The Glass Tower Murders (2021) by Mikito Chinen

Last year, I came across the work of fan-lator Mitsuda Konno, formerly known as Mitsuda Madoy, who's translating first-rate Japanese detective fiction with "cosmmiicnana" such as Kie Houjou's superb "The Ryuuzen Clan" series and Danro Kamosaki's insane "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" series – which have become personal favorites. I keep my fingers crossed Houjou's Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019), Katou no raihousha (Visitors to the Isolated Island, 2020) and Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022) get official releases one day. I consider them to be the classics of tomorrow and a glimpse of what the detective story could involve into over the course of this century. That's a story for another day.

Mitsuda Konno has a few more pieces of forbidden fruit fanlations on his website and one title especially has been beckoning me for months.

Mikito Chinen's Garasu no tou no satsujin (The Glass Tower Murders, 2021) is described by Konno as "a mystery fan's mystery novel" that's "extremely tropey, and extremely self-aware about how tropey it is," which incidentally also makes it "good as an introduction to modern J-mystery" – dedicating "a lot of page time to explaining the appeal of its own genre." Ho-Ling Wong praised The Glass Tower Murders in his 2022 review for the meaningful way it used the genre's familiar tropes and concepts to create "a very entertaining puzzles that presented a surprising deep look at the genre" ("...basically a love letter to the shin honkaku subgenre"). Chinen's The Glass Tower Murders sounded like a trickier, more complicated and deeper shin honkaku version of Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936). Well, I'm game!

The glass tower of the title is the setting of the story and home to Kozushima Tarou, a retired professor of biotechnology, who invented TRIDENT that "completely altered the course of gene therapy." This invention also made him a very rich man and allowed him to built the tower. A towering, cone-shaped building erected on the slope of Mt. Chogatake with glass walls and a spiral staircase at the center linking together the floor and rooms. The point of this cone-shaped building is called the Display Room where the "Kozushima Collection" is kept. Kozushima is not only a biotech genius, but "a devotee of mystery fiction" and has accumulated a huge collection of detective memorabilia from across the world ("is this Columbo's coat?"). Fittingly, the normally reclusive Kozushima has invited a small group of people to the Glass Tower to make an important announcement.

First of all, there's Kozushima's doctor, Ichijou Yuma, who pulls double duty as a Dr. Watson narrating the story. Sakaizumi Taiki, a chef, who's always called upon to cook lavish meals for Kozushima's events. Aoi Tsukiyo, a self-proclaimed Great Detective, styles herself after Sherlock Holmes, but another guest, Kagami Tsuyoshi of the Nagano Prefectural Police, says she always turns down cases that look too difficult to solve. Kuruma Koushin is a celebrated mystery novelist who made his name during the early days of the shin honkaku movement and "particularly known for his skill at creating locked room mysteries." Yumeyomi Suishou, a TV psychic, is the star of the Psychic Detective Case Files. Sakyo Kousuke is the editor-in-chief of Super Mystery Monthly Magazine known for its "scattershot approach" by "placing proper honkaku stories of logic and reasoning next to unbelievable tales of the paranormal." Lastly, the loyal butler and maid.

So there you have a fairly basic and typical setup for a conventional shin honkaku mystery novel. Conventional to the point you almost get déjà vu, however, that's the point as the story slowly, and playfully, begins to take a different track with these classic, time-honored tropes. Yuma not only narrates the story, playing the witless Watson to Tsukiyo's Sherlock Holmes, but this Watson is also a murderer who has an urgent reason to slip his employer a poisoned pill loaded with tetrodotoxin – which is the poison in pufferfish. Yuma figured if he declared Kozushima's death the result of a heart attack, "it won't be considered a crime," but his plan is completely derailed when Kozushima cries out for help over the telephone. That gives Yuma precious little time to get out of the room and create a very basic locked room setup, which he hopes will do the trick. When the door is opened with the master key, Yuma discovers Kozushima left a clue before dying. The letter "Y" written on the floor ("it must be a dying message"). Tsukiyo, of course, rejects any notion Kozushima died from natural causes or committed suicide. She gets to play detective as an avalanche blocked the road and the police won't be able to get to them for another day or two.

Roughly, the first quarter of The Glass Tower Murders plays out like a darkly humorous inverted mystery in which the murderer finds himself assisting the self-appointed Great Detective investigating his own crime. Something that could have come straight from an Anthony Berkeley or Leo Bruce novel! Yuma is not the only murderer roaming the Glass Tower. A second locked room murder soon follows the second one as Oita Shinzo, the butler, is brutally stabbed to death in the dining room with the door securely latched from the inside. The door being latched from the inside is not even the strangest aspect of the case. Somehow, the dining table was on fire with a message, "SPIRITED AWAY FROM CHOGATAKE," written on the tablecloth ("...a reference to a series of murders that happened in this region over a decade ago").

So now Yuma has a potential scapegoat and more than ever determined to help Tsukiyo find the murderer by being her Watson. However, the murderer is not done yet with creating locked room murders and other impossible situations. The Glass Tower Murders is not about its locked room murders and tricks. It's a detective novel about detective fiction with a cast of genre-savvy mystery readers who discuss various authors, novels, styles and history of the genre – particularly the development of the shin honkaku mystery. Not to mention the plot-thread about an mysterious, unpublished manuscript Kozushima's claims to have discovered that "completely overturn the history of the genre." And, of course, occasionally winking at the fourth wall ("maybe we are characters in a honkaku mystery set in a creepy mansion and just don't realize it"). Don't mistake The Glass Tower Murders for lightweight fluff or an excuse for Mikito Chinen to fanboy all over his favorite mystery writers, novels and series. The Glass Tower Murders is an incredibly dense, layered detective novel pulling off something truly amazing.

The Glass Tower Murders basically gives you three different, deeply intertwined mystery novels for the price of one. Firstly, there's the Berkeley-style inverted mystery involving Yuma poisoning Kozushima. Secondly, the conventional, classically-styled shin honkaku mystery ticking every box needed for such a novel. And that includes two challenges to the reader! This conventional portion of the novel concludes with Tsukiyo's equally conventional solution to exactly such a mystery, but the story is not over yet. So the last part offers an alternative take turning everything that happened before upside down. And brilliantly so! I can't say much more without risking serious spoilers, except how it reminded me just how popular and influential Ellery Queen is in certain non-English speaking parts of the world. Something that's not always appreciated or even noticed in the West.

Mikito Chinen's The Glass Tower Murders stands as a truly exceptional, self-aware meta-mystery novel that demonstrated you can have your cake and eat it too. You have, on the one hand, a typical shin honkaku mystery with a eccentric mansion, locked room murders, a dying message, cracking codes and a closed circle of suspects – completely shut off from the outside world. The solutions to the various mysteries of this conventional shin honkaku novel aren't half bad. Like the locked room-tricks behind the second and third murders, which give you everything you hope to get from a series of impossible crimes in a bizarre mansion. At the same time, the story goes much deeper than merely references to Hercule Poirot or the “Bizarre House Mysteries” series by Yukito Ayatsuji. Only to escape its own confines to prepare the firework show that would end the story. Simply fantastic!

I'm just not sure I would recommend The Glass Tower Murders as an introduction to the shin honkaku mystery, or the genre in general, because the plot demands some level of familiarity with the detective story. Not just for knowing who's who, or who wrote what and when, but in following the plot along as it twists and turns towards its inevitable conclusion. Today, it's easier than ever to read up on the Japanese shin honkaku mystery novel. Enough to fully appreciate The Glass Tower Murders.

So, in closing, all that's left to say is Chinen really took the meta-mystery to another level of consciousness with The Glass Tower Murders. Highly recommended.

Murder at the End of the World (2022) by Akane Araki

I previously reviewed Ross Montgomery's The Murder at World's End (2025), a classically-styled, retro-Golden Age mystery, which is set against the backdrop of the Great Comet Scare of 1910 when Halley's Comet was making its pass by the Earth – believing the planet would pass through its poisonous tail. However, the apocalypse never happened and Montgomery exploited the historical panic to stage a locked room murder inside a grand mansion that was turned into a vintage doomsday bunker. Coincidentally, just when I finished writing the review, the perfect supplement arrived in the mail.

