Conundrums with Corpses: Q.E.D, vol. 5 by Motohiro Katou

I've remarked in past reviews that Motohiro Katou took a different route to other, more well-known, anime-and manga detective series when it came to the characterization of the protagonists, the type of cases they get to solve and volume structure – making Q.E.D. vastly different compared to Case Closed, Detective Academy Q and The Kindaichi Case Files. The previous volume was a perfect example of these dissimilarities with a scam story and a quasi-techno thriller, but the cases in volume 5 were unexpectedly close to the kind of stories littering the Case Closed series!

The first of two stories, "The Distorted Melody," is an inverted detective story, a la Columbo, but with a quasi-impossible problem of where the body was hidden at the time the murderer was orchestrating an unimpeachable alibi.

Hirai Reiji is a world-famous young cellist and an equally celebrated symphony orchestra had added him as their main attraction for an upcoming concert, but the President of Kouwa Industries, Okabe Kousuke, canceled their long-running sponsorship. A decision Hirai, "a slave to a great art," simply could not allow to stand. So, when Okabe visits him at his remote, cliff side cabin, Hirai strangles him and sews together an alibi by inviting a small party of high-school students, which includes Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara – only they arrived a little too early. This leaves Hirai with mere minutes at his disposal to hide the body inside a small, sparsely furnished cabin without any apparent hiding places. Somehow, he managed to do it, but how? And, no, the body wasn't stuffed inside the cello case.

Two days later, Okade's body is found at his home, crammed inside a disused, filled-in water well, but "the kids testified that there was no corpse in the house" and supporting evidence, namely a train ticket and a phone call, cemented Hirai's alibi.

Touma believes the young cellist murdered the tightfisted businessman and begins, piece by piece, to tear down both his story and carefully constructed alibi. The solution hinges on the use of the cello, a piece of classical music and cellphone feedback, but the highlight of the solution is the place where the body had been hidden. A simple and elegant solution marred only slightly by the lack of (visual) clueing, but still a clever take on the hidden object puzzle.

As an aside, this story was loaded with translator's note and had a floor plan of the cabin, which, in combination with the search for a missing, cleverly hidden object, also made the story vaguely feel like an American Golden Age detective story.

Where's the body?

 

The second and last story of this volume, entitled "The Afterimage of Light," is, story-wise, right up there with "Rokubu's Treasure" and "The Fading of Star Map," as one of the better tales so far and serves the reader a bizarre, neatly posed locked room mystery – buried in the dimly remembered past. A story that begins, or ended, when Touma and Mizuhara buy an old camera on a flea market only to discover a role of undeveloped film inside. A film with five snapshots of a doll, a storage house, three children, a mountain and a blurry picture of a man's shoulder.

So they decide to follow the clues of the camera and pictures original to Otowamura, a small mountain village, where they find the "surprisingly small," windowless storage that turned out to have a weird and sad history behind it. Once upon a time, it was simply used to store rice and farming tools, but when tuberculous reared its ugly head in the region, it was converted into a sanatorium. A lot of people died in there. However, the weirdest story to come out of the store house is that of a little girl, Kuwano Taki, who had tuberculous and was confined to the windowless store house. But, every day, the girl told her visiting mother what had happened that day outside the storage house and replicated this ability in public experiments. She was "shut up in a big box" from "where she would tell people what was outside," but this is only of two locked room puzzles the story has to offer!

Touma and Mizuhara, with the unwilling assistance of a local policeman, break open the door of the storage house, because the key had gone missing of thirty years ago and nobody appears to have entered it during that period. Curiously, while the walls are crumbling, one of then looks whiter than the other as it was plastered over in the past, but part of the wall disintegrated upon being touched – revealing a decomposed skeleton behind it. The sole, long-lost store house key had been in the pocket of the body all this time. So how was the murderer able to leave a locked door behind and who did the murderer hide in the wall? And how does this long-hidden murder linked to the photos, the now three grownup children and the story of the clairvoyant girl?

