Ever After

 Made from a tree, 

But he's like you and me!

"Pinocchio: The Series"

Now I think about it, I have probably seen much more of Pinocchio: The Series (the Tatsunoko anime) than the Disney adaptation...

Don't forget: Netflix will be releasing the adaptation of the first book Akazukin, Tabi no Tochu Shitai to Deau ("And On Her Way, Little Red Riding Hood Met A Corpse" 2020), and it's directed by the person who also did 33pun Tantei!

After safely delivering her basket and solving a couple of murders along the way, Little Red Riding Hood returned home to her mother. One day, she happens to pick up a wooden arm lying by the road, left by two cats and a fox who were struggling with something inside a bag. To Little Red Riding Hood's big surprise, the arm can actually move on its own, and when she gives it a pencil, the arm starts to communicate: the arm belongs to Pinocchio, a wooden marionette who dreams of becoming a real boy, but some foolish life choices later he was sold off to a circus to do a living wooden puppet act: the fox and cats Little Red Riding Hood saw earlier were actually dragging Pinocchio back to the circus after a failed escape attempt, and his arm was accidentally left behind. Little Red Riding Hood's mother, quite aware of her daughter's rather sharp mind, tells her daughter to help the poor boy and get him out of the circus. And so Little Red Riding Hood's off with an arm in her basket as she travels the world to retrieve Pinocchio's body and help him become a real boy, but the way to the end of their quest is long, and along the way, she of course encounters fantastical murders she has to solve in Aoyagi Aito's 2022 short story collection Akazukin, Pinocchio wo Hirotte Shitai to Deau ("And After Picking Up Pinocchio, Little Red Riding Hood Met a Corpse").

By now, you should now the drill with these Once Upon A Time short story collections by Aoyagi. Akazukin, Pinocchio wo Hirotte Shitai to Deau is the fourth book in the series. The first and third books, titled Mukashi Mukashi Aru Tokoro ni, Shitai ga Arimashita ("Once Upon A Time, There Was A Body", 2019) and Mukashi Mukashi Aru Tokoro ni, Yappari Shitai ga Arimashita ("Once Upon A Time, There Really Was A Body", 2021) respectively, had Aoyagi turn well-known Japanese fairy tales and fables into puzzle plot murder mysteries, where the magical and fantastical of the original stories were used in surprising ways to present wonderful detective stories. The second volume however was about Western (European) fairy tales and fables and also had a slightly different set-up: whereas the "Japanese" volumes featured short stories which were not related to each other besides their themes, the four stories found in Akazukin, Tabi no Tochu Shitai to Deau ("And On Her Way, Little Red Riding Hood Met A Corpse" 2020) all formed one larger narrative together and featured a recurring detective character in the form of Little Red Riding Hood, who was travelling with her basket and who usually had to solve the murders along the way so she could continue with her journey. The fourth volume in this series follows this same set-up, with four stories (+ one intermezzo) that form one narrative about Little Red Riding Hood and (parts of) Pinocchio travelling together as they try to retrieve the marionette's body and make him a real boy.

Mokugekisha wa Deku no Bou ("The Eyewitness is a Wooden Boy") starts with Little Red Riding Hood finding Pinocchio's arm and learning about his predicement, so she quickly stuffs his arm in her basket and makes her way to the nearby town, where the circus is. She eventually watches the show and sees how Pinocchio (without one of his arms) is forced to do an act, but when she demands his release, Little Red Riding Hood is thrown out of the circus tent. She returns home with Pinocchio's arm to contemplate their next move, but the following day, Little Red Riding Hood is visited by the police, as the fox Antonio has been murdered in one of the circus tents last night, and there was an eyewitness who states Little Red Riding Hood was the killer. And this witness happens to be... the head of Pinoccio, a boy who can't lie or else his nose grows. And thus the weird situation arises where Pinocchio positively states Little Red Riding Hood is the killer of Antonio, even though she's here to save him. I have to admit I have never read Pinocchio or seen any adaptation completely, so I only know bits and pieces, a scene here and there. But while the idea of Pinocchio, a boy who can't lie, stating Little Red Riding Hood (our protagonist) is the killer, is a pretty funny to use pre-existing elements. In this story, we learn that Pinocchio had been taken apart as a punishment for messing up his act earlier in the day, and a series of accidents led to his head being in the tent just as Antonio was being killed, but so much of this mystery plot, about how Pinocchio could've "witnessed" Little Red Riding Hood commit the murder, hinges on elements that, as far as I know, don't come directly from the original Pinocchio story, so you can easily guess that these original elements will feature in the mystery one way or another. Which makes it a rather simple story, and where you also feel the story strays too far from the original Pinocchio story, taking away a lot of the charm. So I thought the opening story rather weak.

Onnatachi no Dokuringo on the other hand stays much closer to the source fairy tale and is also much more fun. It is a kind of inverted story, where we first learn about Hildehilde, a beautiful girl born in a village of witches, but who had no talent for witchcraft herself. She eventually ran away from her home village, with her mother's magic mirror, which allowed her to see anything she desired. Hildehilde eventually married the king of the Apfel Kingdom, who already had a daughter Snow White from a previous marriage. While things were good between Hildehilde and Snow White eventually, things soured after the king's death, and now Hildehilde sees no other way but to kill Snow White. However, the hunter she hired to kill Snow White betrayed her, and now Snow White is living with the seven dwarves in the forest, a fact she learned through her magic mirror. She now still plots Snow White's death. Little Red Riding Hood, having retrieved Pinocchio's head in the previous story, is still after the rest of his body as it was stolen at the end of the story, runs into one of the seven dwarves, and is invited for a meal at their home. Hildehilde witnesses all of this through her mirror, and eventually comes up with a plan to poison Snow White with a poisoned apple, but how will her plans go? This is a funny inverted-type of mystery, where we follow both Hildehilde and Little Red Riding Hood. In the Hildehilde side of the story, we see how the queen uses information she sees via her mirror as clues to come up with her poisoning plot, while in the Little Red Riding Hood parts, we follow a plot where first one of the dwarves is killed and Little Red Riding Hood slowly realizing what is going on. Telling more would be spoiling the best parts of the story, but this is a huge improvement over the first story, for while things like Hildehilde's backstory and everything may be original inventions, the core mystery plot makes good use of familiar elements like the magic mirror and the poisoned apple to present a fun 'battle of the wits'.

Little Red Riding Hood's quest then brings her to Hamelin in Hamelin no Saishuu Shinpan ("The Last Judgment of Hamelin"), where 45 years ago, the Pied Piper took away the town's children after the town refused to pay his reward for saving them from a plague of rats. The Pied Piper however was caught, and kept imprisoned in the town prison all this time because the laws don't allow for a death penalty. The Pied Piper has since then always played the mandelin every evening from his prison cell (they don't dare give him a pipe instrument). The people in Hamelin also always play music day and night, a kind of superstition as they are afraid of the same tragedy happening again so the idea is they'll drown out the Pied Piper's luring music. There is still a kind of curse hanging over the town though, as there are still next to no children born natively to the town. Little Red Riding Hood arrives just in time for the Hamelin Music Festival and becomes friends with some of the town council members, when on the first evening, everyone is warned: the Pied Piper has somehow escaped his prison, and killed a guard on his way out. Little Red Riding Hood has to figure out how the Pied Piper managed to escape his prison and how to catch him next. While this story is set decades after the original story, it still builds really well on the lore of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with a town that is still visibly affected by the fact all the children were spirited away by an eerie tune almost fifty years ago. The mechanical explanation of how the Pied Piper managed to escape his prison isn't really impressive, but the explanation of why now, why he escaped after 45 years of imprisonment is good and is a good continuation of the original story.

