Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars (1996) by Jun Kurachi

Last month, I reviewed Takekuni Kitayama's Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002), which came out of the first round of nominations for the new, up-to-date "Locked Room Library" and turned out to be available as a fanlation – translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmiicnana." The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders takes place in different time periods and places littered with seemingly impossible decapitations grandly tied together in the end. I summed it up as utterly insane in the most flattering sense of the word. So was curious to see what else they had translated and one title stood out. Surprisingly, it's not a locked room mystery or impossible crime novel!

I read about Jun Kurachi's Hoshifuri sansou no satsujin (Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars, 1996) when Ho-Ling Wong reviewed it back in 2021. Ho-Ling praised Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars as "a fantastic example of the logic school of mystery writing" that "challenges the reader to logically infer who the murderer is." The challenges begin the moment you open the book with each, lengthy chapters title summarizing what's going to happen in that chapter. For example, the first chapter is titled "First, we are introduced to the main character. The protagonist is the viewpoint character, or, alternatively, the Watson. In other words, they shall share all information they possess with the reader. They cannot be the culprit." Every other chapter ends with helpful pointer or comment like "there's important foreshadowing here" or "pay attention." That sure sounds suspiciously considerate and needlessly helpful. Surely, Kurachi isn't going to lie through his teeth by strictly speaking the truth? Let's find out!

Kazuo Sugishita, the Watson of the story, works for the Production Department of Century Ad, but, after a work floor related incident with an assistant manager, Sugishita is temporarily moved to the Culture and Creative Department as a manager-in-training – except his duties turn out to be of an attendant. Shiro Hoshizono, the detective of the story, is a dandy, pompous self-styled Star Watcher, "he celebrated the beauty of the stars, talked about the night sky," whose books, horoscopes and TV shows are tremendously popular with the female demographic. A rising star developed in-house, but Sugishita thinks of Hoshizono as "an annoyance and a creep." However, Sugishita's first job as Hoshizono's attendant is accompanying him to a remote campground deep in the snowy mountains of Saitama Prefecture.

Century Ad also has a finger in the real estate business and is working together with a development company to redevelop the recently acquired Togaridake Lodge Village. A poorly thought out, ill-fated business venture that had gone bust due to its remoteness and lack of a special attractions. So the President of Yamakanmuri Development, Gozo Iwagishi, brings a select group to the campground to look over the lodges and spit balling ideas for a new concept to attract tourists. Akane Kusabuki, a popular romance author, and her secretary, Asako Hayasawa. Kazuteru Sagashima is a full-time UFO researcher who believes there's an alien base hidden somewhere deep in the mountains of Chichibu. Yumi Kodaira and Mikiko Ohinata are two college students who jumped on the opportunity to meet a couple of celebrities. And, of course, Sugishita and Hoshizono.

So the plan is to spend the night at, the soon to be renamed, Togaridake Lodge Village and brainstorming to make the impoverished-looking, desolate square of lodged and its two-story main building both appealing and profitable ("home of stars, romance, and UFOs"). Like having one of Akane Kusabuki's romance novels take place at the future star resort or a planetarium with recordings of Hoshizono lecturing on the constellations peppered with discussions on extraterrestrial visitors ("...did you know there are fragments of an enormous UFO mothership scattered in orbit?").

Kurachi takes his time working towards the murder, roughly the first-half, but everything leading up the murder is full with important information, clues, red herrings and foreshadowing – exactly as promised on the can (i.e. chapter titles). On the following morning, they find the beaten, strangled body of Gozo Iwagishi lying on the floor of his lodge. There are no phone lines and nobody brought along the cell phones on top of a minor avalanche that made the road below impassable. And, when they turn on the television, they learn a raging snowstorm has paralyzed the entire region with emergency services being overstretched. So the group is stranded for the time being, short on supplies and one of them is a murderer.

Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars has all the appearance of an extremely conventional whodunit, which has has a very obvious purpose. Kurachi basically removed all the short cuts.

I recently reviewed Seishi Yokomizo's Akuma no temari uta (The Little Sparrow Murders, 1957/59) and noted that it read more like a Western-style, Golden Age mystery than what we have come to expect from the recent run (shin) honkaku translations. Yokomizo simply wanted to read a Western-style mystery a la Agatha Christie and simply had no need for locked rooms, corpse-puzzles and other plot-oriented tropes. My love for these things have been well documented (fortunately, not by a psychiatrist), but it has to admitted that something like a locked room murder, dying message or a corpse cut to pieces often present a short cut to the solution or important parts of the solution – if you know the how it was done, you often know who done it. For example, I figured out the solution to Tetsuya Ayukawa's short story "Akai misshitsu" ("The Red Locked Room," 1954) because the murderer left a dismembered body inside a locked mortuary. Kurachi seems to have eschewed all the usual shin honkaku tropes, or short cuts, on purpose in order to make the whole thing as difficult as possible.

Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars has no locked room murders, dying clues, bombproof alibis, corpse-puzzles or a trail of bodies following a rhyming scheme. Just a small group of people in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the outside world, stuck with a body and killer. Kurachi took the isolated, closed-circle of suspects situation to its logical extreme as Hoshizono assumes the role of detective with Sugishita as his initially reluctant Watson.

Sugishita at first feels like "he'd been banished from his company to a frigid village with a gigolo," but, over the course of Hoshizono's investigation, begins to appreciate "the the brain behind his professional playboy front." So without an impossibility, dying message or tidy alibis to investigate ("...nobody has a perfect alibi"), they concentrate on the suspects and physical clues. And how! Hoshizono makes a lot about the three distinct lines of footprints going, or leaving, Iwagishi's lodge and the murder weapons. There is, what appears to be, a crop circle directly outside the lodge and a second murder involves an improvised "burglar alarm" that didn't work. If you like these in-depth investigations, you're certainly going to enjoy the discussions, weighing of evidence and possibilities – culminating in a lengthy, dizzying denouement. Hoshizono collected from the evidence and information six categories of clues, positional relationship, choice of weapon, alibi, psychological element, physical characteristics and action. One by one, Hoshizono begins to painstakingly eliminate suspects as he explains the murderer's movements and sometimes baffling actions on the nights both murders were committed. Like the creation of the snowy crop circle. Until apparently one person, the guilty party, remains, but there's a twist!

