realize that the two narratives are indeed connected to each other, but arriving at the precise relation between the two stories might prove quite tricky. The recommended reading order by the way is to start with Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel and then continue to Non-serial Killer before you go to the ending, though the reverse order is also possible if you want a more tricker reading order, the book says, so that's what I did. The two sides are both fairly short by the way, more novelettes than full-fledged novels.

Non-serial Killer is touted as a suspense story and consists of the (private) online diary entries by "Bluewildpear", a freelance journalist for Independent News Agency.  When the father of the baby she was carrying died in a car accident after being overworked, Bluewildpear was naturally sad, but still: she had already broken up with him because she didn't think he'd be any good as a father, so it wasn't as dramatic as some might've thought. Kenta might've been a nice man and he might've been sincere when he said he was going to do better now, but the work he did at the film production company Fantascope Co. showed all she needed to know about his future prospects. But Bluewildpear's interests are piqued when she learns that more people working at Fantascope had died in accidents recently from what appeared to be overwork, from a gifted animator to a producer. She starts to think that these might not be simply accidents after all and starts digging, and slowly she figures out there's something connecting all these people. What's funny by the way is that the text here is printed horizontally, from left to right (Western convention) like you'd normally see on a Japanese website, while the other story is printed with the lines vertically from top to bottom, like most Japanese fiction is written.

In Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel, attorney Morie Shunsaku is invited to a private viewing of a film that was thought to have been lost. The show will be held at the Chinese Lute Hotel, located on a tidal island, similar to Mont Saint-Michel. When Morie arrives at the hotel however, he learns that four other people were invited here too, but all for different reasons. By the time they realize they have been lured to the island, it's already too late: high tide has swallowed the road that connected the place to the mainland, making it into a true island (technically a car might make it through, but the salt of the sea water will ruin the car, so nobody wants to try it out). The one employee of the hotel has also disappeared, but in their stead the five guests find a sixth, unwanted guest: Judge Chidi'iwa. Morie knew the judge from the Nanase Incident, in which he as defense attorney more than sufficiently made it clear there was insufficient proof to convict his client, but where the judge still ruled a guilty verdict, all just to protect the 99.9% conviction rate of Japan's prosecutors. The judge's narrow-minded rulings had also ruined the lives of the loved-ones of the other four guests, and it's then that Morie realizes what is going on: in And Then There Were None ten people were lured to an island to be killed one by one, but here, five potential murderers were lured to an island to kill one and the same hated potential victim. And while Morie at first thinks it's impossible that normal people would suddenly resort to murder, he finds he's wrong when the judge is found hanged, and what's more, it appears that only Morie himself could've committed the murder!

So when you're done, you're clear to cut the sealed pages open and find out who the murderers are in both Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel and Non-serial Killer. While both stories are actually fairly simple (and Non-serial Killer isn't even a real whodunnit, but a suspense story) and there's no mindblowing trick performed here, I do have to say that Double Mystery does something neat with the double narrative structure. The two stories are obviously connected, by finding out how is done pretty interestingly, and the narrative of Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel in particular manages to pull of something that would've been impossible to in a normal, straightforward narrative, but works wonderfully in a split-up narrative. Could this only have been pulled off with two narratives that work towards the middle, instead of for example the two narratives one after another or with alternating chapters? I do not think so, but I do think the idea works better by having the actual physical seperation of the two narratives, so the way Double Mystery was printed is definitely the best way for this idea to work. The clewing in Murder at the Chinese Lute Hotel is a bit lacking, in the sense that the jump from one admittedly good clue to the deduction of the decisive attribute of the murderer is rather big, but one the whole, I think that Double Mystery was quite enjoyable, that managed to elevate an okay, but short and simple mystery story to a higher level by making excellent use of the medium.

Double Mystery was thus an enjoyable read: while the core mystery plot might be not as grand as one might expect from the concept of this book, it's still a solid mystery that still makes meaningful use of the idea of having two seperate narratives and a sealed section. I can't deny that I had hoped for something even bigger, as the idea behind the book is absolutely fantastic, but I guess my expectations might've been unreasonably high. Still, the book itself managed to turn a mystery story that otherwise might've been less impressive into something bigger, and in the end, that for this story, this form might be the best and I can't deny it was a fun experience. I'd love to read more mystery stories that make use of the format!

