Taken at the Flood

“And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation."

"Genesis" (KJV)

Finally moving away from short stories!

Shuuichi is meeting up with his old group friends of his university outdoor activity club for the first time in a few years since they graduated, but because something awkward happened between him and one of his friends, he decides to bring his cousin Shoutarou along too. One of the friends, Yuuya, tells the group about a strange underground complex he discovered when he was in this same area half a year ago and he convinces them to have a look at it together. Yuuya didn't quite remember the exact location though, and it takes them a long time to reach the abandoned spot deep, deep in the mountain forest, where their phones of course have no signal. It is already almost dusk when they arrive at the spot, so they have no choice but to spend the night here, which is also true for family of three they happen to come across: they got lost in the woods hunting for mushrooms. Yuuya shows the group a hidden manhole, with a ladder leading down into a cave. Behind a large rock they find a steel door, which leads inside the rather surprisingly large underground complex, which was apparently built within an existing natural cave, following its natural contours. The underground complex consists of three basement floors, the upper two basement floors consisting of one large corridor with about twenty rooms on each floor, and a third basement floor with fewer, but larger rooms, but groundwater has already flooded the third basement floor. In one of the rooms they find a building plan, and the group learns this secret underground base is called The Ark. Shoutarou and Yuuya share the same suspicions about the place: it was probably an underground hideout built several decades ago by either revolutionaries or some shady cult, though it has been abandoned for a long time, and Yuuya notes nothing has changed since he first came across this place. Fortunately for the group, there's a working generator in the Ark, so they have electricity and lights in here, and are for example able to keep their phones charged, even if they can't communicate with the outside world. As they explore the rooms in the Ark, they not only find a communications room with monitors connected to security cameras aimed at the manhole they came in through and another emergency exit (though that one connects to the flooded third basement floor), they also find a lot of supplies and tools left by whoever used this building in the past, including mattresses and blankets, so Shuuichi, Shoutarou, his friends and the family of three are able to spend the night in the Ark in relative comfort, and it's at least better than having to camp outside.

Of course, that is until in the early morning, they are forcefully awakened by an earthquake. While fortunately, only one of them is lightly hurt by hitting her head, they soon learn they are in a desperate situation: the large rock which had been sitting in front of the steel door leading back to the ladder has been moved by the earthquake, blocking the door! When they go to the second basement floor beneath the entrance and the rock, they find the rock is actually attached to a pulley system, which can be operated by turning a wheel in that room: Shoutarou suspects this was a security measure of the Ark's original users. In times of trouble, they could use the pulley system to first pull the rock towards the door to barricade themselves. Closer examination of the system shows they can actually pull the rock through a hole down to the second basement floor: this was probably designed like that so if the first door was breached, they could pull the rock down one floor below and then block the door to this room, where theres's not only the pulley system, but also the ladder leading down the currently flooded third basement floor. But because the pulley system has to be operated manually, this means the person turning the wheel will be locked up in this room, as the rock will then block this door. But not only is the third basement floor now flooded, the earthquake has caused the water level to slowly rise, and in just about a week, more of the second basement floor will be flooded, which will render the pulley system unusable. This means one of the ten people here shall have to "sacrifice" themselves to save the others: they will have to operate the wheel and pull the rock down to the second basement floor, opening the steel door outside, but locking themselves in the room below. But not only is the water level rising, due to the isolated location of this base, the fact they don't know exactly where they are and there's no phone signal, and it's unclear how long it'll take them to make it back to the civilized world because who knows what the earthquake has caused or whether new earthquakes will occur, it is not certain that the others will be able to get help in time for the person left behind. It is during this stressful time one of them ends up dead: Yuuya is found strangled in one of the rooms while they were all looking for tools that might be useful. Nobody understands why Yuuya was murdered, but they realize that if there's one person who should sacrifice themselves and put themselves in danger in order to save the others, it's the person who just killed someone. But can they figure out who the murderer is in time while imprisoned in this underground base, and can they convince the murderer to repent for the murder and help the others? The deadline is about one week, but the clock is ticking faster and faster in Yuuki Haruo's Hakobune ("The Ark", 2022).