The Locked Room Mystery

A really well done detective with many moving, interlocking parts that beautifully dovetail together in the end. Once again, the clueing is not always pitch-perfect and one clue, in particular, is impossible to correctly interpret, but enough of the plot can be worked out to satisfy most armchair detectives.

I think a good chunk of readers will be able to work out the clairvoyant images of the little girl, which is a surprisingly modern take on the naturalistic impossible crime fiction that was somewhat popular during the turn of the previous century (e.g. L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries, 1898). The result is something pleasingly different than what you usually get in these stories about faked psychic abilities. I liked the explanation as to how the skeleton ended up behind the wall of a locked room, but worked out the trick when I read Ho-Ling Wong's double review of volume 4 and 5. I misunderstood the exact situation of the locked room, but the hint in my comment (mild spoilers) was spot on! To be honest, there's really only one way that specific locked room-trick could have been worked. I still liked it.

The strength of the story is how all these plot-threads were tied together and the fact that the statute of limitation has ran out, which means that the murderer not only gets away with killing an innocent person, but is not even confronted by Touma – reminding the reader that Q.E.D. is not like the other manga detective series. Even when it tries to be!

So, all in all, this is easily my favorite volume up to this point in the series and, while not entirely spotless, I found the stories to be excellent with some original ideas and tricks. Definitely recommended!

Portrait of a Murderer (1933) by Anne Meredith

Lucy Malleson was a fertile mystery novelist best remembered today as the author of the long-running series about a morally flexible defense attorney, Arthur Crook, published under her most well-known pseudonym, "Anthony Gilbert," but there were two other pennames that have fallen into obscurity – namely "J. Kilmeny Keith" and "Anne Meredith." Between 1927 and 1935, Malleson produced ten novels, as Keith, featuring a Liberal MP, Scott Egerton, as the series-detective. Egerton was abandoned as soon as that rogue elephant among lawyers appeared on the scene.

The name Anne Meredith mainly appeared on the covers of Malleson's straight novels, twenty in total, but there was a dark, highly-praised seasonal crime novel published under the Meredith byline.

Portrait of a Murderer (1933) was praised by Dorothy L. Sayers as a "powerful and impressive" story with a "tragic quality," while Carolyn Wells called the book "a Human Document" crammed with "interest and personality." Regardless of their praise, the book was soon forgotten and remained in complete obscurity until it was republished in 2018 by British Library/Poisoned Pen Press.

Portrait of a Murderer is with its emphasis on psychology, instead of detection, not your typical 1930s Golden Age detective novel and the story can best be described as the mirror opposite of Philip MacDonald's experimental detective novel, The Maze (1932) – in which any hint of characterization was barred from its pages. The characters only appeared as names in a court transcript. But, from the very first page, Portrait of a Murderer sets off in the opposite direction with character exploration supplanting the detective work.

The story begins with a brief announcement that the life of an elderly curmudgeon, Adrian Gray, ended violently at "the hands of one of his own children" at Christmas, 1931. An "instantaneous and unpremeditated" crime that left the murderer as "incredulous and dumb" as the victim.

After this primer, the story goes back a day to introduce the various relatives of Adrian Gray arriving at their ancestral seat, King's Poplars, which painted a picture of a family that "had come down in the world" as the cost of the modern world had rapidly evaporated their old money – forcing them to part with much of their property. Once life in the village had centered round the stately manor house and now it "swept past its doors." Even the family had broken up with many of them migrating to the towns or going abroad. The "generations of Grays" littering the churchyard would have scarcely recognized their descendants and would have been "reluctant to acknowledge their kinship," because they're either broken husks of human beings or up to their eyeballs in trouble. And three of them have come to ask Adrian for money.

Richard is Adrian's eldest son and an ambitious politician, who has invested a lot of time and money in obtaining a peerage, but now he's being blackmailed by his mistress for "an absurd sum." Hildebrand is one of Adrian's more troublesome sons, a passionate artist, who wants to money to escape from his harridan of a wife and scraggy-looking children. Some of whom aren't even his own. Eustace Moore is Adrian's son-in-law and a well-known financier, but his financial schemes is about to place him in the docks and desperately needs ten-thousand pounds to straighten things out. Only problem is that he also lost a lot of Adrian's money!