 

 

A pleasingly convincing, logically reasoned solution firmly positioned on, what John Dickson Carr called, a ladder of clues and pattern of evidence deceivingly arranged and logically joined together. In that regard, Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars is a triumph and a minor classic. A no-gimmicks-needed, simon-pure jigsaw puzzle detective novel with more than half a dozen diagrams to help out the struggling armchair detective. While playing absolutely fair in presenting a solvable whodunit, the misdirection was also on point and the honestly titled chapters were indeed about as helpful as a sandstorm in a labyrinth. Very well played!

So, plot-wise, nothing much to complain about, but stylistically and presentation-wise, it has one or two shortcomings. Firstly, if there ever was a detective novel that needed "A Challenge to the Reader," it is this one. It was just conspicuous in its absence here. Secondly, the story itself didn't feature an impossible crime, but the story mentioned an unsolved locked room murder in Hoshizono's backstory and a sequel was teased ("maybe someday, perhaps even someday soon, Kazuo and Hoshizono would journey to that village... to uncover the truth behind the locked room murder from nine years ago before the statute of limitations ran out"). Considering this is a standalone, published nearly thirty years ago, I doubt that case will ever be solved. I hate getting teased with non-existent locked room mysteries like that unrecorded Dr. Fell case of the inverted room at Waterfall Manor mentioned in Death Watch (1935). That and the current title is a bit of a mouthful.

Other than those minor issues, I agree with Ho-Ling that Kurachi's Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars is a must-read for fans of Ellery Queen and Alice Arisugawa's Koto pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989). An extremely conventional whodunit, but a conventional whodunit playing the grandest game on hard mode. A grand performance that makes me wish people like Anthony Boucher and Frederic Dannay were still around to enjoy it. Highly recommended!

A note for the curious: I have mentioned more than once on this blog that it always surprised me that the traditional detective story, particularly impossible crime stories, rarely ventured outside haunted houses, rooms that kill and séance rooms whenever the plot calls for supernatural or otherworldly dressing. An impossible murder around a séance table remains a popular setup, even today, but expanding into other, post-Victorian-era myths and legends could give the impossible crime genre a whole new impulse. I always thought UFOs and everything associated with them is an untapped reservoir of potential for mystery writers specialized in locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. For example, the third story from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 89. You can find another small example in the snowy crop circle from this book, but just as interesting are the UFO cases the characters discuss because some could easily be the setup for an impossible crime story. Cattle mutilations in field with "no human footprints, tire tracks, or any other traces left at the scenes" or two farmers in New Zealand burned to death by aliens in a corn field in front of an astonished witness. Even better is "the Jessica Reid incident" whose bedroom was invaded by "an alien in a silver protective suit" who strangled her husband to death in a handful of seconds when they resisted ("...every shot bounced off the alien's suit"). Only downside to turning that one in a detective story is that the solution is rather obvious.

Midsummer Murder (1937) by Clifford Witting

Midsummer Murder (1937) is Clifford Witting's second novel starring Inspector Harry Charlton, attached to the Downshire County Constabulary, who has to put aside his daily, small-town problems to turn his attention to a curious murder – committed in the town square of Paulsfield. The murder happened during a chaotic moment on a market day, in July, when a bull "intent on its one brief hour of glorious life" got loose and turned the whole market in an uproar. So the sound of a gunshot largely went unnoticed in the pandemonium. What didn't went unnoticed is the man who had been cleaning the statue of a former Lord Shawford dropping dead between the railings and the plinth with a bullet in his head.

Inspector Charlton begins to investigate this strange shooting with all the accustomed thoroughness and plodding vigor of the British police.

They begin to gather evidence, which isn't much, trying to determine the general direction from which the bullet came or hoping to match the extracted bullet to locally issued firearm permits. A whole crowd of witnesses need to be questioned and close attention is being paid to the shopkeepers occupying the part of the square from where the shot was presumably fired. And there's the question of motive. Why shoot "an ordinary working man" who's cleaning a statue? A somewhat unusual case, but an isolated one and nothing too sensational until the murderer decides to make murder a habit.

On the following morning, the murderer kills a second man in the then deserted square and, later in the day, a third man is shot and seriously wounded while sitting in his car – only links are the bullets and opportunistic nature of the shootings. Every time the shooter pulled the trigger, it was during "the psychological moment." Like a bull rampaging overturning market stalls, a passing thunder storm or a deserted street with "no one awake but a nodding night-watchman." More shots would be fired in the town square "before the sniper's reign of terror came to an end." So the newspapers begin to screaming about the Paulsfield Sniper spreading terror in town and making veiled comments regarding the lack of progress the police has made in apprehending this homicidal maniac. Charlton remains undeterred and investigates each crime, "separately and also in relation to the others," with that same thorough and plodding vigor.

Midsummer Murder is not the first Golden Age mystery to revolve around a serial killer, but Witting certainly penned one of the earlier examples and a pretty odd one at that.

The serial killer from the pre-World War II detective novel has always been an odd, often out-of-place character compared to its modern-day counterpart. There are generally three types of serial killers in the classic detective novel: a rational murderer who uses the serial killings as a smokescreen for their through motives/objectives or a genuine homicidal maniac, which always feels out-of-place in a Golden Age mystery – a third type is a combination of the first two. So closer to the serial killers of modern crime fiction. One thing they all have in common is that they lean into the thriller-ish elements of having a serial killer present as panic spreads across the community stoked by sensational headlines blaring about the latest murder. For example, Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepp (1931) and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949) do this very well. However, Midsummer Murder reads like a charming, leisurely paced small-town mystery with a thick dollop of local color, quirky, but well-drawn, characters and some lighthearted humor. There are blaring headlines and the people of Paulsfield began to favor the parts of town "free, as yet, from the murderous attentions of the Sniper," but within a week "everything had returned to normal" as they began to drift back into the square. Even though the newspapers about alarm and panic, the actual description of "that 'orrible to-do in the Square" is very little more than an annoyance to the locals. Like the shopkeepers around the scene of the shootings.