I have never read anything by Yuuki before, but Hakobune caught my attention because it managed to rank into the various major best mystery book rankings for books released in 2022 (technically late 2021 - late 2022), taking first place in Bunshun's Mystery Best 10, second place in the Honkaku Mystery Best 10 and fourth place in Kono Mystery ga Sugoi 2023 among others. The description also sounded interesting, with an underground closed circle situation and the people being forced to find the murderer because they need them to sacrifice themselves to save the others. I also happened to catch people saying here and there the logic behind the solution of the mystery was memorable, and as a big fan of logic-focused mystery stories, I of course had to read this.

So I went in with pretty high expectations, and yeah, I was not disappointed! Though I have to say, this was also because I had heard people saying that you had to be prepared for a very artificial closed circle situation, a very forced way to put the characters in their specific predicement and that's really true. You can easily tell that the whole deal with the underground complex, and especially how the pulley system is set-up with a rock and how the one operating it will have to stay in that room with a rising water level is all just there to put the characters in a very desperate situation, but at no time does it ever feel really natural. Of course, mystery fiction is often incredibly artificial, and not seldom, the curious locations or characters just scream out loud they only exist to faciliate a specific mystery plot, but in the case of Hakobune, I have to say the Ark really feels like one big plot device. You don't really learn much about the Ark itself throughout the book, only that it exists and theories about why it is built the way it is. Also: the dimensions of the Ark are a bit wacky. The whole thing is built inside a natural cave, but still, it's an underground complex with corridors, stairways and rooms (with working electricity), so it can't be that spacious, and yet people can wander around the complex without others really noticing them or hearing them walking around, which is really weird. More murders occur in the book besides the initial one with Yuuya, but while you could argue the Yuuya murder was feasible because nobody expected people to be murdered and they were walking in and out of rooms to find tools, it's extremely odd people could go about relatively silently in this underground base once everyone was aware a murderer was among them. The corridors and rooms really have to really big for that to work, though this complex is supposed to be built by some fringe group. So you do need to accept some things for this book to work.

But when it works, it works! Because they have to choose one of the survivors to operate the machine and pull the rock down, they all believe it's the murderer who should do that (because they have already taken a life; the least they can do is help the others). But as they're cut off from the outside world with limited resources at their disposal, Shoutarou is very fixated on the point of making an air-tight case based on logical reasoning, because there's not really much else they can rely on, being locked up underground. By proving beyond any doubt who the murderer is, they hope to convince the murderer to do the "correct" thing to make amends, while meanwhile, Shoutarou also stresses the fact they are not looking for a scapegoat or trying to pin the crime on the easiest person: they need to know for sure for themselves who the murderer is, or else they'll force an innocent person into locking themselves up in a flooding room and they could potentially cause this person's death if they don't manage to return in time after escaping through the steel door and up the ladder. This does make the first part of the story a bit slow, as there aren't really many usuable clues available yet, and all they can do is wait as the time limit approaches (which does lead to some parts where almost a whole day passes without anything really happening, so it feels a bit hasty at times).

But thing starts to become tenser once you're past the halfway point, with more murders happening and of course the stress slowly building as people start to clash with each other (which is also partially because you also have the family of three who are "outsiders" to the other people), but also long-time feuds starting to flare up. The second murder is especially gruesome, but it is also basically the starting signal for the detectives to really begin their work, as we finally have clues and situations that allow us to make meaningful deductions about the murderer, about how they committed the crime and how their actions will, in a logical manner, eventually lead us to their identity. This culminates in a fantastic denouement scene, just before the deadline as the water keeps on rising. The logical chain used to point out who the murderer is, is quite impressive. While in terms of "events", I'd say there happens less than you'd expect initially and it's not a very long book at any rate either, but there are surprisingly many hints and clues spread throughout the narrative, and some of them are deliciously clever. Objects the murderer used, places they must have visited, all of that is stringed into a surprisingly solid chain of logic, eventually pointing to one and one character alone as the murderer. When it comes to the strenght of the reasoning pointing towards the murderer, I'd say Hakobune is a really strong novel, and definitely a recommended read for those who like Ellery Queen-like mystery novels with long chains of deductions based on the physical evidence and what they say about the actions of the murderer. The way a small hint first leads to a seemingly innocent observation ("Okay, so that clue means the murderer did that. So what?") but then snowballs into something more important until you have a really big indicator of the identity of the murderer is great and I also like how the deduction revolve around certain objects you seem far too seldom in puzzle plot mysteries even though they are so common. The way they are used here is very natural, but cleverly done, and therefore very satisfying. The big climax, after the murderer has been denounced and they are asked to pull the rock down and lock themselves up for the time being so the others can escape and find help is also great, and actually also form a small mystery narrative on their own, as more cleverly hidden clues are used to facilitate this great escape epilogue. The epilogue was certainly the cherry on top of a very cool mystery novel.