The final story, Nakayoshi Kobuta no Mittsu no Misshitsu ("The Three Locked Rooms of the Three Little Pigs"), brings to Oinkburg, a town founded by the three little pigs. The town is divided in three sections with buildings made of straw, wood and bricks, as originally the three little pigs each built their own houses using those materials. And the whole town is full of factories, where.... other pigs work. Or technically, these are humans turned into pigs. The three little pigs have teamed up with a witch, turning humans into pigs and having them work as slaves in their straw/wood/brick factories to pay back their debts. You're supposed to be changed back into a human once you have paid back your debt, but of course, nobody has ever managed to do that. To the outside world however, the three little pigs pretend to be good businessmen who have started their own town with a good running economy, so they try to play nice to the tourists visiting the town, like Little Red Riding Hood. At least, that is only at the beginning, for Little Red Riding Hood soon notices there's a rift between the three little pigs, three brothers in fact, about how to run the town, and when one of the brothers is found dead in a straw house, she immediately suspects it's a locked room murder even though to the others, it seems just like an unfortunate accident of the victim falling on a knife. This isn't the only murder to occur in the town however, for soon a locked room murder follows inside a wooden building, and another in a brick building... This is a story that shares a lot of the points I didn't like about the opening story, in that while the idea of three locked rooms in buildings of different materials is fun, a lot of how these mysteries are resolved hinge on elements completely original to this specific story, which means they stand out and make it really easy to solve them. Both the straw and wooden locked rooms are solved within seconds, and even the brick one, which involves a brick wall being made in front of the (inward-opening) door) is solved rather too quickly, and that one is also clewed rather sloppily. There's more to this story in regards to mystery, as this story also involves the climax of the whole Pinocchio storyline, and Little Red Riding Hood herself is put in mortal peril as she's forced to confront the person who stole Pinocchio's story. This is similar to the finale to the previous collection, which also has Little Red Riding Hood having to use her wits to escape a dangerous situation, and while it's fine as a finale to the collection, it still feels a bit underwhelming in terms of surprise and cleverness. 

So all in all, I thought Akazukin, Pinocchio wo Hirotte Shitai to Deau was actually the least entertaining collection of the four released until now. While I love Little Red Riding Hood as a protagonist, and I think the middle two stories are really good at staying close to the source material while also spinning a good mystery story out of it, the opening and finale stories just feel just a tad too distant from the source fairy tales/fables, adding too many original elements that stand out, making it far too easy to guess what the story will do with those elements. Whereas the Snow White and Pied Piper of Hamelin stories stick closer to the source material and build on elements already seen in the original stories, which mean these elements don't stand out nearly as much, making them more surprising when you do see how they were used to facilitate the mystery. I'll still read this series as long as Aoyagi keeps on writing them, as on the whole, it's an entertaining series, but this one was clearly not as strong as previous entries.

Original Japanese title(s): 青柳碧人『赤ずきん、ピノキオ拾って死体と出会う』:「目撃者は木偶の坊」/「女たちの毒リンゴ」/「ハーメルンの最終審判」/「なかよし子豚の三つに密室」

The Door-to-Door Deception

Gave it all that I got

And started to knock

Shouted for someone to open the lock

I just gotta get through the door

"Gotta Knock a Little Harder" (The Seatbelts)

It's not as bad as how it went with Kubinashiyakata no Satsujin, but still, I wrote this review 12 months + a week after reading the book. And then the review still had to wait a few months for publication! In the time between me writing this post and it getting published, they actually announced a live-action drama is in production, which will start airing in July and it's directed by none other than Tsutsumi, the director of the original Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo drama series, Keizoku and of course Trick!

Knockin' On Locked Door is the title of a 2016 short story collection by Aosaki Yuugo, the name of the title story in said collection and the name of the detective agency run by Gotemba Touri and Katanashi Hisame, though their part-time assistant/housekeeper Kusuriko will probably argue she's actually one trying to get the agency to be succesful. While both Touri and Hisame can be a bit eccentric in their own ways, the unique part of their agency is that the two detectives are very specialized and that they are in a way equal co-workers, but also minor rivals. For Touri specializes in impossible crimes (howdunnit), while Hisame focuses on inexplicable crimes (whydunnit). Each time a new client arrives at the agency, both detectives of course hope they'll be the one to handle the crime, as the other is usually just forced to play assistant for the other and thus have the most boring day ever, though on lucky days, they come across cases that require the abilities of both these detectives. Occasionally, they meet with old acquaintances: Ugachi is an old college classmate who is now a police detective, though she's usually not a big fan of seeing her old friends again nosing around at her crime scenes. Another old college classmate is also in the business of crime, although that is literal: unlike the previous crime-fighting trio, Mikage has chosen the path of the criminal consultant, planning crimes for others to commit, and occasionally, their paths cross, finding themselves on opposite sides.

Knockin' On Locked Door is in a way a book with a very rigid formula, as the stories basically always utilize either a howdunnit or whydunnit focus, or a combination of both. The idea of multiple detectives with different methods can be fun, like seen in Morikawa's Hitotsu Yane no Shita no Tanteitachi ("Detectives Beneath One Roof" AKA Two Detectives and One Watson), where the two detectives were bascially the Ant and the Grasshopper. Or a book I only recently reviewed: Sailor-Fuku to Mokushiroku features the trio of Kyouko, Mizuki and Marii who all focus on different aspects of a crime: Kyouko focuses on the whodunit, Mizuki on the howdunnit and Marii on the whydunnit.This approach however is very different from Knockin' On Locked Door: in Sailor-Fuku to Mokushiroku, the three detectives focus on the same mystery, but from different angles. Knockin' On Locked Door however isn't about the angle from which a crime is examined, but it's the intrinsic type of the mystery that determines whether Touri or Hisame will take the initiative in the investigation. This sounds better than the actual execution however. For obviously, each story will still feature both characters and most stories try to have something to do even for the detective who is forced to play assistant, but it's seldom you really feel it was really necessary to split up the questions of howdunnit and whydunnit across characters, and the synergy between the two elements isn't always as strong.

In fact, it's the opening story Knockin' On Locked Door that does this the best, and while this sounds very negative (don't worry, the book is overall really good), I did think it a shame the book almost peaked right at the start. The two detectives are asked to investigate the death of an artist, who was found murdered inside his locked atelier. Which doesn't make sense, because why wasn't the death dressed as a suicide if it was in a locked room anyway, and why were the paintings thrown across the floor and only one of them painted red? Thus we have a mystery that is both a locked room (the impossible) with very weird features (the inexplicable). The synergy between these two elements is at its best in this story. While the exact why is rather hard to guess, but the way how the why actually explains how the locked room was executed is brilliant, and the trick behind the how is quite clever, yet simple too. Together with the next story, the best story in the collection.

The second story, Kami no Mijikaku Natta Shitai ("The Dead Body Whose Hair Was Cut Short") I already read back in 2017 because it was featured in an anthology. The leader of a small theatrical troupe was found murdered in the small, soundproof apartment the group had been renting for their rehearsals. The body was discovered in the bathroom, wearing only her underwear and for some reason, her long hair had been cut short and been removed from the crime scene. Evidence seems to be pointing towards someone among her three fellow members, but why would anyone want to cut the victim's hair off? A case that is about the inexplicable, and the problem of the cut hair reminds of a certain mystery novel by a well-known Japanese author, the story itself is glad to tell you. I liked the story back in 2017 and now I still do, being very much a story done in the Queen-style as you'd expect of Aosaki. So a focus on physical clues and the state in which they are found, which tells us about what the culprit did or did not do. Some parts of the mystery might require a bit more imagination/guesswork than you'd usually see in a story in that format, but overall, the explanation of why exactly the culprit took the victim's hair with them and why she was left in her underwear in the bathroom is really good, and the story is despite it short length constructed really well.  