German edition

However, with exception of the murderer, these character portraits are, for someone who prefers plot over characterization, quite unnecessary. The only characterization that has any relevance to the story is that of the victim and his killer.

All of that being said, I thought the two-tier aftermath of the murder was very well done and fascinating to read. Firstly, you have the murderer's journal, whose name will not be revealed in this review, in which he detailed what happened directly after he struck down his father and his reluctance to forfeit his life on account of his father – whose life he considered to be "quite worthless." And the steps he took to lead the trail away from himself. Secondly, there's the discovery of the body on Christmas morning and how the family responded to the news.

Unfortunately, there was very little in the remainder of the story that held my interest with exception of the snippets of social commentary and the unsettling portrayal of the murderer's squalid home life, which included child neglect and outright physical abuse. Something you rarely find in a Golden Age mystery. Towards the end, there was a spot of detective work, in order to wrap up the story, but reader already possessed all of the answers. So there was nothing to sink my teeth in and all the characterization, of even minor characters like Sergeant Ross Murray, just felt like padding to me.

I've to be honest here and acknowledge Portrait of a Murderer is not my kind of crime fiction, which negatively tainted this review, but I couldn't help but think how much better this psychology-driven, character-oriented crime novel could have been had there been an element of mystery about the motive – a mystery along the lines of "Rosebud" from Citizen Kane (1941). During their stormy argument, Adrian Gray could have uttered a cryptic remark or word that made his son pick up a paperweight and swing at him in blinding anger. This would place the reader in a position to piece together the significance behind that cryptic and deadly remark. I think this could have made it one of the few truly classic whydunits.

So, on a whole, I can't say I particularly enjoyed my time with Portrait of a Murderer, but keep in mind that my personal presence strongly lies with the labyrinthine-like detective story and my personal dislike for character-heavy crime novels takes nothing away from Malleson as a talented writer. I just prefer her Arthur Crook mysteries. However, if you want a second-opinion, Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, positively reviewed the book some years ago.

A note for the curious: coincidentally, my previous read, Gerald Verner's Noose for a Lady (1952), contained a line that aptly described the story of Portrait of a Murderer: "A portrait of the murderer... not the portrait of a face, but the portrait of a mind — a mind that thinks and acts in a certain definite way." If I were still using opening-quotes, I would have definitely used it for this review.

The Orange Axe (1931) by Brian Flynn

When you're a wholesale consumer of detective fiction, like yours truly, you inevitably come to appreciate originality and, as Steve Barge stated in his introduction to The Orange Axe (1931), Brian Flynn made "an effort to do something original with each of his books" – which should explain why I've been enjoying his work so much. The Orange Axe has an original premise that allows the story to be told as both an inverted mystery and a fully realized whodunit.

André de Ravenac is an unmerciful blackmailer and likely the Parisian serial killer, known as "Le Loup de Poignard" (The Dagger Wolf), who murdered "nine of its most worthy citizens" with "a dagger through the victim's heart." Unfortunately, the French authorities were too late to apprehend him and he had cleared out of the country before they could get to him. Now he has turned up in England as a high society blackmailer with the wife of a British minister as his latest victim. However, Josephine Pelham counts a number of "certain men of honour" among her inner circle who are more than happy to remove De Ravenac from her life.

Major Daniel Wyatt summoned these men to a private-room of a restaurant, in Soho, where he unfolds a plan to them to commit the perfect murder.

This group comprises of Lady Pelham's brothers, Dick and Robin Blaker, their cousins, Gerald and Nick Twining, and journalistic friend of Major Wyatt, Martin Pierpoint – who are told about De Ravenac's bloody past in France. So they all agree that he has to be removed, but, as one of them ask, is "a beetle worth hanging for?" The answer is clearly no, but Major Wyatt has plan that should prevent them from meeting the hangman.