But you do have to roll with the initial artificial set-up of Hakobune for it to work. If you can get to that point, you're treated to a very impressive closed circle mystery novel that has a very memorable chain of deduction at the end denouncing the murderer in this unique, almost absurd situation. I can definitely see why it ended up so high on many of the major annual mystery rankings, as it is not only a great mystery novel, but the tense underground closed cricle situation also allows for some cool drama, and it never overstays its welcome. The book definitely has made me curious to Yuuki's other books, so I might explore those in the future.

Original Japanese title(s): 夕木春央『方舟』

The Dark Side of the Door

And the more that I knocked 

The hotter I got 

The hotter I got 

The harder I'd knock 

I just gotta break through the door

"Gotta Knock a Little Harder" (The Seatbelts)

I got the e-book of this book for free from BookWalker, but I still think that was a rare pricing error, because it was free for only half a day and I couldn't find any announcements about it being distributed for free...

Two weeks ago, I reviewed Aosaki Yuugo's short story collection Knockin' on Locked Door, which introduced the reader to a detective agency bearing the same title as the book. Run by Gotemba Touri and Katanashi Hisame (and their part-time assistant/housekeeper Kusuriko), the two detectives specialize in completely different types of crimes: Touri specializes in impossible crimes (howdunnit), while Hisame focuses on inexplicable crimes (whydunnit) and whenever a client appears at their offices (something that doesn't happen often enough), both detectives always hope it's their kind of case, because usually, the other one is forced to play assistant to the other. Touri and Hisame know each other from university, where they studied criminology with two other friends withw whom they sometimes cross paths: Ugachi is a police detective who usually doesn't really like working with her old study mates, but she knows they're the best at what they do. Meanwhile, the fourth member of their criminology class has made a career on the opposite side: under the name "Cheap Trick" Mikage has been working as a crime consultant, creating murder plans (with "cheap tricks") for his clients and occassionally, Touri and Hisame find themselves having to work on a case that involves their old friend. In Knockin' On Locked Door 2 (2019), the reader is treated to six new adventures of the titular detective agency.

The first Knockin' On Locked Door was an entertaining series of stories by Aosaki, where he combined his Queen-esque plotting focusing on chains of deductions based on (the state of) physical evidence with plots that usually revolved around the impossible, the inexplicable or a combination of both. While the book, on the whole, was quite good, it was also the mystery equivalent of popcorn or a bag of crisps: each story was very short, following the exactly same four act structure, and usually focused on a single idea and while most of the stories were usually at least "okay" and some really good, it was also the type of collection that just fades away easily because everything felt so light and formulaistic. Knockin' On Locked Door 2 is basically more of the same, so if you didn't like the first one, you'll find nothing to change your mind here: it's still a very light-hearted short story collection where almost all stories follow a formula, and while usually the stories are well plotted and some are really clever, it's really similar to the first book. In fact, I read both books in quick succession, and it took me a while to actually get started on the reviews, but I honestly couldn't remember which book had which stories, because they were all so samey, despite being about very different situations each time. And okay, it probably didn't help I waited like over a year before I got started on the reviews...

The opening story Ana no Aita Misshitsu ("The Locked Room With A Hole") is about a kind of locked room. Or at least, it was at one point in time. A man was found murdered in the shed where he usually spent his days off working on DIY furniture, lying across a table he had been working on with a driver in his head. The door of the shed was locked from the inside, the key found with the man, and no windows a person would fit through.... but there is a gigantic hole in the back wall, cut open with a power saw. So considering there's a hole in the wall it isn't really a locked room, and the fallen paint can and the paint on the floor in front of the door suggests why the murderer did this, but can Touri and Hisame figure out who the murderer is based on the state of this odd locked room? Yes, they can, and it's a technically sound story, with a good focus on physical evidence which allows you to deduce a lot of the crime yourself, though I have to admit the initial impact of the gigantic hole in the wall is much bigger than the surprises you'll find later in the story: it's a fine detective story and there's a good way in which the hole is used to deduce who did it, but the idea of the hole itself is a bit more impressive than the deductive chain leading to the culprit