Dial W Wo Mawase! ("Dial W!") has a title that is a play on the Japanese title of Dial M for Murder and starts off with two different clients appearing at the agency, so Touri and Hisame have to split up and work on different cases: Touri is looking into the death of an old man who seemingly tripped and died on the street during a midnight stroll, while Hisame has to examine an old safe, which for some reason doesn't open despite its now deceased owner actually left clear instructions as to how to open the safe. The story is again short, so it doesn't really surprise when we later learn the two cases are connected, and I do think the connection is really clever: the death of the old man and the safe intersect in a very interesting manner, and logically explains why both events have occured. The reason why I don't think this story is as strong as the previous two is mainly because the initial split in "two" cases seems rather too obvious, as you just know right away the two things will connect in one way or another, and because the first half of the story focuses at two different investigations, things move rather fast and feel a bit underdeveloped, even in comparison to the other (all very short) stories.

Cheap Trick has Touri and Hisame investigate the murder of a company executive, who had been afraid for his life for a while. He was shot with a rifle in his study through the window, but because the man had been expecting an attempt at his life, he had thick, black-out curtains hanging in front of the windows, making it impossible for anyone outside to snipe them. Yet the man was shot in his study in his chest and found lying near the window, even though he was avoiding the window all this time. So how did the sniper standing beneath the window know the victim would be near the window to be able to shoot him, despite the curtains? It turns out this murder was planned by Mikage, Touri, Hisame and Ugachi's old classmate who know engineers murders for others as a consultant, making this case a personal thing too. Like the title suggest, this one is a pretty cheap trick, in the sense it's fairly simple to guess. Aosaki tries to make it a bit more difficult by adding one element, but even that's a bit too obvious. Not the strongest story in the collection.

Iwayuru Hitotsu no Yuki Misshitsu ("A Locked Room in the Snow In a Way") has Touri investigate the death of a man who was found with a kitchen knife in his chest lying in the middle of the snowy field that lied between his own workshop and that of his brother, with whom he had a big row. The only footsteps in the field are those of the victim (and the persons who found him in the morning) and there are no fingerprints on the snow. A classic no-footprints-in-the-snow set-up, and as you may expect, a lot of the story revolves around Touri proposing many familiar solutions (using the knife as a projectile etc.) to this old trope which get rejected until they arrive at the real solution. Which isn't super exciting on its own, but I have to say the misdirection going on in this story is fairly good, making a solution which without the context would be very disappointing, still a story that is saved by competent plotting.

Juuendama ga Sukunasugiru ("Too Few 10 Yen Coins") is perhaps better translated as The Ten Yen Coin, because it's a play on the Kemelman story The Nine Mile Walk. This story is the odd duck out, not following the usual story format. Agency assistant/housekeeper Kusuriko tells her employers about a strange phone call she happened to overhear, of a man on his smart phone. The line she remembers is "I have too few 10 yen coincs. I need five more." The line stuck with her because the 10 yen coin is worth so little (100 yen is basically the equivalent to 1 euro/1 dollar), so in what situation would you need specifically 10 yen coins, and in such an amount the caller would say they had too few of them and needed five more? Like The Nine Mile Walk, this initiates a discussion that allows the two detectives to come up with various explanations for this specific line and the intended use of these 10 yen coins, taking in account the precise context of the phone call Kusuriko overheard. It takes a long time for the detectives to arrive at the explanation which seems rather obvious to me, though I guess people who are much younger than I might find it more surprising? It's a story that may have been more surprising many years later from now, but I find it hard to believe that it's that hard to guess what this is about.

Kagirinaku Kakujitsu na Dokusatsu ("A Poisoning with Extreme Certainty") is about the death of a politician, who collapsed after drinking his glass of champagne during a speech. Poison was detected in the remainder of the champagne, but a check of the security footage shows nobody forced that specific glass of champagne on the victim, nor did anyone have any chance to put any poison in the glass after it had been picked. The murder is once again the work of Mikage, making this another personal case. Perhaps the least memorable story of the collection, and unfortunately, also the last story. The how of the poisoning can be guessed very quickly once you get through the initial investigative scenes, and from there it's basically a problem-free race to the finish. There are interesting ideas to the crime as regards to some of how it was all timed by the planner of the crime, but still, once you realize how it was done the rest of the mystery falls like a set of dominos.

But looking at the whole collection, I'd say Aosaki did a good job with Knockin' On Locked Door on the whole. If you're looking for depth however, this might not be your book: each story is really short (though usually structured well), with the characters basically just doing their usual two catch phrases/the same comedic act or something like that at the start of a story before moving on to the main mystery, but most of the mysteries are plotted well, and while I do think the book peaked with its opening stories, it's an excellent read if you're looking for something easy to read and yet crave puzzle plots. 

Original Japanese title(s): 青崎有吾『ノッキンオン・ロックドドア』: 「ノッキンオン・ロックドドア」 / 「髪の短くなった死体」 / 「ダイヤルWを廻せ！」 / 「チープ・トリック」 / 「いわゆる一つの雪密室」 / 「十円玉が少なすぎる」 / 「限りなく確実な毒殺」

The Moonstone Castle Mystery

誰だ？とびっきりのrivalは

どこだ？まじりっけなしの勇者たち

正々堂々 Say say do 

「くすぶるheartに火をつけろ!!」（影山ヒロノブ）

 

Who? My greatest rivals are  

Where? Heroes who aren’t impure

Fair and square, Say say do

"Light the Fire in Your Smouldering Heart!!" (Kageyama Hironobu)

A lot of the modern Japanese honkaku and shin honkaku works I discuss here, are written on the shoulders of Giants, and not alongside those Giants. By which I mean, many contemporary Japanese puzzle plot mystery novels are written with the concepts of Golden Age detective fiction in mind, but few are them are really "copies" in the sense that you'd mistake them for books actually written in the Golden Age and in fact clearly, build on the concepts. For yes, you may see the familiar tropes of Golden Age detective fiction from locked rooms to alibi tricks in these books, but there are numerous points that show that contemporary puzzle plot novels are indeed, contemporary, written in a completely different context than the books written in the actual Golden Age, besides the fact that many of these books are set in Japan of course. Take the time setting for example: many books are simply set in "the present", which in some cases means a full century since GAD! Normal consumer technology like smart phones and tablets are normal for us now as series like Detective Conan use them a lot in their puzzles, showing how fair-play puzzle plot mysteries don't only work in ye olde Golden Age with limited technology, but how one go beyond that. And then there's the meta-angle: a lot of contemporary mystery fiction from Japan is aware the genre didn't appear out of nowhere, but that there were Giants in the past, often building specifically on their works or themes. The Decagon House Murders (disclosure: I translated it) isn't even shy about its inspiration, featuring characters who have nicknames taken from Golden Age detective authors and a lot of early parts of the book revolving around their discussions of mystery fiction. But also think of the post-modern Late Queen Period problem, a theme Ellery Queen wrestled with in some of their later books, and which is incorporated in the works of Norizuki Rintarou and Maya Yutaka. Some books play with these meta-themes, subverting your expectations based on the work of the Giants, some try to develop a theme further. And another angle that shows these books are indeed not limited by the notion of what is "A Golden Age Mystery" (TM) is of course the way how mainstream it has become to incorporate supernatural or scifi elements in contemporary honkaku and shin honkaku mystery fiction: from fantasy settings like Wonderland (alice) or a world where alchemy exists to actual ghosts and other yokai existing, modern Japanese mystery does a lot to explore the idea of how broad the concept of a "fair play detective story" can actually be by using settings you simply didn't really see often in actual Golden Age mystery fiction.

And then there's Kagami Masayuki, who in the early 2000s basically said "Screw all of that, I am going to write the Golden Agiest mystery that ever existed!" (*unsourced quote).