Now I appreciated the calm, levelheaded approach of the police and the town to the presence of a sniper indiscriminately picking people off in the market square, but it strikes a false note. And a missed opportunity. Witting put on the local color thickly and it would have made for a great read to see a rural town, where "everything seemed so ideally peaceful" under the midsummer sun, getting paralyzed as everyone locked themselves away in their sweltering homes. But without that element of spreading fear and terror, Midsummer Murder comes across as an overwritten, drawn out novel that badly needed trimming in order to expand the ending. Midsummer Murder ends abruptly and not in a good way. Nor something that justifies taking the long way round to get there. The story begged for something better and more substantial to end on.

I don't think the story's shortcomings would have bothered me half as much had Witting not been so cute by constantly acknowledging those shortcomings with such lines as "it will be as well if local colour is not laid on too thickly at this early stage in the story" or "overstock this story with characters." Even worse is the sudden ending in combination with that closing line (ROT13), "jr xabj gung gur Qrgrpgvba Pyho, haqre gur cerfvqrapl bs Ze. R. P. Oragyrl, qb abg yvxr znq zheqreref, ohg gurer vg vf." Without those comments, I would have taken Midsummer Murder as an interesting, well-intended curio of the Golden Age serial killer novel similar to Brian Flynn's experiments in The Edge of Terror (1932) and Reverse the Charges (1943). Witting knew what the story lacked and simply didn't appear to care. Just wanting to write the story, whether it worked or not, and joking about it. I can forgive a lot from a mystery writer when they have something to show in the end, but not being cute and empty handed. So the conclusion annoyed me to no end.

That being said, I did enjoy Charlton trying to grapple with the problem of a serial killer, "these are not natural crimes," while admitting ordinary police methods can have its limits with an indiscriminate killer. And trying to anticipate in which direction the solution is headed. Other than that, the least satisfying of the Witting reprints so far. Catt Out of the Bag (1939), Subject—Murder (1945) and Let X Be the Murderer (1947) are all infinitely better detective novels. Murder in Blue (1937) is better written than plotted, but would even place that one above Midsummer Murder. Well, you get the idea. I'll try to pick something good for the next time.

Prelude to Revival: The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Novel in the 1980s

In "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime in the 21st Century," I attempted to give a brief rundown how the impossible crime genre, especially the novel-length version, went from a dormant state in 2000 to the budding revival of recent years – realizing too late that the attempt was premature and incomplete. First and foremost, I should have simply waited until 2025 as it would have given a clearer picture of recent developments and a larger sampling of this new batch of locked room specialists. I also realized too late that I unfairly brushed over the fact that the story of today's locked room revival has a not unimportant prelude. I first need to retrace my steps from the previous post.

Robert Adey wrote in the preface to Locked Room Murders (1991) that the post-WWII impossible crime novel experienced a sharp decline with John Dickson Carr being "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels." John Russell Fearn diligently carried alongside his favorite mystery writer, but his work existed in relative obscurity until recently. I pointed to the 1981 selection, "A Locked Room Library," as a perfect illustration of the rut the impossible crime novel found itself in during the second-half of the previous century.

There were, however, occasionally flareup over the decades. During the 1960s, Helen McCloy suddenly became interested in locked room puzzles and produced the superb Mr. Splitfoot (1968). Paul Gallico wrote two novels earlier in the decade in which his paranormal investigator, Alexander Hero, exposes locked room trickery behind seemingly supernatural phenomena in additional to several one-offs – like Kip Chase's Murder Most Ingenious (1962), Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) and John Vance's The Fox Valley Murders (1966). At the time, they were the last spurts of an apparently dying genre as the only one who made a splash in the 1970s was John Sladek and his two locked room classics, Black Aura (1974) and Invisible Green (1977). The miracle crime continued to thrive in short story form in publications like Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, but novel-length locked room mysteries had become a niche. Then something remarkable happened.

The 1980s saw an explosion novel-length locked room and impossible crime novels, but even more remarkable is that it happened in four different countries, across three continents, under vastly different circumstances and outcomes. One of those outcomes has put its stamp on the budding locked room revival we're seeing today.

The first stop is the United States where the resurrected locked room mystery came out guns blazing. I got the idea for this eighties retrospective from an apparently unremarkable, largely forgotten mystery, Phillips Lore's Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980), which one of only three novels starring a multi-millionaire attorney, Leo Roi. Murder Behind Closed Doors turned out to be not as unremarkable as first expected as Lore valiantly tried to string together a quartet of impossible crimes. Only the solution to the first murder in the locked coach house is noteworthy, but Murder Behind Closed Doors unwittingly set the tone for the American locked room resurgence of that decade.

A year later, Bill Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981) sends his "Nameless Detective" to San Francisco's first ever Western Pulp Con to root out a blackmailer, but ends up having to crack a tougher nut when a man is shot in a hotel room – locked from the inside. Even better is the second murder in a shed sporting one of Pronzini's most creative locked room-tricks and inspired clueing. Pronzini was only warming up. Scattershot (1982) is an interlinked short story collection and a sequel to Hoodwink following the nameless detective around during a regular working week, which turns disastrous by inexplicable disappearances, impossible thefts and a murder behind locked doors. So three in total and five all together with the previous novel, but Pronzini added one more to the tally. Bones (1985) has nameless digging into the death of a pulp writer who supposedly shot himself inside his locked office thirty years ago. I suppose a case can be made to add Shackles (1988) to the list as one plot-thread certainly can be taken a reverse locked room mystery, or locked room escape, but not everyone's going to agree.

If you add Pronzini's short stories from the period, such as "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" (1980) and "Booktaker" (1983), it's not difficult to see why his name became synonymous with the American locked room mystery with Hoodwink being his flagship impossible crime novel. However, there's another reason why Hoodwink perfectly represents this period of the American detective story/locked room mysteries. It appears that convention culture of the 1970s and '80s was a source of inspiration for some of the decades more unusual mysteries (e.g. Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun, 1987). Richard Purtill was a philosophy professor and a fantasy/science-fiction author who wrote an incredibly fun, curiously overlooked impossible crime novel, Murdercon (1982). The story takes place at a fantasy and science-fiction fan convention where two people die under bizarre, inexplicable circumstances. One victim is "zapped" to death by Darth Vader, while the other is pushed from a window by an invisible killer.

Pronzini's Hoodwink and Purtill's Murdercon form a complimentary set of locked room mysteries, which both do something differently with a somewhat similar premise. I consider them to be highlights from this period, but the best was yet to come.