A woman is found murdered in Tokei ni Matsuwaru Ikutsu no Uso ("A Few Lies About A Watch"), and the main suspect is her boyfriend, with whom she had a row earlier that evening. However, the boyfriend has an alibi, as he was performing on stage with his band, while the time of death of the victim is determined by both forensic investigation and her broken watch, and the boyfriend most definitely has an alibi for the time the victim's watch stopped at. Of course, the police doesn't blindly trust a stopped watch, but the victim's watch was a special case: it is a limited edition radio-controlled watch with the special "feature" nobody can actually change the time of the watch! The makers were so confident in the clock's accuracy, it actually doesn't even feature a crown, and can only be opened by the makers (battery replacements are of course free of charge). As nobody could've tampered with the time of that specific clock, it appears the boyfriend has a solid alibi, but is it really so solid?  The idea of how this "perfect alibi" is created is a bit artificial (who's going to buy such a watch?) but the clues in this story that point out how the murderer managed to create this alibi are really cleverly hidden in the story, and result in a satisfying tale of deduction, as in hindsight, you realize you really should have solved this mystery yourself considering the obvious clues. I also think this is one of the few stories where the characters unique to this story really make an impression, instead of being a bland A, B or C who'll be forgotten by the time the next story starts.

Ugachi Keibuho, Jiken Desu ("Lt. Ugachi, it's a case!") is almost like a spin-off story, as it focuses on Ugachi instead of the duo from the detective agency. Ugachi is investigating the apparent suicide of a writer, who fell off the seventh floor balcony of his room. A witness of an opposite building however states they saw a woman in the apartment above the victim's room looking down her balcony too around the presumed time of death, but she never called the police and the body was only reported much later. The woman living one floor above actually worked with the victim in the past, and she had been sexually harrassed and assaulted by him, so she has a motive, but the problem is that the victim's apartment was locked from the inside, and the key was found inside his room, so how could the woman have made it look like a suicide? It's a story that works best as a spin-off story I think, as while the howdunnit itself isn't really memorable and the physical clues pointing to the truth of what happened are a bit too mundane, I think it works perfectly as a story where Ugachi herself is the main detective, giving the reader a story that isn't strictly about how or why, but manages to turn it in a kind of different mystery.

In Kieru Shoujo Ou Shoujo ("The Vanishing Girl, The Pursuing Girl"), the two detectives are hired to find a girl who disappeared from a tunnel running beneath a road: her friend spotted the girl from the other side of the road, waving to her. The girl then entered the tunnel which should've taken her to the other side of the road, but no matter how long her friend waited, the girl never showed up at the other end of the tunnel, nor was she seen returning back to the entrance of the tunnel (the opposite side of the road). Little time has passed so the police hasn't been informed yet, especially as the friend's not sure whether the girl disappeared by choice or against her will, so Touri and Hisame start investigating the dorm where the girl lives to see if they can find any clues about her disappearance. The investigation is surprisingly more focused on the why of the impossible disappearance than the how, and while in the end, that does work in the story's advantage, it still reads a bit weird. Not a big fan of this story though, as both the why and the how feel a bit underwhelming, and you really wonder whether this was the most logical thing for the culprit to do.

Mottomo Manuke na Dekishitai ("The Stupidest Drowned Body") has Touri and Hisame investigate a very odd death orchestrated by their old friend Mikage AKA Cheap Trick. A IT company president was found drowned in an exclusive club members only pool one early morning. The man had drowned about eight hours earlier and had been lying in the water since, but... there had hardly been any water in the pool when he died! The previous evening, after a reserved party at this pool, someone had drained the pool of the water, which was only discovered at midnight. The caretaker switched the water management tool on again at midnight, and it would take about eight hours to fill the pool again, just in time for the morning swimmers. It seems thus that the victim had somehow managed to drown himself while there was basically just a puddle lying on the pool floor. But of course, Mikage is behind this, so there was some trick to how a drowned body appeared in an empty pool. By far the best story of the whole collection, it's always with these Mikage stories a cheap trick by which this inexplicable murder was created, but still a very memorable one, and the idea of the victim just drowning in his swimming wear in a puddle in a basically empty pool is just really silly in the good sense: just inexplicable enough for an interesting murder mystery, without being overly dramatic.