Original Japanese title(s): 芦辺拓　『ダブル・ミステリ』

Designs in Crime

I will well and faithfully serve Her Majesty and Her Heirs and Successors according to law as a police officer, I will obey, uphold and maintain the laws of the Colony of Hong Kong, I will execute the powers and duties of my office honestly, faithfully and diligently without fear or favour to any person and with malice or ill will towards none, and I will obey without question any lawful orders of those set in authority over me.

"Hong Kong Police Oath"

I myself have also worked on books with titles that aren't straight translations from the original source title, but with slightly different titles, but sometimes, the change in titles of translated versions seems rather... extreme, and there's not even a hint of the original title left. What's even more vexing is when the original title can't even be found on the copyright page....

In the five decades of his life that Superintendent Kwan Chun-dok had dedicated to the Hong Kong Police Force, the man had acquired the reputation of having the best mind in the whole force, with his colleagues referring to him with nicknames like the "Crime-solving machine", "Eye of Heaven" or "Genius Detective". Kwan had seen it all: from the 1967 leftist riots of those who opposed British colonial rule, to the showdown with the two Shek brothers, the most wanted criminals in the late eighties and the uprise of technology and information as weapons used by the underworld in the new millenium. Even after the official end of his career, Kwan Chun-dok remained retained by the Hong Kong Police Force as a consultant, as his analytical gifts were too precious to give up. And even on his death bed, Kwan seems to be invaluable to the Hong Kong Police Force. As Inspector Lok seeks the help of his mentor one last time in what seems to be an unsolvable case, we also turn back in time to see some of Kwan's past exploits in Chan Ho-Kei's 2014 novel 13.67, which has been released in English as The Borrowed.

How susceptible are you for hype? Chan Ho-Kei's 13.67 from Taiwan was published last year in Japanese, and it was extremely well received with both mystery readers and authors, and saw loads of authors like Ayatsuji Yukito heap praise upon the novel. Seeing the title pop up all the time of course piqued my interest, and I learned the book had already been available in English for about two years with the completely different title The Borrowed, while it was also available in various European languages (often with the title Hongkong Noir). It was also then that I realized that I actually already had a book lying around by Chan Ho-Kei, the Hong Kong-born, but Taiwan-located author who also goes by the English name Simon Chan. The Man Who Sold The World (2011) had won the second Soji Shimada Award and my own take on the book was that it was an okay, but not exceptional mystery novel that did had an interesting, not-often seen setting with Hong Kong, so while I was not completely sold on Chan's mysteries, I was still planning to read 13.67/The Borrowed some time. And some time is now.

And to start with the conclusion: this is indeed a great interlinked short story collection! The original title 13.67 refers to the five decades worth of Kwan's adventures the reader is presented with: the first story is set in the year 2013, and each subsequent story jumps back in time, to an earlier period in Kwan's long career, until it ends back in 1967, in the formative years of Kwan as a detective. This plot device of the reverse chronology really gives this book its flavor: the first time we see Kwan, he's in his dying days, but we do learn about his reputation. Each following story jumps back in time and in his career, telling us more about him and his working methods. It's also neat to see characters or references pop up as we go back in time: in the 2013 story for example, we see Inspector Lok as a capable detective who would make his mentor proud, but as we return back in time we see how he was in his rookie days. Or what at first seems to be an off-hand reference to some exploit in Kwan's past career suddenly turns out to be the subject of the next story in real time. As we jump back in time, we also see Hong Kong change of course, and technological advancements are also rewinded, resulting in interesting, differing conditions per story.

What makes The Borrowed really a satisfying read is how it really succeeds in marrying the social school of mystery fiction with the classic puzzle plot. The reverse chronology is a way for Chan to show the tumultuous history of Hong Kong: sociopolitical issues like (Western) British citizens living in Hong Kong, the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong and the aforementioned 1967 Leftist Riots play an integral part in the stories, and they provide unique backgrounds and motives. But while Chan does delve into these unique socio-historical issues to Hong Kong, he doesn't forget to actually plot and clew a proper mystery. While the presentation of these stories are definitely set in the social school's distinct realism, the actual core mystery plots are what you'd expect from classic puzzle plot stories, with ingenious tricks used by criminal masterminds and a great police detective in the form of Kwan who calmly analyzes all the clues available and reasons his way to the solution.