Kagami Masayuki debuted in 1999 as a mystery author with several short stories he wrote for anthologies, but it was in 2002 he made his "big" debut with the full novel Sougetsujou no Sangeki ("The Tragedy at the Twin Moon Castle") and would continue on writing three more books and more short stories, but he died suddenly in 2013 in his early fifties. A short story collection collecting his uncollected stories was released posthumously, as recent as in the second half of 2022, making his bibliography list only five books long, which is a shame going by what's found in his first novel Sougetsujou no Sangeki. In a way, this book is incredibly refreshing because of the fact it really sets out to emulate a Golden Age mystery novel, and especially the work of John Dickson Carr. Carr's influence can be sensed throughout the whole book, but the interesting past is that Kagami, unlike many of his comporary fellow mystery authors, takes on this challenge of doing a Golden Age mystery novel on those terms alone. He faces the challenge face-on, with no narrative trickery, no fantasy or sci-fi background, no focus on comedy, no Late Queen Problems or meta-discussions on the state of honkaku mystery fiction. This is Kagami, saying "I am going to write 1930s style mystery story, exactly like Carr would have done and do it on those terms alone!" I have seldom read a contemporary Japanese mystery novel that is so... straightforward in tackling this theme and the result is surprisingly good!

Patrick Smith is an American with a mother of French descent and after studying in the old continent, Patricks moves to Paris, as that's where his uncle Charles Bertrand, a brilliant magistrate feared by all criminals, works and Patrick becomes Bertrand's assistant and chronicler. It's these books that lead to Patrick receiving a letter in 1931 from his old professor Neuwanstein, who is currently staying in the Twin Moon Castle, one of the castles in the Middle-Rhine region in Germany near the Lorelei. The Twin Moon Castle is the property of the Oelschlägel family, an ancient clan with a history going back many centuries. Traditionally, daughters are born in the family, and often twins too, and indeed, the current masters of the family are Karen and Maria Oelschlägel, and professor Neuwanstein is currently taking care of Maria, who is prone to having rather fierce mood swings. Other guests at the castle are the Hollywood actor Kurt Reinhart and his entourage. Reinhart has made it big as a "bad guy" actor in gang movies, but he actually grew up in the Twin Moon Castle, as his parents used to be servants here. When he fell in love with Maria however and tried to woo her, he and his parents were thrown out the castle. He's now back with his manager and a director, ostensibly staying at his old home while doing research on German castles for an upcoming film, but it's clear that's not his real goal, and professor Neuwanstein fears he's here to cause trouble and take revenge for what happened to him and his parents in the past. An unsuccesful attempt at poisoning led to the professor writing to Patrick, begging him and Bertrand to come to the Twin Moon Castle to investigate. 

Due to prior engagements, Bertrand is unable to go at once, so he sends Patrick in advance. At the dinner table however, Maria lets a bomb explode when she announces she's going to marry Reinhart and that's she's pregnant, which infuriates her sister Karen. The two fight and argue, and it's clear this will take a while. The following morning, Patrick wakes up to find a small group standing in front of the doors of the two towers that flank the main castle tower. On the left side stands the New Moon Tower, but the group is at the Full Moon Tower to the right. Last night, after their fight, Maria had retreated to the tower room at the top of the Full Moon Tower, but she hasn't been seen since and the tower door is locked and bolted from the inside. They break the door open, walk up the winding staircase to find the tower room door also locked from the inside. When they break that open too, they stumble upon a horrifying sight: a decapitated body lying on the floor. When they take a closer look, they find she was not only decapitated, but also de-handed, and near the body, they find the head and hands lying burnt on the floor. Only one window is open, but that one is facing the back of the castle, which is basically a thiry meter drop to the ground, which is then only three steps away from another 100 meter drop down to the Rhine. Considering Maria had her hands and head cut off and those parts were burned, it is clear she did not commit suicide, but how did the murderer escape as the tower door and the room door were locked from the inside, and the only open exit was a window looking down a very deep fall down? Or was the murder the work of the Black Knight, a legendary Oelschlägel ancestor who was killed by a gang of robbers, but who returned as a knight riding a flying horse to kill the men raping his daughters in the two twin towers and whose suit of armor is standing in the tower room to this day?

1930s setting, a medieval castle near the Lorelei, twin towers, a legend of a flying knight, suits of armors in the tower rooms, decapitations... Yep, you can tell whom Kagami was inspired by.

This is a pretty long novel, but it's stuffed with a lot of mystery goodness. The first murder (yes, first), is definitely the best: a woman murdered in a tower room, which is locked from inside, inside a tower which was also locked, and it is clear it was a murder due to the way in which they found the body, with its head and hands cut off and burned. The way the murder seems to mirror the myth of the flying knight who killed the ruffian raping his daughter in the tower room centuries ago is of course an added goodie. Basically the whole situation is absolutely fantastic as a whole, the high point of the novel. The trick behind this gruesome double-locked room for example makes great use of the unique setting, and while I personally would have liked to see an additional clue, it's still properly clewed and quite surprising. The motive behind why Karen was killed however is perhaps a bigger surprise, as it ties in fantastic with the way the murder was committed and why the murder was committed in a locked room in the first place. For this part alone, this book is already worth the read, because everything behind this murder works so well together in a way that is almost shocking, from method to motive and the whole appearance of the murder.

After the first murder occurs, Bertrand arrives at the castle, but not alone, as he's accompanied by Von Stroheim, a police inspector of the Berlin police force, but also an old friend and foe of Bertrand. During the Great War, Bertrand was an intelligence officer and his path crossed that of Von Stroheim many times, and during this skirmishes, they learned to respect each other very much. But Von Stroheim has never stopped seeing Bertrand as a rival, and this murder at the Twin Moon Castle seems like a good opportunity to see who is really the cleverest of the two. Von Stroheim arranges so he and Bertrand can also stay at the castle and in three days, they are to see who will come up with the more convincing explanation for this murder. At least, that was the original plan, but then more murders occur during their stay. And considering the castle is called the Twin Moon Castle and at this point, only one murder has occured in the Full Moon Tower, you can of course guess the next one happens in the New Moon Tower, and yep, it's another locked room murder. This time, they find the tower room of the New Moon Tower locked from inside, and when they peek inside, they see the decapitated head of the victim lying on the floor, with the key of the room in his mouth. The body, sans head, they find stuffed inside the suit of armor that belongs to this room. This locked room situation isn't as good as the first as a whole, though it has a lot of interesting ideas. Some parts miror the first murder in an interesting way for example, feeling like a "twin" to the other, but some parts seem overly... complex while the murderer really didn't have to do all of that to achieve the same effect. I think a lot of the seperate elements of this second murder are good and as a mechanical locked room, it has memorable parts, but it would have perhaps worked better in a different context, but here some parts of the whole operation feel like they were only done because of the whodunnit angle of the book: a lot of this part is used later in the novel as hints to identify the murderer, and because of that, Kagami has the murderer do a lot that basically only serves as a way to lay a trail of clues, but it feels a bit too artificial here, because you wonder why the murderer go all that trouble from their POV. 

Surprisingly, even more deaths occur after this second tower murder, but they are fairly minor in comparison, and only the third one deserves a minor mention, just because how ridiculous (in the good sense) it is: as a murder trick, it's hardly realistic, but it's so funny to just visualize and as it's not the main problem of the book anyway, it can get away with being a bit silly. As a whodunnit, I think it's pretty easy to guess who did it, especially with the aforementioned clewing and some other parts that stand out a bit too much, but that's not really a problem here: it's the why and how that really make Sougetsujou no Sangeki a worthwile book. 