In July, Pushkin Vertigo released Akane Araki's Konoyo no hate no satsujin (Murder at the End of the World, 2022), translated by Jesse Kirkwood, which was awarded with the Edogawa Rampo Prize ("...Japan's most prestigious award for unpublished crime writers"). That award got her manuscript published. Araki's Murder at the End of the World is a completely different story from Montgomery's The Murder at World's End.

Murder at the End of the World begins normally enough as 23-year-old Haru is taking driving lessons from her instructor, of the Dazaifu Driving School, Isagawa, but something strange is going on with the world outside – deserted roads, empty streets and everything's unnervingly quiet. Haru tells Isagawa she's now living alone with her younger brother, because their mother run away early on and their father hanged himself two days ago. And that's before they come across dozens of bodies hanging from trees in the mountain forest. Not a mass suicide, but individual people who decided "dying wild" ("...carrying out the deed in some remote natural setting") was their best option given the circumstances. It turns out humanity has only three months left.

Four months previously, the Spaceguard Foundation held a press conference to announce asteroid 2021-NQ2 (a.k.a. Telos) is going to collide with Earth on March 7 and release "a kinetic energy equal to 45 billion megatons of TNT." The asteroid is expected to land in Aso District, Kumamoto Prefecture, south of Fukuoka. A doomsday broadcast that became known "Black Wednesday" resulting in global, large-scale riots in which "150 million people perished," but Japan and the whole Asia and Oceania got the brunt of it. There was a mass exodus that turned two regions of the world into a continent-sized ghost towns as everyone tried to get as far away from the projected impact site as possible. However, it was explained it didn't matter where you are in the world when the asteroid impacts ("...over 3 billion people would die in the initial shock wave... 5 billion who survived would then starve or freeze to death"). Haru's hometown, Dazaifu, is right in Fukuoka Prefecture. So why even bother taking driving lessons when the story of humanity is about to end? Haru has her own reasons, but Haru and Isagawa stumble across a real and very disturbing mystery.

The Dazaifu Driving School has an untouched, fully fueled fleet of forty-nine training cars. So they can pick and choose which car to take for their lessons without having to worry about fuel. But when they return for their next lesson, they find the body of a woman stuffed inside the boot of one of the training cars. She has been the victim of a brutal and savage knife attack! Isagawa is an ex-detective with an overdeveloped, sometimes dangerous sense of justice and is determined the find the killer of the woman, but where do you start when everything around you has collapsed and been practically deserted? Surprisingly, they find several police stations with a skeleton staff and learn there have been other murders. But the victims of those frenzied stabbings were two male high school students. Nothing was really done to investigate the murders on account of the problems the impending end of the world has caused.

The first-half of Murder at the End of the World is superb from the pre-apocalyptic aesthetics, existential dread and looming extinction to the problems arising from trying to carry out an investigation in a collapsed, depopulated society – like finding the link between the victims. Something that would have been routine before the Black Wednesday. This also count for the murderer. Why go on a killing spree near the end of the world? Why try covering up the murder by hiding the body in the boot of the car when a body beside the road would hardly be noticed, reported or acted upon? That being said, Murder at the End of the World is not a detective novel proper dealing with cleverly hidden murderers, impossible crimes, dying messages, clues and red herrings. Murder at the End of the World is ultimately a criminal character piece/crime novel telling the story of Haru coming to terms with the inevitable and Isagawa's uncompromising desire for justice, but also the stories of the survivors and small pockets of civilization they come across. The so-called holdouts who, for one reason or another, couldn't get out of the country.

So that's perhaps why I preferred the first-half to the second-half and ending, because it was building towards a more detective-esque possible solution. I thought I had at least gotten hold of part of the correct solution, but had to abandon that possibility at the halfway mark. That's where the book became a character-driven crime novel in a doomed world that has largely gone dark. A serial killer sub-plot was even introduced fairly late into the story. Not that the story became any less readable or captivating. I was hooked and actually wanted to know how it ended for the characters, before the asteroid arrived. So even without a detective-esque plot, Araki had my full attention with Murder at the End of the World from start to finish. It's at the finish where my only problem with the story turns up.

The character-driven crime novel is not my favorite type of crime fiction, but I'm not completely allergic to them when they have something good or interesting to offer in lieu of an intricate or simply good plot. Murder at the End of the World definitely found that hook with an asteroid hurling towards Earth, but (IMO) it should at least give the murderer a strong motive to kill under these circumstances. I thought the motive behind the murder to be weak, unconvincing and cheapened the characters and the story preceding it. I would have been happy enough if the murderer turned out to be cracked and was sacrificing people to heavens as an old world remedy to the asteroid. So that left me with mixed thoughts.

I guess you can compare Murder at the End of the World to the other disaster detective Pushkin Vertigo published earlier this year. For me, Haruo Yuki's Hakobune (The Ark, 2022) is the better, more satisfying of the two novels as The Ark is a fiendishly-plotted whodunit with a series of crimes that could have only arising from that situation. Murder at the End of the World is the better written novel with a bigger impact. The Ark only impacted the characters trapped inside that underground structure, while most of society has already collapsed months before page 1 of Murder at the End of the World. Araki very effectively showed the devastating effects of Black Wednesday by exploring the nearly deserted Dazaifu and the surrounding Fukuoka region. If only the motive had been better or slightly more convincing and I would have been happy with this departure from my regular detective fiction.

Araki's Murder at the End of the World is still a very good, hard to put down read. Basically doom scrolling for crime readers. If your taste is somewhat similar to mind, I recommend to adjust your expectations. Araki's Murder at the End of the World is an entirely different kind of "disaster detective" from Yuki's The Ark. The disaster is larger in scale, nothing short of apocalyptic, but not the plot. So this is one best read and enjoyed when you go along for the ride.

Note for the curious: the next review is not going to be of Stuart Turton's The Last Murder at the End of the World (2024). I wish I had thought and planned that far ahead. 

She Walks at Night (1948) by Seishi Yokomizo

Back in May, Pushkin Vertigo released their eighth Kosuke Kindaichi novel, Yoru aruku (She Walks at Night, 1948), written by the patriarch of the Japanese honkaku mystery novel, Seishi Yokomizo – translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood. No doubt, the book title will make Western readers immediately think of John Dickson Carr's It Walks by Night (1930) and not wholly without reason. But, as Ho-Ling Wong noted in his review, it also smacks of Edogawa Rampo's grotesque tales with its sleepwalkers, hunchbacks and headless corpses.

This bizarre, twisted case begins when Naoki Sengoku consulting Torata Yashiro, a childhood friend and struggling mystery writer, concerning the Furugami Family. Naoki's family has been shepherding the Furugamis, "notorious for their naivety and indecisiveness," through Japan's most turbulent times from the Meiji Restoration to the depression of the 1920s. A much needed stewardship of the Furugami estate and fortune as generations of inbreeding produced a long line of idiots and hunchbacks. Naoki's father, Tetsunoshin Sengoku, even "stepped in as a sort of stud horse" and fathered Yachiyo Furugami with the now widowed, second wife of Oribe Furugami, Lady Oryu. Yachiyo is the reason why Naoki decided to consult and invite Torata to the Furugami estate.

A strange situation has developed as tangled and twisted as their own family tree and backstory. Yachiyo Furugami is the 24-year-old daughter of Lady Oryu and the drunkard Tetsunoshin Sengoku, but her official father, Oribe Furugami, consulted a soothsayer who ensured his daughter is not going to be a hunchback – instead she's destined to marry a hunchback. So good news for Yachiyo's hunchbacked half-brother, Morie, who's fallen in love with his technically not blood related half-sister. Only for her to announce her intention to marry a modernist painter, Koichi Hachiya, who's a hunchback. What worries Naoki is Koichi Hachiya was wounded a year ago when a woman shot him at Cabaret Hana. This still unidentified woman spotted the painter, shouted "you monster" and shot him. Naoki knows the mysterious woman who shot him at the night club is Yachiyo. On top of that, Yachiyo has been receiving bizarre letters alluding to the soothsayer's prophesy or warning her "walk not at night." That's a very odd, very peculiar warning as nobody outside the Furugami household knows she's a sleepwalker.