Door no Kagi wo Akeru toki ("When The Door Is Unlocked") is the final story, and brings the old four university friends together, when Mikage suddenly appears again and challenges his old friends to solve a locked room mystery they all know very well, because it's something that happened to themselves a few years ago, when they were studying criminology together. In a flashback, we are told how the four of them were working together on their graduation project, which involved investigating a real crime, when one of them was assaulted: the victim was found bleeding from his neck and an ambulance had to be called immediately or he wouldn't have lived to tell the tale. However, the house he was found in was locked from the inside, and the key was found inside a cup in the living room where the victim was found. Mikage now wants them to solve what really happened back then. A story that is more interesting as a flashback case fleshing out the relations between Touri, Hisame, Ugachi and Mikage rather than as a locked room mystery itself, as the trick behind the locked room is really old and a lot of readers will probably be familiar with one or more variants on the exact same idea. Aosaki obviously wouldn't be himself if he wouldn't pay good attention to clewing, but still, it's not a really memorable locked room mystery on its own merits, and works better as a story for those who wanted to learn more about the protagonists, especially as previous stories follow a formula so rigid, so this one stands out.

So like the first collection, Knockin' On Locked Door 2 is a lot like popcorn, a light snack that never really disappoints, but in comparison tot the first book, I'd say this one is not as good. The first one simply had more stories I really liked overall. I don't really hate any of the stories in this second volume, but I don't think the highest highs of this volume are as high as those we saw in the first volume and while some readers will like the attempt to flesh out the characters a bit more in the two outlier stories in the second volume, I found it, on the whole, just a tad weaker.

Original Japanese title(s): 青崎有吾『ノッキンオン・ロックドドア２』:「穴の開いた密室」/「時計にまつわるいくつかの嘘」/「穿地警部補、事件です」/「消える少女追う少女」/「最も間抜けな溺死体」/「ドアの鍵を開けるとき」

The Bloodstained Book

'I will now lecture,’ said Dr Fell, inexorably, ‘on the general mechanics and development of the situation which is known in detective fiction as the “hermetically sealed chamber.” 

"The Hollow Man"

I don't even remember the last time I did a review of a non-fictional work!

Among fans of classically-styled puzzle plot mysteries, the locked room murder is of course a very popular trope. The idea of an utterly impossible crime, like a murder occuring inside a room from which the murderer simply couldn't have escaped because all exits were locked from the inside or because all the exits were observed, is of course very alluring, and ever since we had the double murder in the Rue Morgue, we have seen countless of variations on this particular variation of the impossible crime. For over a century, the locked room mystery has entranced readers all across the globe, and writers have struggled with coming up with new versions of what often still boils down to a very similar problem: a crime happening at a specific sealed or observed space, with no sign of the culprit. There are of course other variations too, like someone disappearing from an observed spot, or for example the famous 'no-footprints-in-the-snow' example. While there are many variations, many people have tried to create categorizations for the broad types of solutions to these impossible crimes. The most famous one probably being the Locked Room Lecture in John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins), where Dr. Fell, in a meta-moment, starts categorizing the types of solutions to the locked room murder and many, many authors since have come up with their categorizations of solutions.

People also love lists for some reason, so you'll probably find plenty of people listing their favorite, or even, if they are ambitious, the "best" locked room mysteries. I have no interest in lists in general, so you'll never see one here from me, but I have in the past discussed a book that came close: Arisugawa Arisu no Misshitsu Daizukan ("Arisugawa Alice's Great Illustrated Guide to Locked Rooms"), which is also known as An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891-1998 was a wonderful book written by Arisugawa Alice, where he selected 50 important locked room mysteries from both Japan and abroad. As the title suggests, one important aspect of the book was the visual aspect: each entry featured nicely drawn maps and illustrations of the crime scene in each story, helping the reader visualize the setting of each story. Many of the stories featured don't feature floorplans/diagrams themselves, so it was very cool to these stories properly visualized. While Arisugawa also discussed each story with an entry, introducing the story and setting of each locked room, he did not go into much detail for each story, as he avoided spoilers.

Iiki Yuusan is probably best known as the authority on Ellery Queen in Japan, so I have to admit, I was a bit surprised when I learned his latest book, released earlier this week, is titled Misshitsu Mystery Guide (2023). Misshitsu Mystery Guide offers an extensive overview of the locked room mystery by discussing fifty titles in total: 30 Japanese stories and 20 foreign ones. Like in An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891-1998, the entries also feature diagrams and floorplans drawn especially for this release, helping the reader visualize each crime scene. However, the introduction does make very clear this is not just "Iiki's version of Arisugawa's book" and that it has a completely different angle from which it approaches the theme of the locked room mystery. For Iiki wants to show the sheer variety within the locked room murder trope and in order to do so, he has decided to spoil the solutions of each entry. The book is divided in two halfs: all fifty stories are briefly introduced in their own entry, with explanations about the story, a more in-depth description/explanation of the locked room situation and a short write-up by Iiki about the merits of the story and why it was picked. 