But the most memorable part, at least for me, was again the way it really sets out to be a Carr-like mystery novel, not just in terms of exterior style, but truly as a work that could've been written in the 1930s. It loses many of the familiar tropes of shin honkaku mystery fiction from the meta-tone to having a true 1930s place/time setting and does not try to really subvert existing mystery tropes and the way it valantly takes on the challenge is fantastic, as the end result is really the kind of novel you'd expect from a 1930s Carr, and it's overall a good one too! Had you told me this was a 1930s novel, I would have believed it. The most meta the book ever gets is Bertrand mentioning being a friend of a certain Dr. Fell from London, but that's it.

So I think Sougetsujou no Sangeki does a great job at what it sets out to do: to present a locked room mystery like John Dickson Carr would've written in the 1930s, and on those terms alone. The result is a book that feels refreshingly old-fashioned, especially considering all mystery stories with supernatural/sci-fi elements I have been reading recently, and especially the first locked room murder situation is a memorable one, so on the whole a fantastic first novel. At the moment, all of Kagami's novels are out of print and only the recently published short story collection is easily available, so I'm a bit dependent on whether I see these books passing by for a reasonable price, but you can bet you'll see more Kagami discussed here!

Original Japanese title(s): 加賀美雅之『双月城の惨劇』

The Creeping Creatures

    月光も　凍てつく森で   

   樹液すする　私は虫の女

「蛹化(むし)の女」（戸川純）

In a forest where even moonlight freezes

I drink sap from the trees / I am an insect woman

The Insect Woman (Togawa Jun)

Before I forget it again: here's the semi-regular "Hey, there's a Honkaku Discord server so join it!" message!  

Mount Otome lies just outside of Shimoyama City and is nearly 2000 meters high. 120 years ago, a man called Kichibei went up the mountain to look for mushrooms, but after making it to one of the higher points of the mountain, he fell off a cliff, but he miraculously survived: he happened to land on a protruding part of the steep rock wall, halfway down the 100 meter fall down to the ground. This ledge was small however, and nothing was growing on it. With no tools available, Kichibei could not climb back up, nor down the steep rock wall. Opposite the ledge was a cliff, and from that point eventually other villagers saw Kichibei was stuck on the ledge on the opposite rock wall, but nobody knew the exact way to the cliff above Kichibei, and there was too much of a distance between the cliff and the ledge to get food and water to Kichibei. Eventually, Kichibei had to survive by eating cicadas landing on the ledge, which didn't help his state of mind: Kichibei eventually jumped off the ledge, thinking he had become a cicada himself.

120 years later, and a duo of illegal loggers on Mount Otome are attacked (fatally!) by a Cicada-Man. Hearing rumors of the Cicada-Man roaming Mount Otome, Furuba, a teacher at Shimoyama Middle School, decides to ask the help of girl detective Sharaku Homura and her Watson Yamazaki "Karate Kid" Yousuke in a matter that has weighed on his mind for decades. Furuba loves mountain hiking, and forty years ago, he climbed Mount Otome. On the way to the mountain lodge, a little building where hikers can rest and buy food, one has to pass by the cliff opposite "Kichibei's Ledge" as it was called nowadays. When Furuba made it to that point however, he noticed a man lying on the ledge and from the way it looked, the man was very much dead. But Furuba also noticed other particular points: two trails of footsteps could be seen in the snow on the cliff above the ledge, both trails leading to the very edge of the cliff. One was obviously of the victim, but the other set of footsteps seemed to suggest someone came up from behind, and pushed the victim down! But both trails only lead to the edge, and none go back into the woods, so where did the attacker go? Furuba also notices a few footsteps in the snow surrounding the victim on the ledge, which he first assumes belongs to the victim, but upon second thought, he realizes the footsteps are in rather odd places and pointing the wrong way. The footsteps thus appear to belong to the attacker, but if so... where did the attacker go, for they are not seen on the ledge? Furuba would eventually get help from the people at the mountain lodge, but he never figured out the mystery behind the footsteps, and unfortunately, by the time the police came, the snow was already gone, washed away by rain. 

Furuba decides to confide this story to Homura forty years later, because the rumors of the Cicada-Man gives him a frightful thought: a Cicada-Man would have been able to simply fly away from the ledge after attacking the victim! Furuba brings Homura and Karate Kid along on another trip to see the ledge for themselves and it so happens the other people who were with Furuba when they found the body forty years ago are also on the mountain today. After a preliminary investigation, the three stay at a small hotel on the mountain, but during the evening, the hotel manager is called by someone calling themselves the Cicada-Man, telling them to check the private onsen (hot spring bath) to find a "nice" surprise. The surprise is a guest who has been stabbed in the back! But the bathroom was completely closed and locked from the inside, making this a locked room murder, Who is the Cicada-Man and why is it killing all these people?

Ever since I first started reading the Sharaku Homura (Sharaku Homura: Detective of the Uncanny) series by manga artist Nemoto Shou in 2018, I've been a big fan of this brilliant, fair-play mystery series. This is a self-published series (a dojinshi) about the adventures of the girl detective Sharaku Homura and her assistant Yamazaki "Karate Kid" Yousuke, combining Scooby Doo/Edogawa Rampo-esque set-ups with villains dressing up in creepy/silly costumes to scare their victims with almost devilishly delicious impossible crimes. Starting 2018, major publisher Bungeishunju (Bunshun) had been making this series available to a wider audience by publishing e-books bundling multiple issues. At the moment, Bunshun has published four volumes with these impossible crime-focused puzzle mysteries, but at the core, this is still a self-published series, so Nemoto Shou has also been publishing newer issues on his own, which eventually will get bundled again probably. Semi-Otoko (2023) or The Cicada-Man is the latest issue in the series, a massive 170-page comic which Nemoto has published on his own Note page (available here). It's also one of the best stories in the series I think, coming quite close (though just not as good as) the phenomenal Hagoromo no Kijo ("The Ogress With the Robe of Feathers").

The story is really long for this series' standards, with a 100 page set-up which introduces three major mysteries (the ledge murder, the bath room murder + one more thing), but there's also a lot of other things going on, and what is definitely the most impressive about this story is how immensely dense it is. A lot is going on, but it never feels boring, nor does the plot meander: basically every single page will be crucial to the mystery one way or another, and it's a sheer delight to read such a mystery-focused story. Had this been a novel instead of a comic, it would definitely be rather lengthy story in order to cover all the plot set-ups, clues, foreshadowing and other brilliant plays by Nemoto. The fact he can make it appear so easy due to the visual medium, is not just because of the medium, but because Nemoto is just that good at presenting his plots in that specific form.

Few mystery stories, regardless of medium, will be this focused on the mystery in fact. Nemoto somehow manages to not only present multiple core mysteries, but also play with fake solutions: characters will not only propose solutions that you as the reader may be thinking about to, but also properly discard them based on evidence. As I mentioned earlier, basically every page will be used one way or another to help the mystery, and it's surprising how many of the panels are also used to provide evidence how certain solutions can't work! Discussing fake solutions and also having proper evidence to prove them wrong has always been a strong point of Nemoto's plotting, but with a story 170 pages long (the part until the Challenge to the Reader is about 100 pages), you can bet he can do a lot more with that. And yes, as per series tradition, there's of course a Challenge to the Reader, for if there's one thing Nemoto likes, it's writing fair-play mystery fiction. As always, you'll come across a lot of page references during the denouement, pointing you back to all the pages where you completely overlooked the clues upon initial reading. A lot of the clues, as per custom, are visual, with some of them really good.