Torata is intrigued enough to accept Naoki's invitation, but things get progressively more bizarre than Naoki's story suggested and begins the moment they arrive. First of all, the Furugami estate is one of those Ellery-in-Wonderland style buildings, "a clever blend of traditional Edo Period craftsmanship and modern Western design," which gives off "a mysterious, almost otherworldly atmosphere." The bizarre scene greeting them could have been a fever dream: a furiously drunk Tetsunoshin Sengoku, dressed like a samurai, chasing a laughing and jeering Koichi Hachiya with a very real sword ("Bizarre old place, this house. Real monsters' den").

So they take the sword away and decide to lock it away in a safe "requiring both the key and a combination to be unlocked." Torata comes up with a three-word character for the combination lock, while Naoki hangs on to the key. Neither men can open the safe on his own. This precaution provided the plot with a locked room puzzle when the body of a headless hunchback is found. Together, they open the safe and discovered the sword coated in thick, dark blood! But how could the killer have taken and returned the sword from a double locked safe ("objects don't just travel through locked doors")? And then there's the question of identity. Who, exactly, was beheaded? Morie and Koichi are both missing and certain identifying marks ended up not giving a clear cut answer. And why take the head?

There are many more mysterious, horrifying incidents following the murder and discovery of the bloodstained sword, but two months pass without a solution. Inspector Sawada permits them to escape the gossip and chatter of Tokyo to go to their old estate in a remote mountain village in Okayama Prefecture. While traveling to the village, Torata and Naoki are joined by a scruffy, shaggy-haired man with a slight stammer and shabbily dressed in a serge kimono and an exhausted-looking hakama – nobody less than Kosuke Kindaichi. Not that the two man are aware Kindaichi is a well-known private investigator who has the respect and corporation of the police. So the Great Detective doesn't turn up until halfway through the story and his role remains somewhat peripheral, even having to cede the spotlight during the denouement to the murderer's unhinged confession. In spite of that, Kindaichi's low-key entrance into the story immediately added interest and excitement to the case. It's easy to see how the figure of the tousle-haired man in an unfashionable kimono and hakana trousers became as iconic and synonymous with the detective story as the silhouette of Sherlock Holmes.

However, not even Kosuke Kindaichi could prevent the murderer from collecting a second head before the case can be closed. So how does it all hold up? Better than first expected.

She Walks at Night is not exactly an immaculately clued detective story, however, I was very please when the second-half began to force me to abandoned the solution I had settled on. You see, I wrongly assumed to have spotted the almost childishly simply method to take and return the sword from the double locked safe (ROT13: Anbxv ghearq uvf onpx jura Gbengn jnf cvpxvat gur guerr-jbeq punenpgre sbe gur pbzovangvba ybpx, ohg jung vs Anbxv unq n cbpxrg zveebe va gur cnyz bs uvf unaq ranoyvat uvz gb ybbx bire uvf fubhyqre. Na byq qbqtr ahyyvslvat gur qbhoyr ybpxf naq thrffrq Anbxv jnf va pnubbgf jvgu Lnpuvlb gb trg evq bs ure byqre unys-oebgure). So, when the second-half rolled around, I had expected nothing more than absorbing, thoroughly entertaining and unchallenging mystery yarn. Fortunately, my armchair solution didn't hold up during the second-half and the locked problem turned on something far more sophisticated and satisfying than the childish magic trick I suspected. Same goes for the who and why. And, while there's definitely an old or two at play, Yokomizo played them very well indeed.

So even though it has its shortcomings, She Walks at Night nonetheless developed in something more complicated than you would expect from a bizarre, nearly pulp-like story teeming with sleepwalkers, hunchbacks, decapitated corpses, missing heads, prophesy and a cursed sword vanishing from a securely locked safe. She Walks at Night is no Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) and Yokomizo would go on to write a better, bizarrely grotesque family murder mystery in Akuma ga kitarite fue o fuku (The Devil's Flute Murders, 1951/53), but She Walks at Night is a solid, mid-tier entry in the Kosuke Kindaichi series and the current translations. This series remains a highlight of the translation wave, because getting to read these previously inaccessible Golden Age mysteries is something not even best shin honkaku mysteries can match. So look forward to Jooubachi (The Queen Bee Mystery, 1951/52), coming next spring, which is apparently a high-profile Kosuke Kindaichi novel that "often makes the jump to both the small and the silver screen."

Death Came Through the Snow (1957) by Frits de Winter

Frits de Winter was a Dutch journalist, translator and a second generation detective novelist whose father, Jan de Winter, wrote juvenile mysteries and more than twenty novels about the Limburg police inspector, Paul Nijst – which apparently enjoyed some popularity during the 1960s. Frits followed in his father's footsteps and debuted as a 19-year-old with De dood kwam door de sneeuw (Death Came Through the Snow, 1957). Five years later, Frits returned to the genre and published five novels, De dode moordenaar (The Dead Murderer, 1962), Dood op een zomerdag (Death on a Summer Day, 1963), Bloedgeld (Blood Money, 1963), Muziek, maanlight en moord (Music, Moonlight and Murder, 1964) and De papiermoorden (The Paper Murders, 1964), under the penname "Fred Summer."

I've been interested in Death Came Through the Snow ever since learning it existed, because a classically-styled detective novel written by a teenager brought James Yaffe, Leonard Thompson and locked room mysteries to mind. That and just look at the cover! I would have gladly taken on a gamble on it, but the book has been out-of-print for nearly seven decades and secondhand copies, cheap or overpriced, appeared to be scarce.

So kept quiet and never alluded to Frits de Winter or Death Came Through the Snow on this blog, because why draw unwanted attention to any copies that might turn up? Well, copies not only proved to be scarce, but even rarer, less often sighted than a planetary alignment – snuffing out most of my hope of ever reading it. But then, to my very great surprise, Delpher digitized and uploaded a whole slew of Dutch detective novels including De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow! Delpher is a project of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) to preserve the paper trail of Dutch culture by digitally preserving old newspapers, magazines and books. Legally downloadable to read and study at your leisure. That means exploring the ruins of the Dutch-language detective story is back on the menu.

This time, I'm spoiled for choice for easier access to some potential interesting, promising-sounding novel for future reviews, but first wanted to take that gamble on Death Came Through the Snow. Even though July is not the best time to be reading and reviewing a Christmas mystery. Let's find out whether De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow belongs on that frustratingly short list of good, traditionally-styled vintage Dutch detective novels or another bust.

Death Comes Through the Snow takes place sometime in the late 1940s as Bob Welters, a Dutch journalist, is traveling from the Netherlands to France with his wife, Charmaine, to spend Christmas with her uncle, Vincent de Blancheville – who resides at an old, now war damaged castle. Not only the castle suffered battle scars, but De Blancheville was practically blinded and only employs ex-soldiers who hobble around on prosthetic limbs with horrendously scarred faces. So a cozy place to celebrate the holidays, but Bob and Charmaine aren't the only invitees. Firstly, there are Jean and Paul de Blancheville, twin brothers, cousins of Charmaine. Countess de Taronne, a widow, who's De Blancheville's nearest neighbor. Guillaume Poruc, an arms manufacturer, who brought along his exasperating wife, Madame Poruc. Charles Homles, a self-styled amateur sleuth, who's accompanied by his wife and an old army general from the First World War, De Battance. Finally, Pierre Bondôle, a friend of De Blancheville, who plays butler for the occasional.

So, as the conclusion of the third chapter says, "the guests for the Christmas party with Death had arrived" and they wake up the next morning to find the world covered in a thick, white blanket of snow, but Guillaume Poruc is missing – apparently didn't sleep in his bedroom. They eventually discover his body hanging from a huge, stone cross in the ruined chapel of the castle! And, not unexpectedly, the snowfall cut the remote castle and nearby village off from the outside world. No police coming for at least two days. So it's up to Bob and Homles ("he had taken a correspondence course to become an amateur detective") to play emergency sleuths. They can't prevent from another member of the Christmas party briefly disappearing before turning their hanged, theatrically posed corpse is found.