Sir Beverley Pelham is the newly appointed British Minister at Santa Guardina, the capital of the fictitious Republic of San Jonquilo, in South America. A bal masque is scheduled to take place at the Pelham house in honor of San Jonquilo's President, Sebastian Loredana. De Ravenac has secured an invitation to the carnival ball.

So the plan is to, anonymously, assign everyone a random role to play in the murder by drawing lots. The person who draws "the slip of paper that means 'direct' action" may be any one of them and only one "will ever do more than suspect who it actually is." A very original premise, especially for the time, which appeared to have gone off without a hitch when De Ravenac's body is found, lying across the threshold of the refreshment-room, with a long, ivory-handled knife in his chest and clutching a torn piece of black and orange silk – which are the national colors of the Republic of San Jonquilo. This murder brings an honored guest at the ball to the scene, Sir Austin Kemble of Scotland Yard, but President Loredana, angered by the murder, tells him to call upon the "finest English detective" he knows. And that brings Anthony Bathurst into the case.

Obviously, the readers knows a little more than Anthony Bathurst, but this is hardly any help as another original bit turns up in his investigation: two "absolutely different sets of clues." Not a set of false and true clues, but two sets of "thoroughly authentic and genuine" clues. Such as strange discovery they made in the bowl of claret cup and the inexplicable fact that Señor Miguel Da Costa, the Chancellor of San Jonquilo, was apparently in two different places at the same time. These complications, in combination with the masked ball, gives Flynn an opportunity to indulge in his beloved Doylean disguises and false-identities. Something he was hesitant to fully utilize was the impossible crime element.

There were locked room and seemingly impossible murders in The Case of the Black Twenty Two (1928), Invisible Death (1929) and Murder en Route (1930), which were clearly defined as impossibilities, but the murderer in The Orange Axe apparently managed to escape from a place a rat couldn't get out of without being seen. So, technically, this would qualify as a locked room mystery, but, the semi-inverted nature of the plot, made me decide against labeling this review as such and that's a shame – because the answer to this impossibility helps Bathurst demolish a number of alibis. However, this is just nit-picking on the part of a chronic sufferer of miraculitis and the main tricks of the plot are the two sets of clues and the breaking down of alibis. Not just the previously mentioned cast-iron alibis, but also "an absolutely perfect alibi" the murderer concocted.

If there's anything to honestly complain about The Orange Axe, it's that the semi-inverted approach allowed to reader to catch on what really was happening way too early. The clues become less mystifying and the murderer is not the surprise it could have been. That being said, Flynn did his damnedest to mislead the reader until the last possible moment, which actually made me second guess myself. Something I can always appreciate in a mystery writer.

Flynn was evidently experimenting with the possibilities the detective story has to offer in these first ten novels and The Orange Axe is a good example of this. The story and plot are not entirely flawless, but has good story-telling with a complex and innovative plot that coherently sticks together. Add to this a galore of fabricated alibis and you have a detective novel that comes particularly recommended to fans of (early) Christopher Bush and Freeman Wills Crofts.

Well, I only have three more reprints, from Dean Street Press, left to go, The Five Red Fingers (1929), The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1930) and The Triple Bite (1931), which makes me really hope there will be more next year, because I want to see where Flynn goes from here. So I'll try to save at least two of them for early next year.

A Twisted Fairy Tale: "The Too-Perfect Alibi" (1949)

"Dark theaters are best for dark deeds."

Previously, I reviewed Christopher St. John Sprigg's The Perfect Alibi (1934), a detective novel that turned the idea of an iron-clad alibi on its ear, which reminded me of a truly brilliant and innovative, but practically unknown, detective story that used the unbreakable alibi to perfection – performed over seventy years ago on the timeless CBS radio drama-series, Suspense. A bleak, mournful story that still stands today as one of the best episodes in the twenty year history of the show!

"The Too-Perfect Alibi" was written by Martin Stern and originally aired on CBS radio on January 13, 1949, starring actor/comedian Danny Kaye as the story's antagonist, Sam Rogers. Sam is a close friend to the woman he loved and "the fellow she loved."