Herbert Resnicow was a civil engineer, life-long reader of detective fiction and locked room fanboy who, upon an early retirement, decided to write his own detective novels and was rewarded for his debut, The Gold Solution (1983) – nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The book concerns the seemingly impossible murder of a well-known architect in his fortress-like, top floor apartment. While not the best or most original of his locked room mysteries, The Gold Solution is a blueprint for the way in which Resnicow would go on to handle the locked room problem. Resnicow drew on his engineering background to create large scale, three-dimensional locked room-tricks and produced two classics of its kind. The Gold Deadline (1984) stages an impossible stabbing in a locked, guarded theater box during a ballet performance and The Dead Room (1987) brings the locked room mystery to the dark, multi-level anechoic chamber of a hi-fi company. Impressively, the solutions are as original as their setup promises and the absence of diagrams and floor plans do not take away from the tricky solutions or confuse them. You can easily imagine the crime scene and spin them around in your mind to understand the tricks. The Gold Curse (1986) and The Gold Gamble (1989) aren't bad either, but not nearly as good or original as The Gold Deadline and The Dead Room. Resnicow was at the time a much needed, innovative voice to show you can teach an old dog new tricks. A shame nobody took note of them at the time.

However, the same year The Gold Solution was published, Marcia Muller embarked on her only solo-locked room mystery, The Tree of Death (1983). Funnily enough, it takes a similar approach as the murder is committed inside a locked museum protected with burglar alarms. Another one-off worth mentioning is Ellen Godfrey's Murder Behind Locked Doors (1988) in which the server room of a data processing/software company becomes the scene of a suspicious death. And the solution is tailor made to suit the situation.

There are, of course, more examples, particular in short story form, but these are the most important, and brazen, examples. A near decade-long Fourth of July celebration after a four-decade drought, but the fireworks fizzled and died down by the time the 1990s came knocking.

Next stop is England, jolly old England, where the locked room revival of the 1980s was conducted quietly and covertly. So cloak-and-daggers instead of fanfare with fireworks. Douglas Clark is a prime example. A former executive of a pharmaceutical company and a once hugely popular mystery writer of retro-GAD mysteries, but camouflaged his plots as police procedurals with ingenious poisoning methods and medical conundrums. So quite a few of his impossible crime novels have been overlooked like Golden Rain (1980). A novel that never once acknowledges that the poisoning of a school mistress is an impossible one. Plain Sailing (1987), on the other hand, concerns the death of a man by fast acting poison alone on a boat out at sea ("one of those locked room mysteries"). Clark's best contribution remains the much earlier Death After Evensong (1969) about a man getting shot point blank by a bullet that vanishes as if by magic. I wish Clark had written more retro-GAD novels in the vein of Death After Evensong or Plain Sailing.

Someone who was more open and brazen when it came to declaring his colors was a staple of the UK library system, Roger Ormerod, which allowed him some freedom to pen traditionally-plotted mysteries. At the time, it was not a route to commercial success or getting paperback deals, but it gave fans today something to rediscover and enjoy. And how! Ormerod dabbled in impossible crime fiction before the '80s (e.g. The Weight of Evidence, 1978), but really started to make work of it with More Dead Than Alive (1980). A modern-day Harry Houdini vanishes from a tower room blocked from the inside by a heavy magician's cabinet and galore of false-solutions, which get demolished as quickly as they're proposed and the correct explanation is daringly original – rediscovered today in certain closed circles as a minor classic. Ormerod produced an indisputable classic only a few years later. Face Value (1983) is not so much a retro-GAD novel as it's a proto-type of the Japanese shin honkaku mystery, presented as a character-driven crime novel. In 1983, the whole shin honkaku movement was still in its infancy and took place behind a language barrier. Ormerod, always willing to experiment, created exactly such a type of mystery novel out of thin air! Ormerod continued to write detective novels, thrillers and locked room mysteries throughout the '80s and '90s, but none as good as Face Value. One of the best, traditionally-styled detective novels and locked room mysteries from the post-WWII period! Amazingly, the phrase locked room mystery or impossible crime is never uttered by any of the characters!!

The last Brit deserving to be highlighted here is the champion of the historical locked room mystery as imagined by John Dickson Carr and Robert van Gulik, the historian Paul Doherty. Doherty debuted in the mid-1980s with the locked room mystery Satan in St Mary's (1986) representing his first, tentative steps as Doherty would go to prolifically write historical impossible crime novels right up to this day. During the late '90s and '00s, Doherty was the only British mystery writer who made impossible crimes his specialty. Doherty's locked room mysteries are generally overlooked, because they're historical mysteries.

Across the channel, in France, Paul Halter appeared on the scene with La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door, 1987) to boldly claim the mantle of John Dickson Carr. The Fourth Door is a classically-styled mystery full of bravado as a body miraculously appears inside a sealed attic room and an impossible shooting takes place in a house surrounded by a carpet of virgin snow. Halter handled both impossibilities like an expert and remember the solution to the no-footprints problem being quite original, but, similarly to Doherty, Halter wrote most of his locked room novels and short stories over the next few decades – including most of his best work. However, despite the technical nature of the locked room-trick, La mort vous invite (Death Invites You, 1988) has its admirers as does Le brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988). While gathering a cult audience over the years, Halter has not inspired others in his country to pick up the proverbial pen to help him revive the French Golden Age detective story of Stanislas-André Steeman, Pierre Véry, Noël Vindry and Herbert & Wyl. So, for all his devotion, Halter remained an isolated voice in the genre until his locked room novel started to get translated into multiple languages. Halter's masterpiece La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019) even had an international premier as the English, Japanese and Chinese translations preceded the original French publication. Things played out a little differently in Japan.

You know the story by now. A century ago, Edogawa Rampo introduced the Western-style detective story into Japan and began to experiment with the possibilities, e.g. "Yaneura no sanposha" ("The Stalker in the Attic," 1925). That evolved into the Western inspired honkaku (orthodox) mysteries of Seishi Yokomizo and Akimitsu Takagi, but had to make way for Seicho Matsumoto and the post-war shakai-ha (social school) movement. The character-driven, socially conscience crime novel gained popularity during the 1950s and remained the dominant form of crime fiction for several decades. However, the 1970s saw, what's called today, the "Yokomizo Boom" in which the Kosuke Kindaichi series was rediscovered and flourished into a multi-media franchise. It ploughed the ground and planted the seeds for what was to come.