The Borrowed is brimming with variation, as Chan skilfully uses the changing time periods of his stories to write different type of mystery stories. The opening story for example, The Truth Between Black and White, has Superintendent Kwan bed-ridden and in a coma when Inspector Lok gathers all the suspects of what seems to be an-inside-job-made-to-look-like-robbery inside Kwan's hospital room. As Kwan himself can't directly communicate anymore, a special device that can read brain waves is attached to his head, allowing the man to move a cursor to either YES or NO on a display. What follows is a unique kind of armchair detective story, as Kwan has to lead Inspector Lok's investigation while only being able to indicate YES or NO. While the scale of the conclusion of this murder case is a bit big for an opening story I think, it serves as an interesting introduction to the character of Kwan.

And as I said, one thing this book definitely offers is diversity. Prisoner's Honour (set in 2003) for example deals with what might become a gang war between two rivaling triads and the attack on a female pop singer enjoying the patronage of one of the triad bosses. While this might sound like some hardboiled gangster movie story with the police desperately trying to keep things in control, the conclusion provides a surprisingly logical solution to the problem. The fifth story, Borrowed Place (set in 1977) on the other hand deals with the kidnapping of a British child for ransom money, while the finale story deals with some bomb terrorists in the 1967 Leftist Riots. Both stories too are good examples of stories that you wouldn't immediately connect to a properly clewed puzzle plot mystery based on the premise alone, but that do manage to scrath that itchy craving for logical puzzle plots perfectly.

The best stories are the two in the middle: The Longest Day (1997) starts with the escape of the convicted Shek Boon-tim during a hospital visit. It was Kwan who got him in prison years ago, but it seems Shek was intent on sullying Kwan's last day before his retirement. While the Hong Kong Police Force is busy looking for the feared criminal, Kwan's disciple Lok is also busy working on a series of acid attacks in Hong Kong, with an unknown person throwing acid at unsuspecting shoppers from flat building roofs. The deductions of Kwan of how Shek managed to escape his guards and then elude the police chasers are properly clewed, while he also manages to make sense out of Lok's case. The Balance of Themis is set in 1989 and also involves the Shek brothers. In 1989, the (then Royal) Hong Kong Police Force was staking out the Ka Fai Mansions, as they knew younger brother Shek Boon-sing was hiding in a room there with two other accomplices, awaiting the arrival and orders of the gang's mastermind Shek Boon-tim. But somehow the gang found out they were being observed, and in the subsequent shoutout in the building, not only all three criminals were shot dead, but also six innocent bystanders, and policemen were also injured. Not only had the stake-out turned into a total failure, it appears there was a mole within the police, as in the following investigation, a handwritten note was found in the gang's hang-out that warned the criminals to flee at once, turning this into an Internal Affairs matter. The story has some neat "historical" touches (the uses of pagers by the criminals!) and the way Kwan deduces who the mole was and how they were involved with the whole plot is great, leading to more than a few surprises.

So I'm happy to say 13.67/The Borrowed turned out to be a very satisfying read. Chan manages to provide a lot of variety within this volume, both by using the unique setting of Hong Kong throughout various periods to present a stage that probably feels fresh to a lot of people, but also by writing clever puzzle plot mysteries that are firmly set within these changing time periods: the mystery plots not only utilize the time period both as a 'background' for flavor, but also by addressing issues that are unique to the time. The result is a novel that keeps on surprising the reader until the very end. I think the book's also very accessible for a variety of readers: I myself really focused on the puzzle plots, but with its focus on the police force and the Hong Kong underworld, there's also plenty here for people who like police procedural or hardboiled mystery fiction, and the unique background of Hong Kong is certain to entertain people who enjoy the socio-cultural aspects of mystery fiction.

Original Taiwanese title: "13.67"

Black Coffee Rag

「オレは今、オレ自身の２つの問題で精いっぱいさ。コーヒーはなぜ、黒いのか？ そして‥‥なぜ、ニガいのか‥‥？」

『逆転裁判3』

"Right now, I have my hands full with my own two questions. Why is coffee black? And why... is it so bitter...?"

"Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations"

Coffee is something I don't see as much as a tasteful beverage, but more like a practical drink for its caffeine. Ice coffee however is a completely different story, as I love that.

Famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is asked by the famous scientist Sir Claud Amory to come by his house as he is facing a problem he himself can not solve. Amory had created a formula for a new explosive, but then he discovers that someone in his house has stolen it, probably to sell to a foreign agent willing to pay much for it and he needs Poirot's grey cells to figure out who did it. By the time Poirot and Hastings arrive at stately Amory manor though, it's been too late: Sir Claud had been poisoned through his black coffee. Was it the thief of the formula who murdered the man, or was there another person intent at taking the inventor's life? Hoping to at least help Sir Claud in his death, Poirot decides to investigate the manner of Sir Claud's demise, as well as of the theft of the explosive formula in Charles Osborne's Black Coffee (1998).

Black Coffee was originally a play written by Agatha Christie herself in 1930 featuring her famous creation Poirot. The play was not very well-known among Poirot fans, but in 1998, Charles Osborn wrote a novelization of the play, giving Black Coffee new life. When I first heard about this book, I have to admit I was not very interested, as it was "just" a novelization by someone else, and even though the source material was by Christie herself, I have to admit I was never that much a fan of the other plays by her I knew (like The Mousetrap or the other Poirot plays). Of course, now we're several years later and as I know all the other Poirot stories now, I thought that perhaps trying Black Coffee out could not hurt (yes, I know, I didn't exactly go in with really high expectations).

That said though, there is very little to say about Black Coffee, as it is an incredibly simple story, and even in novel-form you feel it was made for the theater. The whole set-up (Poirot being called to find a thief/murderer among a small household) reminds a lot of the Poirot short stories The Under Dog and The Incredible Theft, and Black Coffee is basically simply another variation on that theme. In terms of scale, Black Coffee is also barely a short story worth of plot, so that strengthens the similarities between these stories. As a mystery story, Black Coffee is nothing special at all, which is once again something this story shares with the Poirot stories mentioned, as I suspect few view them as the highlights of the Poirot short stories. Christie for example makes use of a device in regards to the whereabouts of the formula that was probably already old and over-used when this story was written and most of the rest of the tale consists of Poirot asking people questions that don't seem to lead anywhere. Black Coffee is definitely not Christie gold.

I can't compare the novelization to the original play, but you definitely can tell that this story was originally a play. Most of the story takes place inside the room where the murder took place, with all the characters moving in and out of the room to suit the plot. Of course, every time a person is all alone in the room, they'll act suspiciously for no apparent reader but to show the reader they're suspicious, I guess the novelization is probably faithful to the play in this regard, and it shows it respects the source material, but I had definitely preferred some more variety. This is a novel, so you don't need to incorporate every element of the play, especially if it's something that probably only exists because of the limitations of a medium. One might say that the final solution with Poirot works better if the whole story is set in the same room, but I don't think the effect is weakened that much if we'd see even a bit more of the outside world, and in any case, the prologue is in fact set outside the room (in Poirot's apartment to be exact), so I don't think it would've hurt that much.

I had hoped I'd be able to write something more substantial about Black Coffee, but there's so little I can say about it. Black Coffee is a full novel, but the core plot mystery is just barely enough for a short story in truth, as it's quite simple and nothing special, and certainly not something I'd consider a Christie classic (and she has written some great short stories!). The novelization is also, I suspect, quite faithful to the original play in being mainly set in one location, but this again strengthens the feeling of this being a short story being dragged out to a full novel. had this been a short story, Black Coffee would've been a mediocre effort of a mystery story. As a full novel, it's simply tedious and nothing special, and not even Poirot and Hastings can save it.

The Wrong Shape

As I peruse the mystery blogs and the comments on the posts, I have noticed a trend among both bloggers and commenters that seems to suggest that most people seem to prefer the full-length novel over the short story. For me, it is quite the opposite. If I had to choose between the two forms, I'd definitely go with the short form. We're not talking about specific novels or short stories here by the way, I am merely talking about the format, so yeah, I might miss out on reading specific titles, I find that in general, I enjoy the brief form better when it comes to mystery fiction.

