Motives: Q.E.D. vol. 39-40 by Motohiro Katou

You can never be sure what to expect from the next volume in the Q.E.D. series as the man behind it, Motohiro Katou, created a detective series for the 21st century by restructuring the traditional detective story with the modern world in mind – breaking new ground along the way. So the series still has regular, classically-styled detective stories, full with unbreakable alibis, dying messages and locked room murders, but also about as many that aren't as easily pigeonholed. I suggest taking a look at "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 1-25" to get a glimpse of Katou's range as a writer and plotter. The stories under discussion today definitely held a few surprises in that regard.

The first of two stories from Q.E.D. vol. 39, "The Incident in Urban Hills Room 6," takes place at a shabby, rundown lodging house where one of the tenants finds the body of their landlady hanging in Room 6. A room that had stood empty for ages and was never before unlocked. The death of the landlady is dismissed as a suicide, but a suicide on the premise comes with stigma. Every housekeeper in the neighborhood refuses to come over to clean the place, until Kana Mizuhara arrives on their doorstep to apply for the position of housekeeper. She immediately starts asking questions about the suicide of their landlady in Room 6 ("we'd even taken to calling it a forbidden room").

Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara go to school with the granddaughter of the landlady. She refuses to believe it was suicide, because she wouldn't and her emergency buzzer was missing. Kana goes to work to collect information from the ill-assorted group of tenants comprising of a failed medical student, a fortune teller, a cab driver, a cook and an office worker. Not to mention the newest, mysterious tenant who "just moved into room 6 like it was no problem at all." So did the landlady commit suicide or did one of her tenants kill her and why? Motive is key here. Sou Touma acts as an armchair detective in the background and notes that each resident has problems, but "none of them are motives for murder" and then reverses the whole situation by showing which, of those non-motives, "is actually a motive for murder" – brilliantly balanced atop the reason why the body was found in Room 6. However, "The Incident in Urban Hills Room 6" is not nearly as conventional as it sounds with sting coming in the solution. A solution revealing it to be an anti-detective story that's somehow not an anti-detective story. You have to read it to understand what I mean, but a great story and a good illustration of what makes this series so much fun.

The second story, "Grand Tour," brings Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara to Hawaii on invitation of an ex-NASA scientist, Professor Anderson, to celebrate his retirement. Professor Anderson worked in the communication team of the Voyager program and also invited his former colleagues from the communication network department. However, the celebration and reunion overlaps with the anniversary of the death of Anderson's wife more than thirty years ago. So has that anything to do with his sudden disappearance? A very minor and regrettably not particularly interesting mystery, plot-wise, except for the fascinating sidelights on space exploration.

The first of two stories from vol. 40, "Love Square," is another very minor, not particularly exciting detective story which mostly is taken up by Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara being forced to play matchmakers between four different people. They're all interested in the wrong person, but this group eventually become suspects when the day's earnings of a bookshop is stolen from the cash box. Now the trick behind the theft is clever enough with an unusual motive behind it, but, on a whole, too slight and forgettable.

Fortunately, the second and final story, "Secret Room No. 4," is a return to form with a nesting doll-like plot of locked room murders!

Samejima Naoyuki, of Suzume Tours & Tourism, is doing a test run of a murder mystery tour on Sasakure Island, "the perfect setting for a murder," based on the plots and tricks of the once well-known locked room expert, Yoimiya Sodehara – whose work nowadays "aren't exactly flying off the shelves." There are other representatives of the company, but, more importantly, they have three guests. Sou Touma, Kana Mizuhara and Enari "Queen" Himeko of the Sakisaka Private High School Detective Club. She didn't need the other club members on this assignment ("...asking them is the same as asking a baby to pull a covered wagon"). When they arrive at the island mansion, the one-of-a-kind mystery tour begins and comprises of three different cases or challenges ("all of them will be locked room murders").

So they get shown three separate locked rooms which, one by one, get unlocked to reveal an apparent impossible “murder” with the company staff taking on the role of victims. What they have to answer is how the murder was committed, instead of who committed the murder. In the first locked room scene, they're shown an old, windowless storehouse with a solid steel door, but Touma immediately solves it based on the smell of new, fresh wood. In the second locked room scene, the door is bolted from the inside and has a locked window looking out over a steep cliff, but Himeko makes short work of the mystery. Very much to the annoyance of Sodehara ("...just beginner's luck"). The third room has double locks on both the door and windows, but, once again, the puzzle barely poses a challenge to Touma. And solves the puzzle in mere minutes. However, the fourth, unplanned locked room murder takes him a bit longer to explain.

When they return from the game, they find the dining room unexplained locked. And when they open the door, they find the body of the director of finance, Komaki Kamekichi, sitting at the head of a fully set dining table complete with burning candles – a knife sticking out of his chest. All three windows were securely locked on the inside. A very clever, well-handled locked room situation, but even better is how one of the three fictitious locked room-tricks came into play to reveal (SPOILER/ROT13) n svsgu vzcbffvovyvgl nf gur zheqrere perngrq na vzcbffvoyr nyvov ol orvat ybpxrq va bar bs gubfr guerr ebbzf, cynlvat n pbecfr, va pbzovangvba jvgu gur pnaqyr-gevpx gb znxr vg nccrne nf vs gur zheqrere unq yrff gvzr guna jnf npghnyyl gur pnfr. Brilliant stuff! Admittedly, the locked room-tricks aren't blistering original, but how they were used together to create a first-rate impossible crime story makes "Secret Room No. 4" a personal favorite.

So vol. 39 started out strong with the unexpectedly original "The Incident in Urban Hills Room 6" and "Secret Room No. 4" ended vol. 40 on a high note by turning the locked room mystery into a Matryoshka doll, which is good enough for me to overlook the two less than stellar stories in between. So next stop in this series is the C.M.B. crossover, but not before doing C.M.B. vol. 3 and 4. Stay tuned!