Soji Shimada's picked up where the greats of the past left off and created a blueprint for the shin honkaku (new orthodox) mystery with Senseijutsu satusjin jiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981) and Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982). Unlike Halter, in France, Shimada only had to wait a few years before others took the ball from him and ran with it. Yukito Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) is generally regarded as the official beginning of the shin honkaku movement with writers like Alice Arisugawa, Takemaru Abiko, Rintaro Norizuki and many others following suit – effectively reviving the genre and bringing about a second Golden Age. A movement who completely revitalized and rejuvenated the classically-styled detective story with their college aged detectives, eccentric architecture and corpse puzzles. They have been at it ever since. During the mid-1990s, Natsuhiko Kyogoku's Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume, 1994) and MORI Hiroshi's Subete ga F ni naru (Everything Turns to F: The Perfect Insider, 1996) started the second shin honkaku wave by moving away from bizarre buildings, remote villages and isolated islands to couch the traditionally-styled plots in specialized backgrounds and subject matters. While they're at it, the likes of Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989), Takekuni Kitayama's Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) have been exploring the possibilities hybrid mysteries have to offer for a potential third wave. Why not. It's not like we're doing anything with it. Not to mention it has spread to every form of media in Japan and leaking into the main stream. Or the success of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series that's comparable only to Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie.

So they did everything right and the story doesn't end there. A century after Rampo introduced the Western-style detective story into Japan, the Japanese shin honkaku mystery is now journeying west. Just like Ayatsuji's The Decagon House Murders marked the beginning of the shin honkaku movement, the 2015 LRI publication of the eagerly anticipated English edition started the translation wave. More importantly, the translation wave has already began to influence the Western locked room revival. I noted before there are two very different strains of modern impossible crime fiction develop in front of our eyes. On the one hand, you have the more traditionalists, Anne van Doorn, Tom Mead, J.S. Savage and Gigi Pandian, who can be linked to the reprint renaissance. And on the other you have a group of mostly independently published writers who can be aligned to the translation wave. Such as A. Carver (The Author is Dead, 2022), K.O. Enigma (Bunraku Noir, 2023) and H.M. Faust (Gospel of V, 2023). James Scott Byrnside and Jim Noy's The Red Death Murders (2022) fall somewhere in between. If things continue to develop along these lines, the shin honkaku-style is going to help shape the Western locked room mystery of the 21st century, nearly a century after Rampo! Sometimes history really does rhyme.

This drawn out drivel is not as coherent as imagined. The point is that the post-WWI era saw a sharp, world-wide decline in locked room mystery novels as it beat a retreat to the magazines where it continued to thrive in short story form. Even in Japan.

I noticed that Japanese locked room novels published during the reign of the social crime novel where either hidden away in historical mysteries or mostly forgotten about. For example, Sasazawa Saho's fascinating sounding Kyuukon no misshitsu (The Locked Room of the Suitors, 1978) which would have been forgotten had it not been mentioned in a famous Japanese guidebook on locked room mysteries. So this dark age persisted until the 1980s when, all of sudden, the lights went on across the world and it's not always clear why. Why and how the Japanese shin honkaku mystery subsisted and grew from a niche into a staple of Japanese crime fiction is clear enough, but no idea how it happened in the US or why it died down after barely a decade. Why did Halter remain an isolated phenomenon, but Shimada's locked room mysteries founded a whole new movement? What are the odds it happened on three different continents almost at the same time? Almost like something was hedging its bets hoping it would succeed somewhere or, more likely, an interesting combination of circumstances that happened to throw up a best case scenario in the Japanese detective story – not to mention a "what if?" situation. What if Pronzini's blending of the hardboiled narrative with actual plots and Resnicow's blueprint for large-scale locked room murders were carried over into the next decade? Could the US and by extension the West have had their second Golden Age twenty years ago with the locked room mystery as its flagship? Japan shows it's theoretically possible, but then again, they're more generous in catering to niche audiences in the hope it grows into something profitable. So maybe not. I have not forgotten about the Brits, but the traditional, fair play British detective story (impossible or otherwise) is never going to be restored to its pre-WWII status without another Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie.

So, to cut a long story short, genre history is interesting and a good excuse to mount your hobby horse to rant on about half-formed thoughts. So, hopefully, I still managed to arrive somewhere coherently and assure you the whole timeline was clear and orderly in my mind. So, beside the possibility of World War III, I'm curious to see how things are going to develop and play out over the next ten years. I think doing one of these retrospectives in 2034 has now become something to look forward to.

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!

Riddle of a Lady (1956) by Anthony Gilbert

Last month, I reviewed the recently reprinted The Tragedy at Freyne (1927) by "Anthony Gilbert," a pseudonym of Lucy Malleson, which was the first novel to appear under that name and introduced her first, short-lived series detective, Scott Egerton – a rising politician who appeared in ten mysteries. Gilbert replaced Scott Egerton with a shady, scheming and relentlessly amusing London lawyer named Arthur Crook. A delightful character often likened to Carter Dickson's Sir Henry Merrivale or his American counterparts like John J. Malone or Perry Mason. Gilbert also knew her way around a plot with her best novels (e.g. The Clock in the Hat Box, 1939) coming close to rivaling those of Agatha Christie. Gilbert stuck with Crook from his first appearance in Murder by Experts (1936) to the posthumously published A Nice Little Killing (1974).

The Tragedy at Freyne was a better than average 1920s mystery novel, but it reminded me that a return to Arthur Crook series was long overdue. So picked one that sounded promising and it didn't let me down!

Riddle of a Lady (1956) is the 31st novel in the Arthur Crook series and starts out as an inverted detective story. Henry Greatorex hails from a family of London lawyers, but his casual, frivolous attitude to life and his work was "an intolerable thorn in the side of his sober half-brothers," Richard and Charles Greatorex – who opened the the Beckfield branch in "to provide a niche" for their younger brother. Not expecting too much, Henry had nonetheless flourished with his light attitude to life proving to be "the equivalent of what, in doctors, is known as a bedside manner" ("Henry had it to perfection"). That was twenty years ago. Riddle of a Lady begins with Henry and his staff treating themselves to an anniversary luncheon. Henry is a little grayer, but no less vital as he intends to marry the much younger Beverley Carr. Just one problem. Henry, "wicked old Henry, the bachelor but surely not the celibate," has a mistress setup in a little house, in Hallett Street, where he has been visiting her regularly for the past five years.