Surprisingly, my favorite part of the story was the locked bathroom murder. While it happens relatively late in the story, and I honestly didn't like the initial reveal of the solution, I became more and more impressed by it as the explanation continued. The trick itself is quite original (though I guess I know a variant on it quite well) and while at first I thought it was a bit unfair, Nemoto soon proved me wrong as yes, he had laid down a lot of clues pointing to that solution (especially visual clues), and I had simply completely overlooked them. And keeping in mind how he clewed the solution, and the surprising solution itself, I think this will be one of my favorite locked room tricks I'll read this year. Another prime example of how mystery fiction isn't just about a solution, but about the path towards that solution. The ledge murder is one that has a trick that feels a bit silly, but I have to admit it was clewed properly and considering the specific conditions, I can imagine it happening like that, so overall a good idea, though on the whole not as impressive as the bath room one, even though the ledge murder is the "main" mystery of the whole tale.  The story has more to offer, and it'll surprise you how very little things that pop up very early in the story, come back at the end in very unexpected ways. I am just repeating myself at this point, but the way Nemoto plotted this tale, not just in terms of "a mystery & solution" but especially in terms of clewing and foreshadowing, is excellent.

So yep, Semi-Otoko is definitely one of my favorite mystery reads of this whole year! I think it'll take a while before Nemoto has done enough issues to make a fifth volume, but I am sure this will be the highlight of that volume! As I said earlier, you can read it for free from Nemoto's site (available here), so be sure to do so!

Original Japanese title(s): 根本尚（札幌の六畳一間）「怪奇探偵 写楽炎　セミ男」

Radio Suspect

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon 

Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned? 

Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains?

"Colors of the Wind" (Judy Kuhn)

One of the traditions of the Kyoto University Mystery Club is the whodunnit story, where a member will write a two-part mystery story (the problem and the solution) and challenge the other members to solve the problem part based on the clues in the story. This game is usually done in a physical format, i.e. the session leader hands out a printed copy to every person participating. With everyone having access to a computer, printer and photocopier (either at home or campus) nowadays, this is of course very easily done, but this wasn't the case when the Mystery Club first started. The earliest Mystery Club whodunnit stories were done, well, basically manually: members wrote their stories by hand (because even word processors weren't available then) and usually, the leader had to read the story out loud themselves, with everyone in the room just listening carefully to the story. It's a thing that's always interested me, because I like mystery fiction in all kinds of media, yet I haven't experienced much mystery media that was specifically created for as an experience to listen to. Sure, I have listened to audio dramas etc., but few of them were original audio dramas, and even fewer actually feature a mystery plot that makes use of the audio format.

So I had been curious to the game Unheard - Voices of Crime (Steam/Switch) for some time now, as it was a mystery game that focuses a lot on audio. In Unheard, you play an "Acoustic Detective" who is tasked to look into a few past cases, but from a sound-based angle. As the Acoustic Detective, you can review a case by listening in on conversations of all the related parties of a case, taking place during a period of  of 5 ~ 15 minutes long. You are also provided with a tablet with a floorplan, where you can see where everybody was at a certain point of time. As the detective, you need to solve the mystery of each case, ranging from theft, bombings and murder, by eavesdropping on everyone, figuring what everyone's doing and thinking at what time, and finally figure out, whodunnit, all based on audio clues only.

Well, that's not entirely true, as the floorplan (a visual clue) for each case is also very important.

 

Anyway, Unheard - Voices of Crime is a very short game, but it's pretty interesting, and certainly has an original angle. In essence, Unheard - Voices of Crime is quite close to other deduction-focused mystery games like Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol: you are shown a certain scene playing out (in the case of Unheard, you mostly listen to a scene), and from the clues picked up in that scene, you are asked to deduce certain facts, like who is who. In the case of Unheard, you'll be handling a few cases which are all about something quite different, from a theft to a bombing, but you are usually given two major tasks: one is to identify every person you hear in the case, and secondly, figure out who did it (and usually a few sub-questions). Each new case you'll be given a list of names, but you don't know which names belong to what voice. On the floorplan you'll see indications where a certain speaking voice is coming from (the sound source), but you don't know who this person is initially. So it's up to you to deduce the identities of everyone who plays a (speaking) role in the game. Sometimes, it's as easy as simply overhearing a conversation where the two persons address each other by names, but in other instances you'll have to do a bit more thinking yourself, like deducing a name by eliminating the other possibilities (by assigning the names to others). As the Acoustic Detective, you can only overhear conversations (or people talking to themselves) if you move your icon to the same room, near the person(s) speaking at the right time, meaning that if you are listening to character A talking in one room, you might be missing out on an important conversation going on in a different room. Fortunately, you can always rewind (or fast-forward) in time, and by eventually listening to everyone speaking, you can connect all the dots and figure out who is who through all the clues dropped in those conversations. The audio makes some use of binaural audio by the way, so it's recommended listening to the game with headphones. The game was originally Chinese, but has full English and Japanese localizations, so the audio is also in those respective languages, which must have been a rather big task for a relatively small scale game.

Identifiying each character however isn't enough, as each case is... about a case. A case that needs solving. This second part of each case is the trickier part of the game, because you are tasked to solve for example a bombing just by listening to everyone, but it's not like there's a character who says out loud "I am the bomber, I am now pushing the button to set the bomb off!" You thus have to listen to all the conversations going on, and try to pick up clues to indicate what exactly happened. I described this as tricky, because all you have are sounds, which leads to some interesting mystery solving segments. For example, you can't see two persons passing objects to another, you can only see sound sources on the floorplan approaching each other and them greeting each other. So the game does require you to think a bit differently than you're likely used to in most mystery games. It's definitely what makes Unheard a unique experience, because this kind of focus on audio is basically never seen in mystery fiction, even though it has so much potential.

I do have to say though, that the potential is also not really fully explored in this particular game. It's really short with just a handful of cases (of which two are basically tutorials), and most of the mystery of each case can really be solved by just... listening at least once to every conversation made. A lot of the initial mystery of each case just comes from the fact you haven't listened to anything yet, but once you have heard all the conversations playing out across the floorplan, you'll already have figured out 75% of all the problems you need to solve each case. There's not really a change in gameplay or clever ways to make the puzzle-solving more challenging: it's basically just each case becoming more difficult because there are more characters who talk more across a longer period of time, meaning there's just more to do each time. The 'explanations' of each case once you've solved it are also very meagre, basically only repeating a few key lines, and fleshing out the explanations/the proof might have given each case just a little bit more impact.

But on the whole, Unheard - Voices of Crime was a pretty fun game, and because I picked up during a sale, I definitely think it was worth the price of admission, if not only for the very unique experience for a detective game. I hope we see more of these kinds of games, because there's so much potential for audio-based mystery fiction (with plots that actually make use of audio as clues/tricks etc.) and while I always thought the audio drama would make the most sense for that, Unheard shows that a game format is also very capable of using audio to present a fun, puzzle-focused mystery.

Uncivil War

"Avengers... assemble."

"Avenger: End Game"

So I will never forget that when I watched Avengers: End Game in theaters, just before Captain America said the line, a kid in the audience cried "Assemble!" just before Captain America could, kinda drowning him out...

Official crossovers between different mystery series from different authors are not non-existent, but they are certainly not common. And most of the time, you can guess that these crossovers will follow the familiar comic crossover pattern, which even people who don't read comics will be familiar with due to its usage in for example the Marvel Cinematic Universe: heroes first have a confrontation with each other due to a misunderstanding or shenanigans cooked up by the villain, and eventually the heroes work together to take the villain down together. But what if you had a crossover with various detectives who aren't series detectives? What if you had detectives with different powers (deduction methods) who would compete. Who would be the best one? That is the question in Nitadori Kei's Suiri Taisen ("The Great Deduction War", 2021), which also has the less interesting English title of Who is the Best One?. The grandfather of the two cousins Yamato and Meguru (the narrator) was a big fan of mystery fiction, and when he obtained a Christian relic, he saw his chance. He contacted several churches across the world and invited them to participate in a special game of wits, in which the winner would be awarded the relic. Yamato and Meguru were to help out with the game, but their grandfather passed away just before the game starts, meaning now they have to lead it together with the family attorney. What they had not expected however, was that the various churches across the world would send almost superhuman (or even non-human!) detectives to represent them in the big war for the relic. Yamato and Meguru had perhaps at best hoped for a Father Brown-esque person to participate in the mystery game their grandfather came up with, but instead, we have a detective who can detect lies just by listening to someone speaking, a detective with super-heightened senses who can see, smell, taste, hear and feel the smallest details, a detective who can "clock up" his brain to consider every possibility within seconds and there's even a detective AI! Who will be the greatest detective of them all when the game starts!?