If I had to word my motivation, which is probably what I should do on a blog, I'd say it's because as a consumer of mystery fiction, I usually focus mostly on the core mystery plot: what is the mystery, what is the solution, and what is the logical thinking process behind the route from mystery to solution? If you read the reviews on this blog, you will notice that most of the time, I will be talking about the core plot. What were the dynamics behind that locked room mystery? Was the solution a complete original, an original variation on something familiar, or perhaps an uninspired rehash? Was the perfect alibi trick really possible done like that? Was the everyday life mystery alluring enough without being too out-of-the-ordinary? Was the clewing adequate enough for the reader to have a fair chance, or was there perhaps an incredibly subtly hidden, original clue? Was the logical process leading to the solution doable, and adequately clewed, or was it only possible if you had knowledge of a super-obscure piece of trivia, or was the jump from the clues to the solution too big? It's these things that I look for when consuming a mystery story in whatever medium it may be, and my memories of stories also tend to focus on that: "Oh yeah, that was that story where the murderer, victim, detective and witness all turned out to be the same person!" or something like that. Characterization and atmosphere are elements that can add to my enjoyment of a mystery story, but there are relatively low on my priority list.

Short stories, due to their limited format, usually excel at focusing at the core mystery plot. They need to be word-efficient, and there is no time for the plot to be moseying around for philosophic moments, scenery-chewing or over-endulging in side-plots. There has to be a mystery, there need to be clues, there needs to be a solution. By the time that's all in, a short story is usually already almost done, and then it's up to the author to carefully add in some salt and pepper, or perhaps remove a bit of the garnish to finish up their dish. So for someone like, the short story is ideal, as its priorities are the same as mine as a reader.

There are of course mystery plots that don't do well in short story form, as they need the extended runtime to perform best. To be as cheeky as to refer to a work I translated: The Decagon House Murders's core plot wouldn't have worked in a short story form, as the misdirection that is set-up in this novel really needs the runtime to have full effect. But in general, I think that if we reduce a mystery novel to its core mystery plot, you'd find that most of them would work as well, or even better in short form, if we're talking solely about presenting a mystery story. Many novels have a core mystery plot, like some trick or a concept, that would also be wonderful for a short story, but which are then extended with subplots, or uninspired red herrings and misdirection. You might have a locked room mystery for example, and that one suspect who acts all suspicious and whom the police investigates thorougly until they find out he not only had a grudge with the victim, but that he's also a stage magician and after a chase and a shoot-out and more, we find out at the end that this suspect had nothing whatsoever to do with the locked room mystery and that nothing of his subplot mattered to the core plot. In these cases, the core plot really doesn't need all the subplots to work properly, and could perhaps fit in a short story.

Another thing that happens often is that there's a second or a third murder, and that usually wouldn't fit in a short story naturally. But these subsequent mysteries are seldom really connected to the core mystery plot, when seen abstractly. To get back to my hypothetical locked room mystery, perhaps it is followed by a second locked room murder, with the victim being someone who happened to witness the murderer doing something suspicious. In this case, the two murders might connected at a story-level (motive), but they aren't necessarily at a mystery-plot level. Unless the first locked room murder trick must produce a witness for it to work for example, the two locked room murders could work independently, in different stories. Earlier, I reviewed Mitsuda Shinzou's Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono and the Detective Conan episodes titled Koureikai W Misshitsu Jiken, and praised them as fantastic examples of synergy in mystery stories: both stories consisted of multiple impossible murders, but what made them exceptional was that in both stories, these were not discrete events at the mystery plot level: each seperate mystery was intertwined with the other, and they needed each other to actually work. Seperating them was impossible, as they were connected at the core. Nikaidou Reito's monsterous lengthy novel Jinroujou no Kyoufu has quite some fluff, as it's four-times-seven-hundred pages long, but now I think about, a large number of the impossible murders that occur there also only work because of the existence of the other murders. This concept of synergy however is not common in mystery fiction. Usually, you only have seperate modules placed one after another, that can easily be disconnected as there's no real link between the previous mystery or the next mystery. So often when I read a novel, I feel the core mystery plot (in this case, the locked room mystery) could've been reduced in short story form (perhaps spread across several stories) just as well.