Catherine was "the loveliest thing on God's earth" and Jack was "a beautiful hunk of man," a perfect match, but Sam never understood why Catherine was so made about him. A good-looking nobody who works as a clerk in a sports shop. However, when they announce their engagement, the well-to-do Sam takes it on the chin and offers them a lovely house as a wedding present, which delights Catherine, but Jack resents that Sam gives them everything he can't afford – sarcastically comparing him to Prince Charming. Unfortunately, for Jack, this remark reminded Sam of the fairy tale of "the Prince, the Princess and the Ogre." A story in which the Ogre dies because "the Prince kills him."

"The Too-Perfect Alibi" is an inverted mystery and the first 15, of 30, minutes comprises of plotting and carrying out the murder. Sam's plan hinges on an alibi, "a strong, unshakable alibi," designed to keep him out of the electric chair.

Usually, these alibi-tricks hinge on the manipulation of clocks, eyewitnesses or documents, such as dated tickets, letters or postcards, which gives the murderer a (small) window to do the dirty deed. Sometimes this window of opportunity is counted in minutes, not hours, which makes them quite risky endeavors. Sam created an indestructible alibi that removed much of the dangers of the initial stages of murder and the only dangerous obstacle was disposing the body where it would be found the following day. When the police started asking question, they got "thirty-five affidavits from responsible people" who swear Sam was at a party at the time of the murder.

A very inventive, yet simple, alibi that's impossible to crack open and can stand with the best alibi-stories by Christopher Bush, who might have partially inspired the story, because Sam utters an unusual phrase when he's almost caught deposing of the murder weapon – saying to himself that his "alibi was still 100%." A possible reference to Bush's The Case of the 100% Alibis (1934)?

So the first half of "The Too-Perfect Alibi" deals with the plotting and execution of Jack's murder, but, in the second half, Sam is confronted with the dire, unintended consequences of his perfect little crime. You have to listen for yourself how this dark, twisted fairy tale ends, but, if you want to end a detective story on a bleak, melancholic note that will cast a gloom on your audience, this is how you do it. I could hear "The Real Folk Blues" playing in my head when the episode ended ("you're gonna carry that weight!").

"The Too-Perfect Alibi" is, in my humble opinion, one of the best inverted detective stories ever written, which not only has an excellent and original alibi-trick, but an unforgettable conclusion that ended the episode strongly. You can listen to the episode on the Internet Archive (here) or Youtube (here). Enjoy!

The Missing Moneylender (1931) by W. Stanley Sykes

Dr. W. Stanley Sykes was an eminent anesthesiologist from Morley, Berkshire, England, who wrote extensively on medical subjects and dedicated the final years of his life working on his magnum opus, Essays on the First Hundred Years of Anaesthesia – a three-volume series completed posthumously in 1982. More than twenty years after Sykes passed away in 1961.

During the early 1930s, Sykes turned his logical mind to the detective story and produced two scientific mystery novels in the tradition of R. Austin Freeman, The Missing Moneylender (1931) and The Harness of Death (1932). A third novel, The Ray of Doom (1935), is a science-fiction mystery in which "the eponymous ray is presented with some scientific rigor." Sykes' demonstrated in his first detective novel his ability to turn hard science into fiction, but in The Missing Moneylender, he used it to create "an almost undetectable method of murder."

The Missing Moneylender was bluntly re-titled in the U.S. to The Man Who Was Dead and this obscure, long-forgotten book was brought to my attention when "D for Doom," of Vintage Pop Fiction, reviewed it in 2017 – calling it "a marvel of intricate and ingenious plotting" with "exasperatingly, inexplicable crimes." You can almost call them impossible crimes!

This peculiar crime story begins with an interesting conversation between Dr. James Osborne and a friend, George Woods, who discuss such topics as public executioners, professionally trading places and one of the doctor's pesky patients, Israel Levinsky. A moneylender who hasn't paid a penny yet of the forty pounds in unpaid doctor's bills. Dr. Osborne lets Woods read a strongly-worded letter he drafted, in which he tells Levinsky that he can't expect medical care at "the price of unskilled labour," but is called away to the sickbed of a convalescing colleague, Dr. Harold Laidlaw. Dr. Osborne diagnosis him with meningitis and the situation, while seriously, looked not entirely hopeless. He died less than two days later.