Not what I expected or imagined from the title and cover art. I imagined and hoped on something in the spirit of the Henri Bencolin mysteries written by a young John Dickson Carr barely out of his teenage years, but the first-half shaped suggested early Ellery Queen from International series (e.g. The Egyptian Cross Mystery, 1932). So wasn't entirely dissatisfied and went into the second-half with good hope of finally reporting back on a worthwhile Dutch detective novel, but that second-half was also the point where De Winter lost interest. The plot became a mess with a third murder and an attempted fourth, briefly teased as a locked room mystery, which turned out to be separate plot-thread from the first two murders. It needlessly muddled and complicated a plot that was already unraveling itself. And not in a good way.

Despite two amateur detectives, it's the murderer who suddenly exposes themselves when time came to wrap things up. From all the characters that could be arbitrarily picked from the cast of characters, this character is the worst and most disappointing De Winter could have picked. While motive possessed a glimmer of originality, it was entirely wasted here as the murderer was ever so slight mad. So it's fortunate Death Came Through the Snow is a short novel you can race through in a couple of hours and that I got to read it for free or else I would have been really angry and disappointed. At least I know now De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow is not some grand, long-lost and hopelessly out-of-print, out-of-reach classic of the Dutch detective novel. The next few reviews of these forgotten, Dutch mysteries should hopefully see an uptick in quality. Wordt vervolgd!

A note for the curious: one small detail I forgot to mention is that Frits de Winter placed Death Came Through the Snow in the same fictitious universe as his father's Paul Nijst series. When Bob learns Homles fancies himself a detective, he smiles and recalls his friend Paul Nijst, Chief Inspector in Maastricht, "who hated nothing more than amateur detectives." That makes me wonder if he borrowed Bob and Charmaine from that series.

The Dairy Devil (1975) by Ton Vervoort

Back in 2022, I concluded my run of reviews of the lamentably short-lived, surprisingly classically-styled Inspector Floris Jansen series written by the Dutch editor, translator and chess player Peter Verstegen – who published his detective novels under the name "Ton Vervoort." A run of reviews starting in 2021 with the sometimes Ellery Queen-ish Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) and concluded with the spy procedural Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965). Moord onder the mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964) deserves a special mention as a series highlight and an unmistakable Dutch detective novel, but pretty much finished the series. Or so I thought.

Vervoort wrote three short stories of which at least "De juwelen van een weduwe" ("The Jewelry of a Widow," c. 1960s) features Inspector Floris Jansen, but not sure about the harder to find short stories "Burleske aan de galg" ("Burlesque on the Gallows," 1965) and "Het alibi" ("The Alibi," 1968). Further more, there's a dossier novel and a special, shortish science-fiction mystery. That last one turned out to have been an unexpected, overlooked final entry in the Floris Jansen series making it one of most curious of all genre curiosities. I mean, how many detective characters have bowed out of the genre from a future timeline in an alternative reality? But first things first.

De zuivelduivel (The Dairy Devil, 1975) is more of an illustrated short story than a short novel, commissioned by the Centraal Schoolmelkcomité, which was distributed free of charge among the secondary school students in Den Haag (The Hague) attending schools with new, subsidized refrigerators for school milk – a project of the then Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. There was also contest with a boatload of prizes attached to The Dairy Devil, but more on that later. Vervoort packed a lot of world building, sometimes visionary world building, into this short story-ish science-fiction mystery taking place in an alternative 1990, then still 25 years into the future, when the country had slipped into a soft dystopia.

When it comes to the visionary part, Vervoort was sometimes decades ahead of our timeline as the euro had already replaced the gulden, everyone communicated with videophones (smart phones), students attending classes through wirevideo (zoom) called "multimedia distance learning" and predicated a Chernobyl-like disaster. This one took place in the United States. Where he missed the boat was water driven cars and the entire country running on green energy, but there's also the political climate where a radical, green feminists party has seized power who demolished all but the historical center of Amsterdam to build huge, chalk white teepee tent-like solar-and wind powered buildings. Worst thing that can happen in this society is not going to a now comfy prison, but being sentenced to a spell in a social reeducation camp.

Most of important of all, the changes to the language as everything is now written phonetically and Vervoort wrote The Dairy Devil in this new, dumb down Dutch spelling. It's not exactly an Orwellian kind of New Speak, but it makes everyone sound like they were just punched in the mouth.

This is the strange, completely altered society in which André Geuskens, an old school bank robber, is released following a lengthy term in prison. André is reluctant to leave his lazy prison life behind to work as a janitor at a mega school, but it's either taking that job or go to a re-education camp. André reports to Adriaan Suurbier, history teacher and vice-principle at a mega school, who has some problems of his own. A generous offer to let the elderly, previous owner of the building he purchased as an investment has come back to bait him when science made life extending breakthroughs – practically guaranteeing Mrs. Terpstra would be celebrating her 100th birthday. Adriaan needs to get rid of her and sees an opportunity in André to create a cast-iron alibi, because they're both bald, chubby guys.

Adriaan also works part-time for a dairy company where has to hand out prizes to every hundredth customer who leaves a certain department store with one of their new dairy products in their shopping cart, until getting to the thousandth customer. So he manages to get André to take his place for the day, while Adriaan strangles Mrs. Terpstra and stages a burglary. Yes, this little book was handed out to children alongside their carton of milk and straw. Adriaan has his airtight alibi with André as his unwitting accomplice when Floris Jansen, now Chief Commissioner, appears on the final page. Jansen has no lines in this story, but he has a list and yellow cape Adriaan/André wore for the dairy job. And that's where The Dairy Devil ends!

The next page says, "you will not find the solution of the detective story in this book," but "if you have read the story carefully, you can discover for yourself why and how" got caught. Students are asked to write how they think Jansen solved the case. The ten best solutions can win one of the super prizes (cassette recorders, portable radios, photo cameras, etc.) and a hundred consolation prizes (Ton Vervoort's own detective novels). Prizes were awarded during a festive meeting during a dairy congress in 1975 and every participant would receive a booklet over the mail with the best solutions and Vervoort's own solution. I tried to do some armchair archaeology wizardry and enthusiastically started digging around, but have not been able to find anything about this dairy congress, the prize winners or the booklet with solutions. Considering it took place half a century ago and involved students from a select number of schools from only one region, the booklet with official ending is probably lost to history. Another volume for the Phantom Library.

So here's my solution: When Adriaan was instructing André on the dairy job, he told him to expect a winner roughly every hour, but André is not particular keen on working long hour and not above cutting corners. André likely figured that the only thing really expected from him was producing a list with the ten winners of the day. So why hang around all day counting people with dairy products in their cart when he could simply pick the first ten and call it a day. Does it really matter if they were actually the hundredth, two-hundredth or thousandth customer who bought those products that day? Not to André. When the police started contacting the winners to check Adriaan's alibi, they discover he really doesn't have an alibi at all. It would also turn André from an unwitting accomplice into an unwitting hero who spoiled a killer's plan. I can also see some technical-minded students suggesting the button Adriaan pressed to switch off Mrs. Terpstra's high-tech TV might have been a recording button capturing the murder and its aftermath. Not a solution I would have accepted, but the kind of creative thinking that would probably be awarded with a Ton Vervoort paperback.

Ton Vervoort's career as a mystery writer and his Floris Jansen series didn't strand for a lack of creativity, imagination, variation or interest. Who else would bring his series character back after a ten year hiatus for, what's basically, a walk-on cameo in a limited distributed book for school students in a specific region... that also happens to take place in an alternate future. The Dairy Devil is not a top shelf detective story, but it deserves a prominent, top shelf spot in the detective story's curio cabinet. 

A note for the curious: I forgot to work this into my rambling, but back in May, I reviewed Edward D. Hoch's The Frankenstein Factory (1975) set in an alternate, early 2000s and published the same year as The Dairy Devil. Vervoort's alternate 1990 looked a more like the 21st century than the alternate 2000s from The Frankenstein Factory. No internet or cell phones and the story's "Computer Cops" operate from an office in the World Trade Center. Just something I noticed.

By the way, if you ever disagree with me on something and you want to call me names in the comments, but you don't know the correct racial slur for Dutch people, I accept zuivelduivel. It would be a shame to let it go to waste.