Stella Foster, "the deserted married woman who has never sued for divorce and is no longer in a position to do so," refuses to let Henry go without a fight. Even waving a revolver in his face and promising that, as long as she lives, he won't take anyone else to church. If he does, she'll be waiting outside to shoot her.

So the idea of murder entered Henry's mind, "it wouldn't be murder, he reflected, but suicide by proxy." And, before too long, the reader finds Henry standing over the body of Stella Foster and beating a hasty retreat through the backdoor with the intention in keeping very quiet. Stella knew him as Henry Browne and there were no letters, or anything else to connect the two, but the methodical police eventually gather enough evidence and witnesses to identify him – getting detained and arranged for trial. Arthur Crook is called on the defend him or prevent the case from going to trail at all, which is easier said than done. But not for a lack of potential suspects. Riddle of a Lady is not the classic story of the eternal triangle, but an infernal revolving door as Stella had a string of lovers and visitors on the night of her murder ("really, she might as well hang a red light over the door").

Arthur Crook appeared briefly in the opening stages and mentioned several times, but shines as a lawyer-detective, "my clients are always innocent or they wouldn't be my clients," in the second-half. The all-important question is, of course, whether Crook's client really is innocent or the author is playing a game of bluff poker with the genre savvy reader. A very well-played game, either way, especially considering Riddle of a Lady is ultimately a sordid crime story. Crook called it "a not particularly edifying common-or-garden story" and the murderer's identity is a bit of a letdown, but the fireworks preceding it was superb! Crook gathered together all the suspects to mercilessly break down their alibis in order to erect cases against them in dazzling succession. And continues to break down, and build up, until the murderer tripped up.

So, yes, a sordid story as old as time, but not one without substance. Everything from the ambiguous, inverted nature of the plot and the various characters to Crook being Crook helped to polish a sordid crime story into an excellent, late-period Golden Age mystery. One of those all together too rare glimpses of what the plot-driven detective story could have been in the age of the character-driven crime and thriller novels.

Note for the Curious: for those who enjoy my completely wrong armchair solutions, I seriously considered (ROT13) Tvyoreg jnf oyhssvat naq Urael npghnyyl qvq xvyy Fgryyn. Rirelbar nterrq “Urael jnf n tragyrzna, ur unq ybiryl znaaref, ur jbhyq abg fgenatyr gur zbfg gverfbzr bs zvfgerffrf,” ohg jung vs ur unq orra unaqrq n unys-svavfurq wbo? Fbzrbar unq nggnpxrq Fgryyn naq, oryvrivat ure gb or qrnq, syrq gur fprar evtug orsber Urael ragrerq gur ubhfr. Fb ur svavfurq gur wbo gur bgure thl yrsg hasvavfurq juvpu jbhyq rkcynva jul fcraq rkgen gvzr va gur ubhfr bgure guna gvzr fgnaqvat fgvyy. Well, I was only mostly wrong.

The Little Sparrow Murders (1957/59) by Seishi Yokomizo

In my review of Akimitsu Takagi's Nomen satsujin jiken (The Noh Mask Murder, 1949), I likened Pushkin Vertigo's current run of honkaku translations to opening King Tut's tomb or the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of China, to find a treasure trove inside – a hoard of previously inaccessible Golden Age detective fiction. Although the discovery of the Rosetta Stone is probably a better comparison.

Either way, Seishi Yokomizo's Akuma no temari uta (The Little Sparrow Murders, 1957/59), originally serialized in Hôseki from August 1957 to January 1959, continues this excellent run of translations. The Little Sparrow Murders is a little different from what most have come to expect by now from honkaku or shin honkaku translations, which until now have mainly shown how much Japanese writers love to indulge in the plot heavy tropes of the detective story. However, The Little Sparrow Murders features no corpse puzzles, dying messages, impossible crimes or narrative trickery. The book a straight up whodunit with a sprawling cast of characters, village setting and a succession of bizarre murders patterned after the lyrics of a temari song (nursery rhyme). Pushkin Vertigo seems to be diversifying their output of Japanese mysteries with translations of Tetsuya Ayukawa's non-impossible crime novel Kuroi hakuchou (The Black Swan Mystery, 1960) coming later this year and Hen na e (Strange Pictures, 2022) from mystery/horror Youtuber "Uketsu" in January, 2025.

The Little Sparrow Murders brings Kosuke Kindaichi to the small, remote mountain village of Onikobe, nestled in a valley on the border between Hyogo and Okayama prefectures, where he plans to have rest. Inspector Tsunejiro Isokawa recommended the village to Kindaichi and provided him with a letter of introduction. Not without reason!

Onikobe is only a small, rural community, but, geographically and historically, it has always caused troubles for authorities, because geographically it should have been part of Hyogo Prefecture – historical links ties it to Okayama Prefecture. So the Okayama police "treat the village as an unwanted stepchild," while the Hyogo police turned a blind eye to everything going on there ("...it is outside their jurisdiction"). There's an unsolved murder hanging like a black cloud over the inhabitants of the village. More than twenty years ago, Inspector Isokawa came to the village as a young policeman to help investigate the murder of a local who recently returned to the village, Genjiro Aoike. Genjiro had began to become suspicious of a traveling salesman, Ikuzo Onda, who has been leasing machines to the struggling, impoverished farmers to make Christmas tinsel to be exported to the US. It was all a con game and Onda and ended up killing Genjiro, before "absconding and plunging the whole village into turmoil." Inspector Isokawa always had his doubts as the victim's facial features were burned beyond recognition and had a feeling the victim might have been Onda. And had a feeling, if his suspicions are correct, Genjiro might one day return to the village. Kindaichi assures his friend he's only looking for a place to rest. Not more murders to solve.

During his first weeks in the village, Kindaichi holed himself up in his room at the Turtle Spring to read books, organize his case notes and dozing the rest of the day ("...there were few things he enjoyed more than lazing around idly like a cat"). Kindaichi eventually starts to become interested in the long, complicated history and feuds of the local families ("...sounds a lot like the situation with the Americans and the Soviets these days") and the old murder case as new troubles begin to develop.