I think this opening showed Sykes was clearly influenced by Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke stories, but the second puzzle-piece of the plot fitted snugly in the early police procedural-style detective novels of Freeman Wills Crofts.

Isreal Levinsky is a creature of habit who has made "a fetish of punctuality" and has never been known "to be late or away from the office without due notice," which causes his clerk, Mr. Rosenbaum, to worry when Levinsky was absent without a notice – something unprecedented in his thirty-year tenure with the company. Rosembeam learns from Levinsky's maid that his bed has not been slept in and his breakfast was left untouched. So he called in the police.

Initially, the case is handled by Inspector Ridley, of the Southbourne Constabulary, but the Chief Constable applied to Scotland Yard for assistance. Conveniently, Scotland Yard dispatches a friend of Ridley, Inspector Dennis Drury, and together they methodically sift through the evidence and, unexpectedly, come across a link between the missing moneylender and the dead doctor. Even more surprisingly, Drury engineers an impossible situation in order to extract the contents of a sealed envelope without opening it! An admittedly minuscule, but interesting, aspect of the plot, because you rarely (if ever) see a detective employing one of these impossible crime-tricks to further their investigation.

The evidence they have to go over consists of such clues as fragments of a spectacle lens, pieces of a medical syringe, paraffin wax, a fingerprint, a missing address book and the astounding discovery of a police sergeant – which leads to an exhumation and the discovery of, what still is, "an undetectable murder." One that might be impossible to prove in court, because the pathologist, Sir James Martin, has to admit at the inquest that he has "no idea" what killed the victim. There are no marks of violence anywhere. No signs of disease or any traces of poisons.

I don't know if there are any quasi-impossible crimes or locked room puzzles in The Harness of Death, but Sykes was definitely experimenting with them in 1931. There's the sealed envelope-trick and inexplicable death in The Missing Moneylender, but Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) also lists two short stories, "How Was the Knife Thrown?" and "The Locked Room," which were published in Hush in early 1931. So I'll have to look into those two stories sometime in the future.

Unfortunately, the second half of the story is very tricky to discuss without giving anything away, because the plot becomes a semi-inverted mystery with the police-detectives, assisted by Sir James, trying to figure out how the murder was committed – edging the story a little closer to the more intuitive detective tales. They're theorizing more and the ingenious solution was even complimented by a clever, nicely done false solution. One that made the murder look like "an absolutely insoluble problem" when it was scientifically disproven!

So the first and second halves of The Missing Moneylender differ noticeably in tone and approach to the problem. If the first half betrayed the influence of Crofts and Freeman, the second half can be entered as evidence that Sykes had read and greatly admired Dorothy L. Sayers' Unnatural Death (1927). Sykes was certainly guilty, to some degree, of imitating either his personal favorites or simply what had come before him. Something not uncommon in the early works of Golden Age mystery writers (e.g. Brian Flynn's The Billiard-Room Mystery, 1927), but Sykes brought such a clever and original idea to the table that you can easily overlooked that beginners mistake. I think I liked it even more than the solution from Unnatural Death!

D mentioned in his review that the method the murderer used appeared to be a little out-of-time, but apparently, this was all brand spanking new in 1931. Demonstrating, once again, that the advance of knowledge and technology only provides new possibilities, not obstacles, to a talented plotter with imagination.

So, purely as a good, old-fashioned how-was-it-done, The Missing Moneylender comes highly recommended with an ultimately simple plot that appeared to be an inescapable labyrinth. That being said, not every reader today is going to appreciate Sykes' characterization or his condescending "social smugness," which undoubtedly will rub most of you the wrong way. The reader has been warned!