Jack the Poetical Private (1997) by MORI Hiroshi

In 2013, the Breakthrough Bandwagon Books translated and published over half a dozen short stories by MORI Hiroshi, associate professor, engineer and somewhat of an experimental mystery writer, which included two short stories in his popular S&M series, "Sekitō no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999) and "Dochiraka ga majo" ("Which is the Witch?," 2001) – collected under the title Seven Stories (2016). We had to wait until 2022 for the BBB to translate, serialize and publish the first S&M novel, Subete ga F ni naru (Everything Turns to F: The Perfect Insider, 1996). Since then, the BBB has published MORI Hiroshi's S&M novels Tsumetai misshitsu to hakase tachi (Doctors in the Isolated Room, 1996), Warawanai sugakusha (Mathematical Goodbye, 1996) and recently Shiteki shiteki Jack (Jack the Poetical Private, 1997).

MORI Hiroshi's Jack the Poetical Private, translated by Ryusui Seiryoin, differs from the previous novels as the plot has no fixed location. The Perfect Insider takes place at the Magata Research Institute on Himaka Island, Doctors in the Isolated Room is set in a low-temperature laboratory at the Polar Environmental Research Center and the backdrop of Mathematical Goodbye is Three Stars Mansion, but Jack the Poetical Private has a serial killer working the college circuit with a free roaming plot.

Jack the Poetical Private finds Sohei Saikawa, associate professor in the Department of Architecture, National N University, as a guest lecturer in the Department of Home Environment Studies at S Women's University. Saikawa is to teach a course to its third-year students, but his arrival coincides with a brutal, inexplicable murder. Satomi Maekawa, a second-year student from T University, was found inside the small, securely bolted log cabin behind the Home Environment Studies – normally used as a study room or meeting place. She had nothing on except her underwear revealing a shallow knife wound ("...ran in a straight line from the victim's left chest to her lower right abdomen") and beside the body, the log cabin was otherwise pristine ("...so clean that it looked like they had used a vacuum cleaner"). Soon there would be another locked room murder. This time, the victim is first-year student from S Women's University, Motoko Aida, whose body was found in the liquid nitrogen pump shed T University. She had also been strangled, undressed and worked over with a knife, but the wounds this time appeared to form the letter "Z." And, somehow, the murderer left the door blocked from the inside.

So the impossible murders of two university students, killed on each others campuses, should be grist on the mill of every academic detective, but Saikawa could barely be less interested. Only showing mild curiosity why the murderer "created such a locked-room situation in the first place." Saikawa actually figures out the locked room-tricks, but leaves the problem for his pupil, Moe Nishinosono, to solve. She solves both locked room-tricks nearly as quickly as her mentor, but the methods in this case do not reveal the killer. This is where Jack the Poetical Private begins losing some of its urgency and the plot stalls just a little.

Moe is left alone to poke and probe the university murders on her own when Saikawa goes abroad on a business trip, but she ends up reflecting on their relationship, "she began to feel that Assistant Professor Saikawa was far farther away than China," concluding that "murder cases no longer mattered to her at all" – until she made a questionable discovery. Minoru Yuki is an eternal student at N University whose musical career has over taken his academic education. Moe sees parallels between the lyrics of his song "Jack the Poetical Private" and double murder case. However, the lyrics supposedly alluding to the murders is the dodgiest part of the plot, because the lyrics are vague enough you can read anything in it. Like astrology or a palmist's prediction. Even worse, you have to take a very literal interpretation and ignore the overall context of the song to conclude that "the lyrics are full of expressions that hinted at those murders." You can pick and choose phrases ("...in exchange for everything in this room...") and say they allude to the tragedy from The Perfect Insider. Poor logic and reasoning, especially coming from Saikawa's pupil.

Where the story, and plot, begins to pick up again is with the third locked room mystery and a fourth murder. This third locked room interestingly takes place around the anechoic chamber and the nearby materials testing room at N University, which is all I can say without treading into spoiler territory. However, this third locked room demonstrates more complexity and imagination than the first two. More importantly, it's this third locked room and fourth murder finally giving the reader an opportunity to begin acting as an armchair detective. Just not based on the clues or the previous murders and incidents, but simply based on knowledge of detective stories and plots. For example, how is the reader supposed to have known (SPOILER/ROT13) Puvxn Fhtvgb obhtug gur fubrf Zbr unq orra rlrvat ng gur syrn znexrg? Not an unimportant detail as Saikawa points out the murders would have remained unsolved had that not happened. So the third and fourth murder is what made me suspicious of the murderer (ROT13: nsgre nyy, hfvat n frevrf bs zheqre gb pnzbhsyntr gur erny zheqre, be zheqref, vf abg rknpgyl n eribyhgvbanel vqrn gbqnl be va gur yngr avargvrf). After this, the story loses some of its urgency again until Saikawa returns to solve the case with a solution that sometimes feels more like imaginative leaps than a logical chain of deductions. That can be blamed on how disjointed the plot comes across in the home stretch.

First of all, I think the best and strongest aspect are the locked rooms. Not for their solutions/tricks, which are all of the technical variety, but why the murders were turned into full-fledged, bizarre locked room slayings that could have featured in a Danro Kamosaki novel – because it really looked like the killer was brute forcing them into existence. So liked the general idea of why a murderer would create a series of risky locked room situations with the third being the best. Purely as a locked room mystery, Jack the Poetical Private has something of interest to offer. The problem is that the solution revealed how disjointed and loose the overall plot is. MORI Hiroshi had a plan and even a blueprint Jack the Poetical Private with all the parts of the plot laid out on the floor, but didn't assemble and screw the whole thing together. And the vagueness of the motive didn't exactly help to tighten those loosely fitting joints.

So you can see how Jack the Poetical Private could have been a better detective novel had the plot been treated with the same rigor as the previous novels. It has still has its strong points as well as a few interesting ideas and discussions. There's a brief discussion early on in which Saikawa gives his take on the locked room problem ("...creating a room that’s completely unaffected by external factors is probably impossible"). But as a whole, Jack the Poetical Private is a marked step down from The Perfect Insider, Doctors in the Isolated Room and Mathematical Goodbye. Only recommended to fans of the S&M series, Japanese mysteries and impossible crime fanatics like myself.

By the way, as of this writing, the BBB has not began the serialization or even announced the translation of the next S&M novel, Fuin saido (Who Inside, 1997), which is supposedly an important entry in the series. This delay probably has to do with last years problem when "all of The BBB's works disappeared from eBook stores for several months due to a problem at the stores." So hope they'll get back on track soon and continue the series, even if this last one fell short of the mark. I really hope they have plans to translate one of Ryusui Seiryoin's own detective novels.

Strange Buildings (2023) by Uketsu

Last year, I looked at two pictorial novels, Henna ie (Strange Houses, 2021) and Henna e (Strange Pictures, 2022), written and crafted by the masked horror/mystery Youtuber "Uketsu" – which received mixed reception in these parts of the fandom. I enjoyed both as something straying off the beaten path without getting lost or stuck. Strange Pictures and Strange Houses aren't without shortcomings, but neither are they novelty or gimmick mysteries like the dossier or photographs novels of the past. That being said, I can also understand why some expected something closer to the detective story rather than just being adjacent to it. Although being adjacent to the detective story is quite fitting for a series written and plotted around floor plans.

Well, I have some good news for those who have been either critical or skeptical about Strange Pictures and Strange Houses. Pushkin Vertigo has published Uketsu's third entry in the series, Henna ie 2 (Strange Buildings, 2023), which is a follow up to Strange Houses. More importantly, Strange Buildings is much closer to what most expected from the first two novels. You can almost call it a grand-style, Soji Shimada-esque detective story in certain regards.

Strange Buildings is both a real and fictitious follow up to Strange Houses beginning with a brief introduction from the author explaining how "readers began sending me their own 'house' stories" and their strange floor plans. So after numerous interviews, arduous research and analysis, the authored gather enough material to put together another book – comprising of eleven cases presented as file chapters. These chapters, or files, are reports of the interviews and excerpts from books, magazine articles or diaries full with diagrams, floor plans and other illustrations. However, these file-chapters are difficult to review as they're not really short stories in the traditional sense. They primarily present the problem or puzzle, but end leaving most questions unanswered until the last, longest chapter connecting all the strange, disordered dots. I'm going to blast through them in short order without going over the finer details or characters to avoid spoilers.