Okay, this is one of those books that I basically bought based on the title alone, and a quick look at the blurb. Having detectives with different work methods duke it out sounds like an amazing premise, and whereas in series, you often end up with a foil detective who obviously isn't going to beat the series detective, or you have the crossover where "everybody has to win" at the end, having a single (standalone) work with different detectives, and giving them all a reason to want to win the game individually (because they are all hired to win the relic), sounds exciting, right? I had only read one other work by Nitadori before this one, Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu, which was a comedic book where each story featured a feat of narrative trickery, but with a much moodier cover and a more "serious" set-up, I was curious to see what Nitadori would do with the idea of a "war" between the detectives.

Though it takes a while before we get to the war! For the first half of the book is used to introduce the various detectives from the different countries, with all but one of the participants getting their own chapter/short story where we see them solve a case in their home country, using their own unique powers. The opening chapter for example introduces us to Charlotte, the "operator" of the AI Detective Judas, which can solve cases with its computing power, of course if and only if the correct and relevant data is entered in the program. Her case involves a rather interesting decapitation case inside a room which only one person had the key to, but it doesn't appear he is really the murderer, so how does this work out? This is a pretty clever locked room mystery, but it's not really realistic. I think the trick is brilliant actually, and like it a lot, but I hadn't really expected this trick in this book, and especially not as the opening story. I can imagine myself accepting it easier if this had been presented in a comic format or something like that, because I'm not sure whether this really works like this physically, and 'reading' the trick somehow feels less convincing than seeing it. The other introducing chapters are all relatively short, and usually revolve around a one-trick idea that is used to show off the different powers of the detectives. The Ukrainian detective Bogdan Korniyenko for example has "Clock Up" (no, he's not a Kamen Rider), meaning he can speed up his thought process and consider countless of theories and possibilities within a second (though this takes a physical and mental toll, of course). This not only means he can solve cases relatively fast, but he can also do things that normally would take hours and even smaller actions, like stumbling over something, could be avoided if he starts Clock Up to take the best actions "during" the fall. Maria from Japan has heightened senses, which is not super interesting because it basically only means she can find small clues normal people usually can't, while Brazilian Mattheus can detect someone lying with a 100% accuracy by listening to them. Each of their cases of course introduces an element that requires their specific powers to find certain clues or to make certain logical deductions, but I think that as a standalone story, the first one (AI Detective) is the most memorable, and the others are more "functional" than really memorable, so I'll not write more about them.

In the second half of the story, the detectives arrive in Hokkaido, where they are to participate in the game to win the relic, with the cousins Yamato and Meguru, and the attorney Yamakawa organizing the 'war for the relic', even though Yamato and Meguru don't really know what the game was their grandfather planned before his unexpected death: they only know the idea is that there'll be a battle of the wits between the detectives and that the winner will receive the relic. The detectives and the organizers are all staying in cottages in a snow-covered camp, divided in two sides by a river, but the snowfall is pretty heavy, covering large parts of the camp. The first day is just the arrival, but the following day, they find the attorney Yamakawa murdered in his room. It appears this is the game of wits, and the detectives are all eager to solve the murder of Yamakawa and obtain the relic for their employers. What follows is an entertaining back-and-forth of different theories about who the killer is and how the murderer managed to kill Yamakawa without leaving clear clues (like footprints in the snow). Each detective is intent on winning the relic, and because they all have different powers and don't work together, they all obtain different clues, which allows them to come up with different theories which of course point at different people. It reminded me a bit of Yamaguchi Masaya's The 13th Detective, which was originally a game book and at the start of the story, you can choose one out of three different partner detectives, who will lead you down a different path and allow you to find different clues (disclosure: I translated Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead). Here too you have different detectives competing, each holding on on clues only they have, with for example Mattheus being able to detect any person lying but of course not willing to share that information, or the AI Detective being able to make certain calculations no person can. Because the crime scene is on one side of a river, with an observed bridge, and some people staying in cottages on one side of the river and others on the other, there's also a nice "is it an impossible crime?" angle to it: if the murderer is one of the people staying on the side of the crime scene, how did they come up with an alibi (an impossible alibi [time] angle), and if the murderer was on the other side of the river, how did they make their way to the crime scene unseen (an impossible alibi [space] angle). This whole set-up is defnitely the best part of the book, with one case offering many solutions because everyone tackles it from a different angle, and while some solutions are a bit too simple, others are quite interesting and could've been used as "real" solutions too. And because we got the introductions of the abilities of the various detectives earlier, it also feels 'fair' in the sense we don't hear about Mattheus' lie detector ability midway.

Though I have to say, I was a bit disappointed not all the detectives' abilities are equal. An ability like having better senses, or have an AI do complicated calculations are still on the realistic side of things, and even a person being able to think faster is okay, but Mattheus can literally just sense people lying as if it were a mutant power, and a fifth detective introduced in the second half of the story has a power that is really far beyond anything realistic, so the balance is kinda off. The book is set in an, on the whole, realistic world, so having supernatural powers, rather than slightly better than normal human powers, felt a bit weird. The tone of the book is also a bit weird at times: it is not as blatantly funny as the other book by Nitadori I read (Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu), and most of the time definitely more serious, but there's also a lot of light-hearted banter, pop culture references and other comedic touches like the cheeky attitude the AI Detective has towards Charlotte, but it's not always funny, so like the detective powers, it sometimes felt like Nitadori didn't know exactly what the exact tone or setting of the story was supposed to be.

I have to admit though that when the battle for the relic has been fought and the war is over... the ending is not nearly as satisfying as the preceding parts. Of course, with all these detectives competing for the relic, the book needs to work towards a conclusion that gives everyone *something* and still resolve the matter of who gets the relic, but the final solution presented to the reader is not nearly as clever as some of the solutions presented earlier, and on the whole, it's not a solution I like in general. Sure, there were clues, but I have seen Nitadori use the same type of clues in this book and Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu in more convincing ways, so it was a bit disappointing to see a less impressing example used for the final solution. It's of course difficult to come up with different solutions for the different detectives, and a final solution to surpass those ones too, but the way it suddenly shifted towards this final solution was just too abrupt, and feels less polished compared to the much better build-up to this moment.

But despite a somewhat disappointing ending, I do like Suiri Taisen, as the parts introducing the detectives and having them compete each other is really fun. It's a book that worked because it was a standalone book though, because you really can't guess who will win and how, but I wouldn't mind seeing for example Bogdan Korniyenko return in his own book. Not all parts of the book are as good, so it's not a book I love unconditionally, but certainly worth a read!

Original Japanese title(s):  似鳥鶏『推理大戦』

Once Upon a Thriller

"The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat."

"The Masque of the Red Death"

There's something comforting about reading a book by someone you used to read a lot, but haven't in a while.

