Delicious Death for Detectives (2022) by Kie Houjou

I previously reviewed the first, of currently three, genre-bending detective novels in Kie Houjou's "Ryuuzen Clan" series that successfully added new dimensions to the classically-styled, traditionally-plotted shin honkaku mysteries – weaving together the logical with the fantastical. Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019) is a superb time travel mystery and Ho-Ling Wong's review of Katou no raihousha (Visitors on the Isolated Island, 2020) makes it sounds like a prototype of what the detective story might look like a hundred years from now. When the detective, horror and science-fiction genres blend together to create a new entity. The third entry in the series keeps the plot a bit more grounded without time travel or otherworldly entities in order to create an insanely tangled, multi-level detective novel that might very well end up fulfilling the role of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) of this century's iconic detective novel.

Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022) is one of Houjou's two novels nominated for the new, updated "Locked Room Library" translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmiicnana." So, with that out of the way...

Kamo Touma from The Time Traveler's Hourglass returns to take on the double role of protagonist and antagonist. Kamo is a magazine writer with a column in the monthly magazine Unsolved Mysteries, "The Pursuit of Truth," in which he presents "alternative explanations" to old, presumably settled cases. His analyses revealed quite a few miscarriages of justice resulting in several wrongful convictions getting overturned. That gave him a reputation of being something of an "amateur detective" and landed him a very special invitation.

Kurata Chikage is a game producer at MegalodonSoft who produces open-world RPG games and the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns caused a boom in game sales. MegalodonSoft into Virtual Reality and created the hit sensation Mystery Maker. A VR game in which "players take on the role of one of the world's top amateur detectives" and "participate in the solving of various difficult incidents" or battle Dr. D, the King of Crime, in Story Mode – even creating original scenarios. Sixty million sold copies later, Kurata and MegalodonSoft expect to release Mystery Maker 2 in February, 2025. By the way, Delicious Death for Detectives takes place in the far-away future of November, 2024. Kurata is organizing an internal event as a special demo, or, to be more precise, "a closed circle event." She asks Kamo to create/design a challenging scenario and play the role of murderer in the play test demo of the VR version of Mystery Maker 2.

The group of people she invited to go head-to-head are "the top real world amateur detectives" who are "to act as detectives and murderers" in an intense battle of wits and cat-and-mouse. Well, Kurata restricted her picks to the amateur detectives of Japan. The first of these amateur detective is the cousin of Kamo's wife, Ryuuzen Yuki, who's a struggling mystery writer under the name "Ryuuzen Yuki." Roppongi Shido is a retired investigator, critic and reputedly an off-the-book consultant to the police ("...often assisted with investigating cases in secret"). Fuwa Shinichiro is the director of the Shinjuku-based Fuwa Detective Agency with a reputation to match. Michi Chiaki describes herself as a job hopping, jack-of-all-trades "who mostly solves or prevents scams for clients." Azuma Yuzuha is an administrator for a hospital, but her brother was a famous detective who died in the line of duty and she carries on his work with her sister-in-law. Hajime Kindaichi Sou Touma Kyu Renjo Kenzan Ryohei is the obligatory, teenage high school detective who solved the cipher murder case at his cram school and several other incidents at his regular high school. Munakata Nozomi is simply known as the drifting detective whose only companion and Watson is a husky, Retsu. Kamo makes eight.

MegalodonSoft honors the time-honored traditions of the detective story and holds the three-day event at Megalodon Manor (floor plan included) on the island of Inunojima in the Seto Inland Sea ("the building certainly resembles the sort of mansion you'd see in a mystery novel"). A VR version of Megalodon Manor was created, called Puppet Hall (floor plan included), where the demo takes place and can be accessed through a full body VR control device – named RHAPSODY. But before the games can even begin, Kurata goes rogue and informs the detectives that there has been a serious change of plan. The game is still going ahead as scheduled, but, this time, being a fallible detective comes with consequences. Kurata states, "normally, the ones who suffer for your mistakes are others, but in this game, you'll be asked to bet your own lives." If the Detectives or Murderer (Kamo) fail to fulfill any of their victory conditions, they'll be killed on the spot. Everyone was given a MegalodonSoft smartwatches that has "death trap" device with a remote controlled poisoned needle. And, to absolutely ensure their cooperation, she gifted similar smartwatches to their loved ones.

You have heard of puzzling brain teasers? Delicious Death for Detectives is a puzzling brain thriller!

I should point out here that all of this is an overly simplified, stripped down summary of the story's setup as it not only has to introduce the characters, laying the groundwork of the plot and explaining the rules of the game, but also has to do a bit of world-building regarding the VR setting of Puppet Hall. An entirely new, specialized setting, "a space set up specifically for a game of deduction," that comes with its own sets of possibilities and limitations. For example, the VR gear is ID-locked with an iris scan bio-authentication and players who get killed in the game, but not IRL, can be resurrected as ghosts with a halo hovering above their virtual avatar to give evidence. So the in-game murderer (Kamo) has to be careful not to be identified when carrying out the murderer. That's why the character of the murderer has the ability to extinguish the lights in the building during "Crime Time" and has night vision function.