The first file is "The Hallway to Nowhere" and has the author interviewing a woman who's childhood home had "an unexplained, dead end hallway." A simple problem to start out and, by itself, this would have made for an excellent slice-of-life mystery, but the ending throws up another nagging mystery. The second file, "Nurturing Darkness," takes a darker turn as it focuses on a house where a teenage boy brutally killed his mother, grandmother and younger brother, but had the layout of the house something to do with the boy snapping? "The Watermill in the Woods," third file, is an excerpt from an old, fictitious book of "accounts by various people of their travels in Japan." The excerpt concerns a small, watermill house without any water near it and a room without a door with a senseless alcove in its wall ("...like something from a dream"), but is there something darker lurking inside this fairy tale-like structure? The fourth file, "The Mousetrap House," has the author interviewing a woman who had sleepover in high school, but it ended with the grandmother of her friend taking a fatal tumble down the stairs. However, she has the idea something about the house was designed to kill the old woman. "The House Where It Happened," the fifth file, has the author helping out a friend whose house turned up on an app identifying it as a 1930s crime scene.

This is where the cases begin to bleed into each other. The sixth file, "The Hall of Rebirth," is an excerpt from a magazine article, "REVEALING THE TRUTH OF A MYSTERIOUS CULT," which was the first of a supposedly two-part expose of the Rebirth Congregation – only "the publishers pulled the second part." So the author only has the first part of an undercover report of the cult's gathering at the titular hall with its peculiar architecture and strange rites. "Uncle's House" is one of the shortest files without any floor plans, diagrams or illustrations, but excerpts from a young boy's diary dying of abuse and neglect. This is not even the grimmest part of the story. The next two files, "The String Phone" and "Footsteps to Murder," are connected. The former tells the story of a young girl who talked in her bedroom with her father over a string phone, but everything changed the night their neighbor's house burned down. "Footsteps to Murder" has the author interviewing the man who lost his parents as a small child in that house fire, but who started the fire? The tenth file, "No Escape," tells the story of a woman and her young child trapped inside a yakuza run brothel to pay off her debt. Yes, it's grim.

Finally, "The Vanishing Room," in which the author helps out a friend who has a childhood memory of finding a new door in his home that opened into a ridiculous tiny room with a small, wooden box on the floor ("...something terrifying was inside"). I felt very smug when glancing at the floor plan and immediately spotting where the tiny room was hidden, but finding the room is the easy part. Getting the damn door open is where it gets tricky.

So having gathered and presented his eleven cases, the author has also collected double as many of loose threads, lingering questions and outright mysteries. The author turns to Kurihara, an architectural draughtsman, who's armchair deductions and solution takes up the last quarter of the book. Kurihara's elaborate deductions slowly reveal an intriguing blending of the classical and modern schools of crime-and detective genres. The classical elements comes from the floor plans and how they fitted together in the end, which is what gives it that Shimada-esque quality. And, yes, that imagery running through everything also helped. I couldn't help but be reminded of Senseijutsu satsujin jiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). Strange Buildings has a plot-structure with classical features recalling the grand-style detective novel, the interior is more in the style of contemporary noir. Some of the answers and backstories, like the one to "No Escape," get very gritty, brutal and a little disgusting.

Uketsu brought these classical and contemporary approaches together under those timeless themes of old sins casting long shadows and murder coming at the cost of more than just one life. That makes Strange Buildings Uketsu's best and most accomplished novels that has been translated, so far. I'm sure some of you will still disagree.

Somehow, I have a reputation of being an uncompromising, hard headed traditionalist, but, as my recent interest in hybrid mysteries has shown, I'm not opposed to experimenting or exploring new frontiers – on the contrary. I encourage it. I just believe experimenting or exploring shouldn't mean destroying or abandoning what came before, but building on it to create or reach something new. That's one of the reasons why I have been enjoying this series more than others. Uketsu's work is definitely something different from your normal, everyday mystery writer or even shin honkaku authors, but they build on and around something familiar. A sound, solid foundation to build something completely crazy on. I approve and look forward to the translation of Henna chizu (Strange Maps, 2025).

The Ark (2022) by Haruo Yuki

When compiling and cobbling together "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Hybrid Mysteries," I mulled over including a disaster-themed detective novel, but was not entirely sure whether disaster detectives counted as hybrid mysteries or not – decided not to include one. It only dilutes the concept if every detective story in which a mine explodes or a submarine is sunk with survivors aboard. Not to mention the knock-on effect of wartime novels suddenly qualifying as hybrid mysteries.

However, there are disaster detectives, rare as they are, in which the disaster is central to the story rushing along the plot. I suppose Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933) is a good, early example of the disaster detective hybrid and it's impossible to ignore Nevada Barr's Firestorm (1996). So this issue needed further probing and why I looked forward to two translations Pushkin Vertigo announced last year as forthcoming.

Akane Araki's Konoyo no hate no satsujin (Murder at the End of the World, 2022) takes place during humanity's last three months as a civilization ending meteor hurls towards our planet, which should be out around late July or early August. Haruo Yuki's Hakobune (The Ark, 2022), translated by Jim Rion, had been out for a few months now and merges the classically-styled, closed circle whodunit with a survival thriller – arrival of my copy coincided with an interesting review. Countdown John reviewed Yuki's The Ark right after it was published and observed, "I think this qualifies as a hybrid mystery, in this case a cross between a classic mystery and a disaster movie." Agreed! The Ark is exactly the kind of disaster detective/thriller that works as a hybrid mystery, but let's start at the beginning.

The Ark begins when a group of former students and members of their university's hiking club reunite two years after graduating. Firstly, there's Shuichi Koshino, a system engineer, who narrates the story. Shuichi brought along his smartly dressed cousin, Shotaro, who's going to be Ellery Queen-like detective and not the infallible version. Other friends from the old hiking club are Sayaka Nouchi, a yoga teacher, Hana Takatsu, an office worker, Yuya Nishimura, vaguely doing something with fashion, Ryuhei and Mai Itoyama. They got married shortly after graduating. Yuya has hiked in the area before and had discovered an underground building in the mountains. A three floor, subterranean steel structure into a huge cavern with the whole structure following "the shape of a naturally occurring cave" giving it the form of an ark ("...like in the Old Testament?"). The place has a murky past possibly involving militant groups, cults and criminals. Yuya suggests they go explore The Ark, but has trouble finding the entrance to the tunnel. So it quite late when they finally find the entrance and bump into a family of three, the Yazakis, who were out hunting mushrooms when they got lost. They have to camp for the night inside The Ark.

During the night, the mountain is rocked by an earthquake that set the barricade boulder rolling and blocking the exit. The earthquake also caused the trickle of water that had already claimed the bottom floor to increase. So they were trapped for the time being, because there's a way out that comes with a huge moral dilemma: the boulder can be moved, but it would trap the person working the winch to be trapped alone inside a small, cavern-like room – no guarantee the rest can return in time with help. Who has to be sacrificed? Before they can even think about it, one of them is found strangled to death in a storeroom! So now they not only have to deal with being trapped, while the water is slowly rising, but one of them unquestionably being a murderer. Even more baffling is why commit murder under these dire circumstances, especially after finding out they need a sacrifice to escape?

What they need to do is find the killer and force that person to make the sacrifice, because they're going to be hanged for murder anyway. Fortunately, the Ark has a working generator with a weeks worth of fuel giving them some time to find the murderer and that's my sole gripe with The Ark. A detective story can be too much driven by coincidence, but The Ark is the only detective story driven entirely by convenience. The situation inside the Ark would have played out completely different had their been no lights or a way to keep their smartphones charges. Not to mention the left over supplies and tools scattered across the numerous room or the old, outdated, but still working security camera system guarding the blocked entrance and exit. However, convenient as the situation may for the purpose of the plot, Haruo Yuki used those plot conveniences to their full potential to tell this story.

So with about a week until fuel runs out and the water reaches them, Shuichi and Shotaro set out to find the murderer, but the first murder is just a plain murder. The storeroom "had not been locked from the inside, no article of clothing was missing for unexplained reasons, nothing in the room had been inexplicably turned upside down" and "no dying message." Only the baffling question why the murderer picked this moment to strike. While the first murder was "almost disappointingly free of puzzles," the second murder is a typical, gruesome shin honkaku slaying. Every action to killer took to be "simply mystifying." Why stab and decapitate a corpse? What happened to the head? Why dispose of the victim's belonging? And why kill when being trapped underground? Merely a few of the puzzling questions surrounding this second and third, arguably even stranger murder.