Firstly, there's the disappearance of the village chieftain, Hoan Tatara, whose title is nothing more than an honorary one as his family house fallen into ruin and lives in a shack, but still quite the character – who had, all told, eight wives during his lifetime. Tatara disappeared at the same time as he had called back his fifth wife, O-Rin. Kindaichi has a strange encounter on a mountain path with an old woman, calling herself O-Rin, going down to the village to see the chieftain. She's nowhere to be found, either, while Tatara's shack has clear evidence that a murder has taken place. So what happened? Secondly, a young girl from one of the leading families goes missing, reportedly taken away by an old woman, but her body is found the following morning under utterly bizarre circumstances in a waterfall basin. So begins a series of macabre murders patterned after a barely remembered temari song.

Like I said, The Little Sparrow Murders has not a single impossible crime or any of the other plot-oriented tropes, which makes The Little Sparrow Murders read more like a Western-style, Golden Age mystery than what most have come to expect from these translations. Without having to pick apart a locked room problem or piecing together a corpse-puzzle, Kindaichi and Isokawa have their hands free to move around the village, talk with people and probe their complicated history and hidden secrets. It brings to mind and sometimes feels like an Agatha Christie mystery, especially those that were published several years earlier, e.g. A Pocketful of Rye (1953) and After the Funeral (1953). However, I poked around the language barrier a bit and discovered Yokomizo got the idea to write a nursery rhyme-themed mystery not from A Pocketful of Rye, but from S.S. van Dine's The Bishop Murder Case (1928). Yokomizo initially decided against the idea as he feared it would be criticized as a rehash, but Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) made him change his mind.

Yokomizo also said of The Little Sparrow Murders is "the least unpleasant of my work and the best written." I agree. The Little Sparrow Murders is the most accessible Japanese mystery novel for Western reader who sometimes find the honkaku-style overwhelming with its eccentric architecture, multiple impossibilities and bodies cut to pieces. Not to mention that this more leisurely, Agatha Christie-style storytelling benefited this lavish detective story about old sins casting long shadows and the consequences of leaving the evil of past events unresolved. Yokomizo's fiction is full of local color, culture, history and it gets all the room it needed to shine here. Just like the many characters who populate the village. I mentioned only a few of them, but there, all together, more than thirty names on the "List of Characters" – divided over five families and a handful of additional characters. So the story is pleasantly reminiscent of Christie and her Golden Age contemporaries, but is it as good or nearly as good? For the most part, yes.

The Little Sparrow Murders is not as diabolically, densely plotted or original as some of the previous novels that have been translated, but solidly put together with a splendid, fairly-clued twist linking the past murder to the nursery rhyme killings. Something that would make the ghost of Brian Flynn rattle the kitchen cabinet's in sheer appreciation. I do think the motive for the present-day murders could have been clued a little stronger and the nursery rhyme should have featured more prominently in the investigation. The reader is told about the nursery rhyme in the first chapter, but two-thirds of the story elapses before Kindaichi is told of the existence of the temari song. So, technically it's a nursery rhyme mystery, but not the most striking or even best use of the murderer following a nursery rhyme motif. Regardless of those little smudges, The Little Sparrow Murders is a solidly-plotted, lavish-spun whodunit that can stand comparison with its Western counterparts. A good, old-fashioned that comes particularly recommended to readers who would like read a Japanese mystery without butchered corpses left behind in hermetically sealed rooms. I'm curious and looking forward to next year's translations. Here's hoping for a translation of Yoru aruku (It Walks by Night, 1948).

The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders (2002) by Takekuni Kitayama

Takekuni Kitayama is a Japanese mystery writer best known for his work on Danganronpa kirigiri, a series of light novels, but started out writing hybrid-style, shin honkaku locked room mysteries – beginning with four novels collectively known as the Castle series. Kitayama is "known as a master of impossible situations with a physical trick behind them" earning him the nickname "Kitayama of Physics."

The first novel in the Castle series, "Clock jou" satsujin jiken (The "Clock Castle" Murder Case, 2002), won the 24th Mephisto Prize and the plot, "vividly depicting the demise of the world," sounds fascinating. Blending the traditional detective story format with fantastic elements appears Kitayama's specialty. Ho-Ling Wong noted in his review of "Guillotine jou" satusjin jiken ("Guillotine Castle" Murder Case, 2005) that Kitayama's novels "seem always to be set in a somewhat different world, a world that is very alike, but quite like 'our' world." A series that sounds right up my alley. So, of course, there are known plans to translate the novels and the series joins countless other Japanese mystery titles and series remaining frustratingly out of reach.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the second title in the Castle series, Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002), to be one of the unexpected, exotic material to come out of the first round of nominations for the new, updated "Locked Room Library" – similar to Aosaki Yugo's "Tokuma shoten" ("Knockin' On Locked," 2014) and K.O. Enigma's Bunraku Noir (2023). Respectively, an excellent fanlation and an even better self-published, shin honkaku-style mystery novel. The available edition of The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is also a fanlation done by Mitsuda Madoy and his friend, "cosmiicnana." A very well done translation of a tricky, intricately-plotted and multiple locked room mystery that has everything from cursed daggers, reincarnating characters and a bloody galore of inexplicable decapitations! Not to mention a ton of diagrams and floor plans of the various locations and tricks.

The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is structured like an interlinked short story collection, set across in different places and periods, involving the same set of characters, Raine and Marie.

Raine and Marie are lovers who have curse laid upon them by six, star-engraved daggers, "belonging to a certain private order in France," which have "drank the blood of countless people in different times and places" – bringing nothing but misfortune to whomever owns a dagger. Those six daggers snagged the two lovers in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. Every time Raine and Marie are reincarnated, they are destined to meet each other and always ending with one killing the other with one of the daggers ("wherever we run, there's another dagger waiting for us"). They have been trapped in this reincarnation cycle for centuries.

The story opens in 1989 at the library of the Foundation of Knowledge, known as the Library at the End of the World, located in the northernmost part of Japan. A young woman, Kimiyo, is approached in the reading room by a man, Kito, who tells her he has been looking for her for a long time. Kito is Raine and Kimiyo is Marie, but she has no memory of any previous life. Let alone several. Kimiyo is naturally a bit skeptical after hearing the story of the cursed daggers and the legend of the Six Headless Knights from 13th century France ("you a knight, and me a lord's daughter... continuously fleeing the curse of the daggers... it's so cheesy"). There is, however, a dagger collecting dust in the library's storage room ("we always reunite near one of cursed daggers"). And not everything about his story appears to add up.