Ironically though, I feel that the type of mystery stories that I like best doesn't do as well in short story form. I know some prefer locked room mysteries (and other impossible mysteries), but I often think those often work better in short story form. In comparison, I usually consider the Queen-esque, ratiocination-based whodunit stories the pinnacle of the genre, but they usually don't fare as well in short form. As I explained in a post on clues in mystery fiction, these type of mysteries usually want you to identify a large number of characteristics of the culprit, and then have you scavenge the text to see which suspects answer the description. Such mysteries have you for example deduce that the murderer was right-handed, that they had to know about a certain fact before a certain moment and they had to have access to the murder weapon, and then you search for clues that show what the dominant hand is for each suspect, and whether there's a part that proves they knew about the fact or not, et cetera. As these stories are not as focused on mechanics like locked room mysteries, but more on contextual clues, these stories thrive by having longer texts, as they help the misdirection and possibilities for clewing. There are of course also short stories that focus on ratiocination in this style (like for example Aosaki Yuugo's shorts), but in general, I think the real masterpieces of this style work better in novel form. An interesting example of both these points might be The Moai Island Puzzle (yes, shameless self-promotion here): I can easily imagine the locked room mystery of this novel as a short story, but the other mystery core (which is solved through a long deduction chain based on characteristics and actions) works because all the clues are spread across a long text.

The second point of irony here is of course that this post on short stories has become far longer than I had planned. There's still some more I'd want to talk about, like the interlinked short story collections (where the short stories are linked by an overall storyline) as seen in videogames like Gyakuten Saiban /Ace Attorney or in the works by writers like Awasaka or Yamada, but perhaps that's something for in the comments. Anyway, I'd love to hear some thoughts on the short VS long form for mystery fiction!

Go Your Own Way

運命のルーレット廻して

アレコレ深く考えるのはMystery

「 運命のルーレット廻して」（Zard）

Turn the roulette of destiny

It's a mystery why I think so deeply about everything

"Turn the Roulette of Destiny" (Zard)

In my review of the very amusing 3DS mystery game Detective Pikachu, I talked about the trend of episodic videogames: a videogame that is like a single episode of a longer series. An episodic game is considerably shorter than the usual videogame (and also cheaper, of course), but also a part of a larger, contineous series. These games are therefore released in a more frequent schedule than conventional videogames. This format is somewhat similar to the serialization of novels as an ongoing service with a limited schedule, but with key differences: episodic videogames can stand on their own for the most part, while installments in serializations are usually not standalone and simply excerpts from a longer story. An episodic videogame is ideally both vital part to the whole series, but should also feature its own storyline that is mostly resolved within that particular episode.

Buddy Collection is an episodic mystery videogame developed by Narutrick At the time of writing this review, the first two episodes of five have been released on PC, iOS and Android (for free!), but last month, an enhanced version of the first episode was also released on the Nintendo Switch (not free!), with the new extended title Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- ("Buddy Collection If -The Red String of Fate-", 2018). The game starts with the female protagonist awakening in the hospital, suffering from amnesia. The girl, Nagisa, is told she's a student at a special high school for detectives, with the curriculum not only including theory classes on various topics of use for detectives, but also practice classes where the students get to work on real cases (you need to earn credits to be able to take on real cases). Nagisa lost her memory while investigating a case, but that was not the only thing she lost, as she also lost her "buddy": the school works with a buddy system, where two students have to work together on cases, but her buddy has disappeared now. While Nagisa belongs in the Special A Class, she is now moved to the E Class so she can recover from her ordeal. Her first school assignment is a three-day "camp" to practice on closed circle murders: she and three other E Class students are locked up in a special underground complex made for these classes, and they are to role-play a closed circle murder situation, with their teacher playing the victim in what appears to be an impossible murder. The students are assigned roles and have to deduce who the murderer is and how it was done, while the teacher plays the game master when not playing dead. However, the next morning the students find their teacher has really been murdered, hanging high up in the sky from red threads from the ceiling of the underground complex, precisely like the scenario in their role-playing game. With the doors to the surface being locked, the player has to take up the role of Nagisa, wisely pick out a new buddy and find out who the murderer is.

Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- is marketed as a lite-otome & mystery novel game, which probably needs some explaining for some readers here. First of all: a novel game (also known as sound novel or visual novel) is basically a digital Choose-Your-Own-Adventure: you are mostly reading a linear story, but once in a while, you'll be presented with choices, which lead to branching storylines. In order to reach the end of the game, you need to find the correct route (combination of choices), as a wrong choice/branch storyline usually leads to a game over screen. The novel game genre has a long history with mystery games and I have reviewed a few of them here on the blog (for example Kamaitachi no Yoru, 428, Machi and Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P). In Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito-, you'll be solving the case through these CYOA-esque choices, with some choices/branching storylines leading to vital clues or evidence (or you missing them by making the wrong choice) and sometimes you have to decide on your next step. While it sometimes can feel a bit like random guessing, as you never really know where a certain choice will lead you until you actually select one, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- actually does a good job of giving the player a good chance of making it through the game alive in one go if they pay attention. The correct choices are quite logical, and it never feels like you need to make a random choice that surprisingly turns out to be the good one.

I also said this game is a lite-otome game: otome games are story-driven videogames targeted towards women, that usually focus on a protagonist developing a romantic relationship with one of the eligible characters (within the context of the story). These games usually take hints from various game genres, like simulation games (gotta level up those parameters to impress the guy you want!) or novel games (making certain choices to develop the relationship). Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- is very lite-otome, as early on in the story, Nagisa has to choose a new buddy from one of the three other E Class students. This leads to three Buddy Routes, where you mostly interact with your chosen buddy and where you learn a bit more about their personalities and background stories. These three buddies also each have their own working styles, so the mystery plot also changes slightly depending on which buddy you choose, though all three routes will eventually bring you to the same conclusion. Basically think of it of having to choose between Watson, Hastings or Goodwin at the start of the story, with the ending being the same, but the way towards the conclusion being slightly different because of the different personalities. It bring some replayability to the game, as once you have chosen a particular Buddy Route, you won't learn much about the others, inviting you to try the other routes too.

As a mystery game, Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- is a short, but ultimately fairly satisfying experience. The mystery plot is a bit simple perhaps, especially as some of the choices you have to make to proceed in the story are bit obvious (Choice 1: Expected. Choice 2: Not Surprising. Choice 3: OBVIOUSLY SIGNIFICANT CHOICE), but the story is adequately clewed and due to some of the characters' personalities, things become far more exciting that you'd first expect. But as this is an episodic game, there are also quite some issues that aren't resolved within this episode, as they'll be addressed in subsequent episodes (for example, the mystery of how Nagisa lost her memories in the first place is left unanswered, and even the motive for the culprit in this first episode is still rather ambiguous, suggesting it will be explained later).

This enhanced version on the Switch added the word If to the title, indicating it was more than a simple port from the original (free) version on PC/iOS/Android. Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- adds a new short storyline, with two new buddies. This storyline titled Detectives VS Culprits is a parallel world to the main storyline (it happens instead of the main storyline) and has the students participate in a variation of the Werewolf/Mafia party game, with two students playing the "Culprits" who have to kill a detective each night, and each day, the Detectives, including the Culprits who pretend to be Detectives too, have to execute someone they suspect is a Culprit. The Culprits win when they outnumber the Detectives, and the Detectives win if they execute all the Culprits. It's a short and entertaining story that shows some of the characters from the main storyline in new ways, but it's also a really mean storyline, in the sense that unlike the main storyline, it is intentionally designed to trip the player up at every corner. The game actually warns you before you begin, but it's basically throwing many, many choices at you that almost all lead to a game over screen, so it's quite difficult to find the correct route here (especially as I encountered a recurring game bug that either froze the game or booted me back to the title screen at a certain point in the story).

While those bugs late in the game were quite annoying, I did have fun Buddy Collection if - Shukumei no Akai Ito- though, even if it was a very short-lived experience (two, three hours?). The mystery plot, while simple, betrays the love of the creators for the mystery fiction genre, and this first episode hits just the right notes of both providing a story that can stand on its own, but that also invites you to play the other episodes to find out more about the overall storyline. I for one hope the other episodes will be released soon too.

Original Japanese titles(s): 『Buddy Collection if -宿命の赤い糸-』