Haruo Yuki delivered some devilish clever answers to those questions, like why cut off the head of the second victim, but even better is the role the character's smartphones played though out their ordeal. I mentioned in the past how much I dislike the claim how advances in forensic science and technology in generally had made the traditionally-plotted, Golden Age-style detective novel obsolete. An argument Isaac Asimov demolished in the granddaddy of hybrid mysteries, The Caves of Steel (1953/54), but The Ark provides several practical and ingenious examples for our time. If you ever wondered what the greats from the Golden Age could have done with today's technology, The Ark should give you a pretty good idea. Where the plot and story excels is when the time has come to put everything together as Shotaro reveals the murder through an Ellery Queen-style chain of reasoning and deductions by going over identifiable action and step the killer took from the first to third murder. But then it's time to get out.

Anyone somewhat familiar with Japanese authors penchant for dark, bleak endings and tragic twists can feel something coming in the epilogue. I expected something normal and mundane. Something like the survivors emerging from the Ark to discover the earthquakes were caused by an apocalyptic event like a nuclear war or an asteroid strike, but I didn't see that twist coming. A cruel, beautiful twist making for an unforgettable ending. Even more impressive, the revelation in the epilogue serves as the finishing touch of perfection as it revealed the crimes to have been truly unique to that place and harrowing week inside the Ark. There was no other time or place where the motive for these murder could have arising except among that group of people trapped inside. So, yes, I enjoyed this one very much.

Haruo Yuki's The Ark is simply a plot-technical marvel of the 21st century detective novel with a time-honored approach to the age-old question of whodunit? Highly recommended!

I plan to do "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Translations from Pushkin Vertigo" sometime in the future, but picking just ten is, fittingly enough, going to be a bloodbath.

Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine (2026) by P. Dieudonné

Recently, E-Pulp published the 14th title in P. Dieudonné's Rotterdam Police series, Rechercheur De Klerck en tranen om Valentijn (Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine, 2026), which has a different tread on its plot than previous entries – centering on a series of disappearances instead of murder. This series oscillates between the modern police procedural/crime fiction and the more traditionally-styled detective stories. Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine squarely falls into the modern category, but the story is a bit of roller coaster with an unexpected, satisfying conclusion. I'm getting ahead of the story.

Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine begins with a panicky phone call to the police. Dorette Vroom is frightened and scared that something has happened to her boyfriend, Bart Biervliet, who went out to confront the man who has been bothering his seven-year-old daughter. The last drop was a Valentine card send to the girl. Bart Biervliet "was determined to teach that pervert a lesson," taking along a hockey stick, but never returned and doesn't answer his call. Inspectors Lucien de Klerck and Ruben Klaver answer the call, only to find out the case is not as straightforward as it first appeared.

First of all, the man suspected of trying to contact Biervliet's daughter, Nico Pelsmaeker, appears to have nothing to do with what he has been accused of. So De Klerck wonders if the Valentine card was bait to lure Biervliet to a secluded place, but who and why? And what happened to the body? A possibility that begins to gain traction as Biervliet's complicated private and professional life begin to stir their investigation by throwing up complications, one after another, as the people involved either go on the run or disappear themselves – always under somewhat similar circumstances ("...lured away to a lonely place..."). What really adds interest to the story, considering how it started, is Biervliet's background as editor-in-chief of an opinion magazine, Vrij Onverveerd Vaderland (Free Undaunted Fatherland). More importantly, his past work and association with De Spanningsgids (Suspense Guide).

Dieudonné opened Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine with a short preface thanking "the friendly people at the publisher who recounted their experiences with the darker sides of the book trade" and "allowed to make full use of their recorded experiences" for the book. If you have read my previous reviews of Dutch detective novels, classics and modern, you probably picked up on the fact that the Netherlands is a hostile place for not only traditionally-inclined detective fiction ("those sourpusses thought that detective novels should actually be thrillers"), but independent publisher and basically everything that's not proper crime fiction. For example, Dieudonné notes in the preface that you can't find his novels in the majority of bookstores in the country, "there are even provinces where practically no bookstore participates in the sale," wanted to explain why that is through this story. Oh, boy, did he ever!

When they start digging into the shenanigans of De Spanningsgids, De Klerck and Klaver uncover everything ranging from bullying and gatekeeping to biased or malicious reviews. M.P.O. Books, better known to some of you as "Anne van Doorn," can tell you what a malicious review can do when you're an author with a small publisher. So that put a very different spin and tone on the story from where it started, but then everything began to dovetail in its final stretch and ending. Now, like I said, Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine is very much from in the modern, not classical, tradition and most of you would probably sneer at the murderer's identity – which can be taken as a cheat. However, there was a hint, or two, for the observant reader to spot. Yes, I spotted it and figured out the identity of the extremely well-hidden culprit, but that's not what made the ending so satisfying. That goes to the solution revealing what ultimately happened to the men who went missing without a trace. De Klerck rightfully called it "a unique case."

My personal taste and bias, of course, favors more detective story-like titles such as Rechercheur De Klerck en de ongrijpbare dood (Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death, 2020), Rechercheur De Klerck en moord in scène (Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene, 2021) and Rechercheur De Klerck en de dode weldoener (Inspector De Klerck and the Dead Philanthropist, 2025), but wouldn't want to have missed that ending for the world! Never knowing, exactly, what type of crime/detective next novel will turn out to be is part of the fun. It can be a straightforward politieroman like Rechercheur De Klerck en het duistere web (Inspector De Klerck and the Dark Web, 2022) or something much weirder like Rechercheur De Klerck en een dodelijk pact (Inspector De Klerck and a Deadly Pact, 2022). Whatever the next novel turns out to be, I'm looking forward to it.

The Hit List: 10 More Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated

In 2023, I posted "The Hit List: Top 10 Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated" going down a list of ten classic, or classically-styled, non-English detective novels from four different continents written in six different languages – not just French and Japanese titles. It would be very easy to compile a wishlist comprising of mostly Japanese and French mystery novels. All I need to do is link to Ho-Ling Wong's blog and John Pugmire's "A Locked Room Library." That would have been too easy. I think I scraped together a decently varied, alluring selection of potentially first-rate detective fiction waiting to be ferried across the language barrier.

That list was originally intended as a follow-up to the 2022 blog-post "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Detective Novels That Need to Be Reprinted," but decided it worked better as an ordered top 10 list and wanted to do a part 2. I needed more than can be found online or in certain reference works and asked for suggestions to be left in the comments. My blog is visited by detective fanatics from across the world and figured if even my country produce writers like Cor Docter, Ton Vervoort, M.P.O. Books and P. Dieudonné, surely other countries must have some gems practically unknown outside their borders. The harvest was not great and gave up on the idea of doing a follow-up, until a minor miracle occurred.

Pushkin Vertigo is publishing a long-awaited translation of Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939), which was one of my two or three premium picks alongside Rafeal Bernal's Un muerto en la tumba (A Dead Man in the Tomb, 1946) and Hajime Tsukatou's John Dickson Carr no saishuu teiri (John Dickson Carr's Last Theorem, 2020). Boileau's Six Crimes Without a Murderer was also one of the least likely titles on the list to get translated, because that snooty French upstart of a locked room extravaganza has resisted getting translated since the 1940s – even producing a lost manuscript. At the end of Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), there's the often overlooked section "Foreign-Language Books." It has a lengthy note for Six Crimes Without a Murderer. A translation was advertised in 1949 by Sampson Low as forthcoming, however, "the publishers themselves disappeared about that time and all efforts to trace a proof" or "a draft of the translation, or the translator, one Eric Sutton, have proved entirely unrewarding." The late John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, tried to get a translation published, but the current copyright holder refused to work small, independent or print-on-demand publishers. Pushkin Vertigo came true and caught the one that kept getting away for nearly eighth years.