So, roughly, the first quarter of Delicious Death for Detectives gives the reader a lot to digest and can be counted as its sole shortcoming as Kurata, in her role as Gamemaster, keeps adding new details and bits of information when the game has already started – giving the impression the story's not playing entirely fair. That's not the case, of course, but simply spacing everything out in order to not give the reader an even info dump to digest. I think it would have been both helpful, not to mention very fitting, if the book had opened with a short game guide explaining the rules, mechanics, maps and list of the in-game inventory and players. It would have smoothed out the opening stages of the story, but, once you get pass that, you get a detective novel like few others. Even by the standards of hybrid mysteries!

I already noted Kamo has to play a double role of detective and in-game murderer. Only the reader, up to a certain point, knows Kamo is the murderer in Mystery Maker 2, but not how he engineered the (locked room) murders. So the murders in Puppet Hall can be taken as semi-inverted mysteries in which the reader knows whodunit, but, frustratingly, not howdunit. Getting caught, having his tricks exposed or successfully defending himself by demolishing a wrong theory, it has deadly consequences either way. If Kamo gets exposed, or one of his tricks, he and his family dies. But if he successfully defends himself, the detective whose theory got demolished is marked for death. The person charged with carrying out the real-world executions is simply called the Executioner and someone hidden among the other players.

I'm going to reveal too many of the details about the impossible crimes themselves, but they deserve to discussed as they're all gems, especially those staged in Puppet Hall.

Firstly, there's the murder Kamo staged in a storeroom barricaded from the inside, which appeared to be the central locked room puzzle of the story as it received a considerable amount of attention and scrutiny – two detectives tacking a crack at it complete with diagrams. A pleasure for everyone who enjoys Ellery Queen-style chains-of-deductions, building false-solutions before tearing them down again centered around the fallibility of the detectives. All the solutions, correct or not, to this locked room puzzle are ingenious and original, but surprisingly conventional compared to the other impossible murder in the VR space. Secondly, around the same time, someone else is poisoned in a locked room and it didn't appear it would develop in anything particular noteworthy, but it ended up giving the book its claim to at least the status of a locked room/hybrid mystery classic. The brilliant solution completely took me by surprise and left me speechless. Revealing a string of pretty unique clues and its brazen originality functioning as a red herring. Is this one of the most pleasing locked room-tricks to mentally visualize? Well, what more can I say? It's a masterclass in how to integrate an invented world or fantastical elements into a fair play (locked room) mystery. And how such a setting can unlock new possibilities to plot and tell a detective story.

If Delicious Death for Detective had been a smaller-scale detective novel restricting itself to experimenting with a locked room murder inside a VR game, it would have still been a first-rate, highly original and fresh treatment of the classical manor house mysteries. Delicious Death for Detectives is a big picture mystery and story continues to twist and turn right up till the epilogue as more people die. But as false-solutions get demolished, the Executioner begins to kill detectives in Megalodon Manor under seemingly impossible, or mysterious, circumstances. I've still barely scratched the surface of this insanely intricate, densely-plotted detective novel climaxing on the third day during the final round of "Answer Time" when Kamo has to reason for everyone's life. Like I said, the story never settles down until the epilogue. All done according to the fair play rules of the grandest game in the world.

I can go on lavishing praise on the story and plot, but you get the idea by now. It's a superb detective novel. A prototype of the detective story of the future and likely going to be a modern classic. What deserves to be pointed out is how it reads like the past, present and future of the genre coming together Megalodon Manor/Puppet Hall, but mostly done very subtly and without referencing famous detective stories or locked room lectures. Those not overly familiar with Japanese mysteries, in all its guises, will no doubt see shades of Christie's And Then There Were None, Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Leo Bruce's Case of Three Detectives (1936) and Ellery Queen, but was particular pleased to spot all the nods to everyone favorite manga mystery series. Some were more obvious ("...the black shadow figure from a certain mystery manga") than others (VR setting and smartwatch hostages), but enjoyed. I really believe what was done with the specialized setting and plot is a glimpse of the detective story of the future.

 Delicious Death for Detectives is not the first hybrid mystery discussed on this blog proving not everything under the sun has been done before, but Kie Houjou delivered a particular effective, convincing and basically a textbook example of the hybrid mystery done to near perfection. And produced a classic locked room mystery in the process. Hopefully, I get an opportunity to read the second, utterly bizarre sounding, Visitors on the Isolated Island one of these days, but, in the mean time, Delicious Death for Detectives comes highly recommended!

Hold on a minute: I have one, very minor, thing to nitpick about. I don't like the title Delicious Death for Detectives or, to use the apparently correct title, "Delicious Death" for Detectives. Just Deserts for "Great Detectives" would be a better fit for an English title, but even that one sounds too cozy-like and this is a story that would actually benefit from a simple, straightforward title. Something like Death and the Great Detectives or Deleting the Great Detectives.