The next part takes place in 1243, Lapis Lazuli Castle, France, during the Albigensian Crusade. Marie is the only daughter of the villainous Count Geoffroy and Raine one of the six knights assigned to watch over her. Strange things happen inside the walls of the Lapis Lazuli Castle.

Some years ago, Marie witnessed her father and mother enter a room on the fourth floor of the east tower and peeked through the gap in the door. Only her parents had vanished from the room. The next thing that happens is a cup falling over and footprints appearing in the spilled wine, "as if an invisible person was walking through the wine spilled on the floor," coming to a stop at the wall. Marie believes the footsteps belonged to her mother and she disappeared into the wall. Count Geoffroy later comes out of the empty room alone. Raine is both skeptical and suspicious about the disappearance, believing her father knows more about the disappearance, but an investigation of the tower room only gives him answer to the phantom footprints – before disappearing himself together with his comrades-in-arms. The next day, the bodies of six headless knights on the banks of Cross Spring, far west of Lapis Lazuli Castle, which takes a day to reach on horseback. Impossibly, the six knights had been seen alive half a day before at the castle. No horses were taken and nobody was seen leaving the castle. They could "only assume that their corpses had flown to Cross Spring." No, the trick here's not what you think it's.

This is merely the beginning of the galore of gruesome, seemingly impossible murders and decapitations across time as The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders has heads to spare. The next stop is one of the trenches on the French-German front during the First World War. 1916 to be precise.

 

 

In this incarnation, Raine is a young French soldier and Marie an army nurse. Raine is not spared the brutality of trench warfare as he's right in the thick of it. While fighting in the flooded, muddy trenches with shell exploding all around him, Raine keeps encountering impossibly headless soldiers. Raine sees "an enemy soldier suddenly turned into a headless corpse" right in front of his eyes with the same happening later to an allied soldier ("had he been walking through the trenches with no head?"). Later, four headless bodies are found floating inside a flooded bunker, which apparently got hit from above and blew off their heads. However, when Raine went up topside and looked down, they were gone. And it would have taken at least eight men to move the corpses. They would have needed a lot more time than a minute.

When it comes locked room murders, Kitayama saved the best for last as the story returns to Kito and Kimiyo in 1989. The Library at the End of the World is turned into a veritable house of horrors with one of the most striking, elaborately staged and layered locked room scenarios I remember coming across. I'm not going to attempt to describe the whole situation, but everything from the locked room-trick itself and the reason for creating such a scenario to the additional impossibility of a cursed dagger materialization out of thin air is brilliantly done. I'll get back to all those inexplicable crimes in a moment.

So an ambitiously-plotted detective novel, stretching across countless lifetimes, requires a rare kind of Great Detective and Kitayama has one, "Snowy" – a white-haired, white-clad genderless being who hops through time. Snowy is tasked with managing chaos, "this world has a self-correcting function, and when it gets all out of whack, it seeks to restore order," which makes them a detective comparable only to Edward D. Hoch's Simon Ark. A character who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest cursed to wander the earth forever in search of evils to exorcise. Snowy is the eccentric sleuth taken to its extreme, but perfectly suitable for a mystery like this one. Snowy appears to Raine and Marie in every time period from the Lapis Lazuli Castle in 1243 to the Library at the End of the World in 1989 to give an explanation of the numerous impossibilities and the mechanics of reincarnation.

First of all, those numerous decapitations and stabbings under seemingly impossible circumstances. Over the years, I gorged on made a study of these impossible crime extravagances and concluded that the magic number is about four. More than four and the story usually starts bumping into one of two problems.

A locked room murder or other type of impossibility always comes with the expectation the author has something to deliver on that premise. Something really original or simply good enough to be acceptable. And those expectations go up with every additional impossible crime. So if you have four impossibilities, you need at least one or two quality locked room-tricks. One really good, quality trick can be repeated under similar circumstances, while the two other can be less original and more routine in nature. A locked room mystery with five or more impossibilities are rarely capable of delivering a satisfying explanation to more than two, three of them. A. Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023) broke with that long-standing tradition by delivering on all eight of its locked room and impossible crime situations. However, the book bumped into another problem. Successfully stringing together eight impossibilities without using overly simplistic, routine trick as filler material is to be applauded, but, even to an impossible crime addict, eight in a single novel can be a bit much to take in all at once. Your mind eventually loses track of the smaller details.

The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders has roughly the same number of impossible crimes as Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes, but Kitayama neatly sidestepped both pitfalls of the miracle extravagance. Firstly, the impossibilities are clearly arranged to their specific time period and location with the minor ones (e.g. the footprints in the wine) getting explained away early on the story. Secondly, the solutions are uniformly excellent. I already mentioned the multi-layered, absolutely insane locked room murder at the library, but not to be overlooked is the bonkers explanation to how the headless knights disappeared from the castle or how the soldiers wandered around the trenches without their heads. I particularly loved that solution! It probably wouldn't work as well as suggested here, but the trick is certainly original and something that would only have a shot of succeeding in the real-life horror story called trench warfare. Very fitting! So a very well managed locked room mystery novel.

However, The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is not entirely without flaws. Kitayama crammed a lot in what is really a short novel and wished certain parts of the story had been given more room to breath and develop. Such as the 1916 case or Snowy's explanation of the mechanics of reincarnation, which gives way to another problem. Kitayama tried to play the game fairly, but the nature of the plot, complexity of the tricks and Snowy's revelations are eventually going to outpace even the most brilliant armchair detective – where it becomes nigh impossible to anticipate the final twists. Even more so, once the reincarnation mechanics begin to influence the overarching plot and characters. It becomes a ride towards the end, you simply have to go along with, but what a ride! Absolutely insane in the truest, most flattering sense of the word!

Somehow, someway, this is reportedly considered to be the weakest of Kitayama's four Castle novels. This is the weakest? This one?! When can I expect translations of the other three?

Anyway, to cut another needlessly long, rambling review short, The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders simply is shin honkaku at its gory best. Highly recommended!