So decided to take another look at that follow-up, dug around a bit and finally managed to gather enough to do another list without leaning entirely on French and Japanese titles with a smattering of Dutch mysteries. I tried to have the list not entirely dominated by locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, but somehow, they tend to be easier to find. So they have, as usually, a strong presence, but marvel at my impartiality.

Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930) by Pierre Véry

The obvious pick here would have been Pierre Véry's vaunted impossible crime novel, Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934), but, to keep up appearances, I went with The Testament of Basil Crookes – "a pastiche of the English detective novel." The Testament of Basil Crookes is Véry's debut and appears to be a madcap chase mystery in which an unpublished manuscript, tossed from one train onto another train, is the key to securing a large inheritance. A madcap race with a three year time limit during which genre conventions are turned upside down. Véry's first stab at the detective story not only sounds like a fun, tongue-in-cheek mystery, anticipating Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin, but one of those early meta-fictional mysteries that started to appear around this time. And that type of mystery is now appreciated more than ever before.

L'antro dei filosofi (The Philosophers' Den, 1942) by Giorgio Scerbanenco

Giorgio Scerbanenco is one of the writers Igor Longo wrote about in his short essay "The Italian Detective Story" from the English translation of Franco Vailati's Il mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935). Scerbanenco belonged to the Van Dine-Queen School and even had an American series-detective, Arthur Jelling, who's "a Reeder-like archivist in the Boston Police Department." Longo highlighted The Philosophers' Den, "a very moody and bleak murder story in a very Queenesque eccentric family, possibly related to the Hatters of the Tragedy of Y," in which he praised Scerbanenco's effective use of "the Queenesque negative clue." The Philosophers' Den apparently is not the only notable Jelling case in addition to "a very famous Noir series with unfrocked and disbarred surgeon Duca Lamberti" written during the 1960s. And, of course, four of the Lamberti novels have been translated into English.

Diferentes razones tiene la muerte (Death Has Different Reasons, 1947) by María Elvira Bermúdez

María Elvira Bermúdez was according to Latin American Mystery Writers: An A to Z Guide (2004) "one of the founders of the Mexican detective story" and "one of the most innovative practitioners of the genre in Mexico," while also making a name as "one of its most perceptive critics." Death Has Different Reasons was "the most ambitious detective up to that time in Mexico" introducing her series-detective, Armando H. Zozaya, who's "modeled after the American sleuth Ellery Queen." Zozaya's solves his first case, a double murder, by sticking to conventions and traditions of the fair play, Golden Age-style detective novels. If that's not enticing enough for publishers, Bermúdez was "one of the most prolific female detective fiction author in the Spanish-speaking world" and "for 50 years a unique voice in Spanish-American detective fiction and criticism."

A morte no envelope (Death in an Envelope, 1957) by Lopes Coelho

This entry also comes from Latin American Mystery Writers. According to that insightful guide, Lopes Coelho was a driving force in the creation of "a uniquely Brazilian brand of detective fiction" by creating the first truly Brazilian detective character, Doctor Leite, whose cases filled three collections of short stories – published between 1957 and '68. The stories are classic whodunits and other type of puzzle stories, "solved by applying principles of logic and deductive reasoning," including two locked room mysteries, "A morte no envelope" ("Death in an Envelope") and "Só o crime estava na biblioteca" ("Only Crime Was in the Library"). So more than enough reasons to want a translation of at least the first collection.

Ălkistan (The Eel Cage, 1967) by Jan Ekström

When it comes to crime fiction, Sweden is known for their dark, dreary police procedural, psychological thrillers and cold, character-driven noir fiction. There's an exception to nearly everything and one of the exceptions here was Jan Ekström, "the Swedish John Dickson Carr," who wrote several locked room mysteries. Ekström's best known impossible crime novel, Ättestupan (Deadly Reunion, 1975), received an English translation decades ago, but nothing else outside of a short story in an obscure anthology. Adey's Locked Room Murders, under "Foreign-Language Books," lists several titles like The Eel Cage. From what I've been able to gather, The Eel Cage is Ekström's best regarded detective novel taking place in a small, rural fishing village where a body inexplicably turns up inside a jealously guarded eel chest, locked from the inside, but the key is found in the victim's pocket! Can you blame me for being intrigued?

Kyuukon no misshitsu (The Locked Room of the Suitors, 1978) by Sasazawa Saho

Like I said above, it would be really easy to fill out a list with just titles Ho-Ling has reviewed over the years. Just one list would not even scratch the surface of my honkaku and shin honkaku wishlist, but some titles stand out more than others. Sasazawa Saho's The Locked Room of the Suitors has for some reason always intrigued me. It was reportedly nearly forgotten about, until Alice Arisugawa included The Locked Room of the Suitors in An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891-1998 examining forty impossible crime novels from across the world. The plot concerns a double murder, plus dying message, behind the padlocked door of an old storage cellar. Ho-Ling says in his review, "the locked room mystery and the build-up towards the solution are quite good" with "both the fake murder theory and the final solution are built on clever clues." More importantly, "the locked room mystery itself is also quite memorable."

Mord & orkidéer (Murder & Orchids, 1996) by Bertil Falk

Back in February, I reviewed Bertil Falk's collection of short stories Mind-boggling Mysteries of a Missionary (2010) and mentioned he had authored two novel-length, untranslated detective novels beginning with Den maskerade ligachefen (The Masked Gangleader, 1954) – written and published when he was twenty years old. Murder & Orchids followed four decades later and appears to be a better, maturer novel combining the formal detective story with the travel thriller to create a tricky plot turning accepted cliches and conventions on its head. So very much a mystery in the spirit of the first entry on this list.

 

Jinrojo no kyofu (The Terror of Werewolf Castle, 1996/98) by Nikaido Reito

I mentioned Nikaido Reito's The Terror of Werewolf Castle in "Top 10 Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated" as not having very good odds at ever getting translated. The Terror of Werewolf Castle is, as Ho-Ling pointed out, "a monument in Japanese detective writing," comprising of four separate books averaging around 700 pages each. So it's not very realistic to expect a publisher today to translate a four volume, 2800 page behemoth, but on the other hand, we're paying customers with a The Terror of Werewolf Castle-shaped gap on our shelves. So, you know, chop, chop!

Le voyageur du passé (The Traveler from the Past, 2012) by Paul Halter

The death of John Pugmire in 2024 ended both Locked Room International and his regular Paul Halter translations, which consisted at his passing of nearly twenty novels, several short story collections and a few uncollected short stories. Tom Mead is currently doing fresh translations of previously published Halter translations, but nothing new so far. There are still quite a few untranslated Paul Halter titles on my wishlist like Le crime de Dédale (The Crime of Daedalus, 1997), Le douze crimes d'Hercule (The Twelve Crimes of Hercules, 2001) and Le tigre borgne (The One-Eyed Tiger, 2004), but The Traveler from the Past intrigued me ever since reading Patrick Ohl's 2012 review. A young man who went missing in 1905 turns up in 1955 without having aged a day, only to be tragically killed in a subway accident. But his identity appears to check out. What follows is no less impossible! Patrick described the book as "utterly fantastic" and "chillingly bizarre" with a plot that springs "a genuine surprise in the dénouement." Fingers crossed Mead eventually turns his hands to the Halter novels Pugmire didn't get to translate with The Traveler from the Past being at the top of that pile.

Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023) by “Anne van Doorn” (a.k.a. M.P.O. Books)

This is the first entry in the New York Cop series by "Anne van Doorn," open penname of M.P.O. Books, which follows Detectives Krell and Merrilee Hopper, of the 16th Precinct, whose first recorded case involves an impossible murder on the seventy-second floor of a high-rise tower on West 33rd Street – committed when the building was swaying in a storm. You can view this series as an homage to other New York detective writers and series like Van Dine, Queen and Ed McBain's 87th Precinct, but flavored like a Dutch politieroman (police novel). The sequel is titled Het legpuzzel mysterie (The Jigsaw Puzzle Mystery, 2026) and scheduled for release later this year. And here's the kicker... The Delft Blue Mystery has already been translated into English complete with blurbs from David Dean and Tom Mead, but holding up its publication is the search for a literary agent and publisher in the United States. No news on that front, yet, but you can at least look forward to my review of The Jigsaw Puzzle Mystery when it gets released.