Oh, wow, my last review of a Higashino Keigo work dates from 2014? It's been a while! Higashino is an author I read a lot in the earlier days of the blog, and I am still of the opinion he's a great choice for those studying Japanese and who want to try to read their first books completely in Japanese, because his writing is really smooth and easy to understand (somewhat like Agatha Christie in English). But yeah, I haven't read very much of him lately, which can be attributed to two factors, I guess. One is that Higashino, especially nowadays, as a mystery author, is definitely more a 'broad entertainment' writer. Which isn't a bad thing per se, considering his huge success both in Japan and abroad, but Higashino's mystery stories are often written for a much broader audience than 'just' readers of mystery fiction, and his books are often written more as mainstream entertainment stories. Great material that lends themselves for countless of adaptations and the focus on human drama in his books are of course an element that have made him popular, but I have to admit I generally don't enjoy those stories as much, because I am a very boring reader who is content with just a puzzle plot and don't per se need human drama. Of course, I don't think all his earlier work is perfect and his later work rubbish, because I really don't (I love The Devotion of Suspect X!), but there's definitely a general shift towards the type of story I'm not looking for, so I hadn't really been reading his books the last few years. Which brings me to a second reason: only a handful of his works are available as e-books and he's one of the few authors still in print (and selling really well) whose works are basically almost only exclusively available on paper. So then comes the matter whether I really want to add one of his books to a physical book order, and often his books just end up lower on the priority list.

Anyway, so I finally got around to reading a book by him again. Kamen Sansou Satsujin Jiken ("The Masquerade Mountain Villa Murder Case") from 1990 is one of Higashino Keigo's earlier mystery novels and while the period setting definitely feels like late eighties/early nineties, in terms of style it feels quite modern, in the sense I could definitely imagine if Higashino had written this book with the idea of it getting adapted for the small or silver screen eventually. Of course, this book was written long before he became the super popular author he is now, so that's of course not the case, but you can definitely recognize how even among his earlier works, you can find mystery novels that were really written for a much broader audience than those who exclusively read detectives, being much closer to a thriller or a suspense novel, with a good dash of human drama. The book is set a few months after Takayuki lost his fiancee Tomomi, whom he first met when she caused a car accident that ultimately injured her more than her 'victim' Takayuki. They got to know each other after the accident, growing closer and getting engaged. The plan was to hold their wedding in the mountain villa of Tomomi's parents, a place they visited each year, but one day, after making arrangements near the villa for her wedding, Tomomi had a deadly car accident, driving her car of a cliff-side road. Several months later, Takayuki is invited by his parents-in-law to come to the mountain villa, as they intend to stay there a few days as they do every year, and the couple Nobuhiko and Atsuko would be honored if their son-in-law would come too. Other guests include Tomomi's brother Toshiaka, Tomomi's cousin Yukie, Tomomi's friend and mystery novelist Keiko, and Nobuhiko's secretary and physician. 

However, during the first night, two armed men manage to sneak inside the mountain villa and they take everyone hostage. The two men are bank robbers, and they had actually planned to stay in this villa for a day until their boss could pick them up. The mountain villas in this neighborhood are just holiday houses and often nobody's staying there, so the bank robbers hadn't expected to find any people in this villa when they picked it as their temporary hide-out a few days ago and made their own false keys. The two men decide to just stick to the plan and hold everyone hostage inside the house, keeping them all in the living room, while observing them from second floor balustrade. But as the stress starts to build among the hostages and they hope to find a way out, they start to realize that some of them don't think that Tomomi died in an accident, but that her death was orchestrated, and furthermore, those people think that the person behind Tomomi's death is right here! The two bank robbers are quite interested in this story as they have nothing to do anyway while waiting for their pick-up, but the following morning, after everyone was allowed to stay in their own room (one bank robber remaining in the hallway to watch all doors), one of the guests is found murdered in their room! At first it seems only the bank robbers could have commited the murder, but why, and nobody really believes they did it, so who of the house guests is wearing a mask and the real murderer, and how did they do it because they were all locked up in their rooms?

Ongoing hostage situation, mystery revolving around Tomomi's death and an actual murder occuring under semi-impossible circumstances? Yep, there's plenty of thrills going on in this book, and that's probably its best part. It doesn't take long for the two bank robbers to show up in the villa and take everyone hostage, and while the hostages are being held captive, one of the bank robbers gets really interested in the story of Tomomi's death, and how Keiko, Tomomi's best friend, suspects her friend didn't *just* drive off a cliff, but that somehow someone arranged for that to happen, and that it's likely that this person is someone Tomomi trusted, meaning one of the house guests. This is of course not really helping the team spirit, especially as more curious things are going on. The hostages, while being watched by the robbers, have some freedom, and some of them try to cook up plans to warn the police: two policemen have already come round the house, inquiring very obviously whether the people here had spotted the two bank robbers on the run, though obviously, the robbers held them under gunshot and made them lie about that. Still, they realize there might be someway to escape the villa and warn the police, but curiously enough, they find some of their attempts to warn the outside world, like a message written in the sand outside, erased by someone. Because none of the bank robber mention anything about their attempts, it seems they didn't discover the message, but who did? When the second night, one of the house guests is murdered in their room, the bank robbers swear they didn't do it, and after some debating, it does seem unlikely the victim would've let any of the robbers in their room during the night without making any noise and one of the hostages was also kept in the hallway, with the bank robbers, as an extra insurance, but she too says she didn't see the robbers go the room, so how was the murder committed and is the murderer then one of the other house guests? The story basically never lets you, or the hostages, rest, as there is always *something* going on, and that's why I mentioned earlier how this would be perfect as a television film.

How does the book fare as a mystery novel? Well, it's a bit uneven. There are some interesting parts, like Tomomi's death, or the semi-impossible murder in the villa, but a lot of those elements don't feel very satisfying as a mystery novel, because the clue-to-solution time is often rather short, so you don't really get that "Aha, so that's how it was!" feeling due to the short build-up time. The facts regarding Tomomi's death for example are given you in small bursts throughout the book, but the really important facts come relatively late. The focus of the book is more on the suspense angle, but I also feel like small things, like spreading the hints out more, or like a little diagram of the villa itself, would have helped the book a lot. The way the hostage situation with the bank robbers, and their involvement in the murder is eventually resolved is more interesting, though again, while certainly guessable, it's not like there were really well-spread hints or clues regarding the climax. Funnily enough, the bunko pocket release of the book includes a commentary essay by Orihara Ichi, who considers Kamen Sansou Satsujin Jiken to rank among Higashino Keigo's best three books, but he also hates the book. Why? It happened to feature the exact same trick Orihara himself had used in a manuscript he had been working on! Orihara tells how he bought the book on release and halfway through started to fear the worst, and it came true, and as Higashino's book was already released and all, he had to abandon his own book. Interesting to hear how two authors arrived at the same idea in a similar time period and you can tell how frustrated Orihara was when he knew the thing he had been working on had already been done just a bit earlier by Higashino.

I have the bunko pocket release, a format which generally comes with a slipcover like most Japanese books, but for some reason my copy came with a second slipcover. And the art on it is actually very nice and in terms of style, I prefer it to the actual cover, only.... I don't know how this cover is related to Kamen Sansou Satsujin Jiken. The girl on the cover is far too young to be any of the women in this boo, and the room itself is not like any of the rooms in the mountain villa described in the book. I mean, this room doesn't invoke any notions of a mountain villa or a hostage situation or anything like that, right? I guess the mask is the one thing that comes from the title of the book,  but that's like a really tiny, tiny connection. I know that a few other Higashino pockets came with second slipcovers in the same style if you bought them at Tsutaya, but this book wasn't bought there, so I don't really understand this second cover....

Do I think Kamen Sansou Satsujin Jiken is one of Higashino's best three works? Probably not. Mind you, it's a short, but thrilling read from start to finish, and taken as a work of entertainment, it is a good work, offering a suspenseful story with a lot of story developments and mysteries both in the present and past. Looked at it as a mystery novel solely, it does feel like it could've been much more if the book had been a bit longer, as some of the better story elements of this book would've benefitted from more "runtime" allowing for more depth, It's not a book I would go out of my way for to recommend as one of Higashino's best, but if you're looking for something short, but fun to read between some 'bigger' mystery novels, this is a good palate cleanser. Nothing to ambitious, but basically a popcorn flick.

Original Japanese title(s): 東野圭吾『仮面山荘殺人事件』