However, the real brilliance of Misshitsu Mystery Guide comes in the second half, where Iiki can freely spoil the solutions of all 50 stories. Of course, this book would just be... a spoiler if all it did was explain how each locked room mystery was created, but Iiki goes beyond that, naturally. For that is what makes this book unique: because the guide is written with the premise of spoiling the solutions, Iiki managed to select 50 titles based on the solution. And that sounds very similiar to the trick behind a locked room mystery, but that would not be correct. What I mean is that Iiki, because he can freely spoil each story, manages to make a selection not simply based the merits of "the trick" behind a locked room mystery. It's not just about how original or impactful the trick of a locked room mystery is. I guess this is where Iiki being an Ellery Queen authority influences the book the most, because for example, there are some books Iiki picked not because the trick behind the locked room murder was so original (in fact, a lot of them he even calls obvious or simple), but because the line of reasoning to uncovering that trick was so brilliant. There are also stories he picked that aren't technically (impossible) locked room murders, but only become so when you get into spoiler territority, something he was only able to do because he's free to spoil the stories. The result is a book that has some really unique picks for a guide on locked room mysteries, but Iiki's entries do make clear each time why he selected each book.

The first entry for example, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Iiki explains, is definitely not picked because of the merits of the trick itself, but because how it is a first example of showing the logical reasoning behind solving a locked room. He intentionally picks John Dickson Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule over The Hollow Man, because he considers it a better work in terms of fair play, and the reasoning behind how the crime is solved. On the Japanese side, you have usual suspects like Honjin Satsujin Jiken (The Honjin Murders), but also a more experimental book like Ashibe Taku's Steam Opera, or Imamura Masahiro's Shijinsou no Satsujin (Death Among the Undead), where Iiki manages to show the versatility of the locked room problem in well-thought out analyses of the books and their place in the greater picture. The fifty books in Misshitsu Mystery Guide are definitely not all you'd immediately expect in a list of locked room mysteries, but Iiki always explains convincingly why he selected them for a book about the potential of the locked room mystery and how the trope is more than just a parlor trick and never "an all-purpose trope you can just use in any mystery story", but how the locked room murder can also always function as a device for other mystery tropes and how even a simple or re-hashed trick can faciliate a great mystery novel by properly focusing on the reasoning/solving element of a mystery.

The book also features three extra editorials. The last one is simply a list of another fifty books that didn't make the final cut (but probably interesting enough to read), but the other two are much more interesting. In the introduction, I already mentioned how John Dickson Carr used the Locked Room Lecture to present a categorization of solutions to the locked room mystery. In the first editorial, Iiki collects many more categorizations from various books and authors from both Japan and abroad (in English language books). It's really handy to see the various categorizations in one article, so not just Carr's, but also from Clayton Rawson, Edogawa Rampo, Abiko Takemaru, Yamaguchi Masaya and many more. I have to admit I was surprised by the news that a year before Carr's Locked Room Lecture, a Japanese author had already published a story with one too by the way! The second editorial similarly collects categorizations of motives/justifications for creating a locked room from various books.

I have read about two-thirds of the Japanese titles, and not even half of the foreign titles, so there are some entries I won't be able to read for a while, but based on the entries I have read, I'd say Misshitsu Mystery Guide is definitely worth a read if you're in any way interested in the locked room mystery trope.While the book does depend a lot on spoiling a lot of books, Iiki's selection does a good job at showing the potential of the locked room mystery, and by not focusing solely on the pure tricks of each entry, but looking at locked rooms from diverse mystery-related angles, like how good the logic is behind solving a locked room mystery, or how a locked room mystery can be used to hide a different mystery trope, Iiki has come up with a book that is also valuable to creators themselves. The diverse examples of how a locked room mystery can be used in a story, and the inclusion of the various categorizations should stimulate the creative minds of people wanting to write a locked room mystery themselves.

Original Japanese title(s): 飯域勇三『密室ミステリガイド』

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」