Going for a Stroll: "The Stalker in the Attic" (1925) by Edogawa Rampo

Recently, I read the very first Japanese locked room mystery, entitled "D zaka no satsujin-jiken" ("The Case of the Murder on D. Hill," 1925), written by the father of the Japanese detective story, Edogawa Rampo, who penned it as a response to the critics of his time – who asserted that it was impossible to use the open, wood-and-paper houses of Japan as a stage for a Western-inspired mystery. Rampo proved them wrong by writing a short locked room story set in a traditional Japanese house with paper walls, sliding doors and tatami-matted floors.

Historically, "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" is an important cornerstone of the Japanese detective story and handed a blueprint to both his contemporaries and successors to follow, but, purely as an impossible crime story, it's not really impressive. Rampo merely showed it was possible to stage a locked room murder in a wood-and-paper house without showing any ingenuity in the solution. Something he would rectify in another story from the same year.

"Yaneura no sanposha" ("The Stalker in the Attic") was originally published in the August, 1925, issue of Shin-Seinen and a translation was published in a collection of short stories and essays, The Edogawa Rampo Reader (2008), which gave 1926 as the story's original year of publication – which has to be wrong. The story is an inverted locked room mystery and remarkably modern in its subject matter.

Gōda Saburō is a restless, ennui-ridden and perpetual bored twenty-five year old man who left "no stone unturned in his search for amusement." A generous allowance from his parents allowed him to act with "reckless abandon" and regularly changed lodgings. There were two events that placed Gōda on the path of murder: one of them was becoming acquainted with Rampo's famous amateur detective, Akechi Kogorō, whose "wealth of fascinating crime stories" entertained Gōda. Akechi seemed to take an interest in his pathological personality.

The second event was discovering that the closet in his room, in a recently built boarding house, has a panel in the ceiling giving access to a normally inaccessible attic!

Tōeikan boarding house encircles a courtyard to form a square and the attic follows this shape, which means Gōda can walk around in a circle and return where he started, but the cherry on top is that the boardinghouse was "shoddily built" and the ceiling boards are riddled with gaps and knotholes – giving him a thrilling opportunity to spy on his neighbors. You read that right. A 1920s detective story about voyeurism and genre historians might want to take note of this story, but I'm unrepentant Golden Age detective fanboy and there were other features of the plot that fascinated me.

Firstly, there are the architectures features which are integrated into the plot in the tradition of the finest Golden Age detective stories.

"The Stalker in the Attic" solved the problem Rampo addressed in "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" by merging the traditional Japanese houses with a Western-type building. The Tōeikan boarding house has sleek, sturdy walls of painted wood and doors fitted with "metal locks," which allowed for more privacy, but the interior of the rooms very much resembled a traditional Japanese house – especially when seen from above as "every item in the room is framed by tatami mats." Secondly, the movement of Gōda during his so-called "attic walks" is fascinating as he freely moves around the squared circle and spies on his fellow boarders in their rooms on the second floor. During one of his excursions, Gōda changes on a way to commit the perfect murder inside a locked room.

Gōda absolutely detests one of his fellow boarders, Endō, but, when he discovers the open mouth of the loudly snoring Endō lies smack dab under a knothole, he realizes the criminal potential of the situation. He can drip poison along a drawstring into his wide, open mouth and push a small bottle of poison through the knothole. Endō always locked his door and window before going to bed, which made it "impossible for someone to enter from the outside" and made his untimely death appear like a suicide.

So, purely as an impossible crime story, "The Stalker in the Attic" is not only the first truly Japanese locked room mystery, but the direct ancestor of the bizarre architecture so often found in the modern shin honkaku detective novels.

The way Rampo integrated the features of the boarding house into the plot reminded me of Soji Shimada's Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982), Yukito Ayatsuri's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), Szu-Yen Lin's Death in the House of Rain (2005) and the many stories from The Kindaichi Case Files – e.g. The Alchemy Murder Case, The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Antlion Murder Case. I was also reminded of Max Rittenberg's 1914 short story "The Invisible Bullet," collected in The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases of Magnum, Scientific Consultant (2016), which deals with an impossible murder in a fencing academy situated on the top floor of a tall building. The way in which the layout of buildings are used in service of the plot and the original locked room-tricks showed that Rampo's "The Stalker in the Attic" and Rittenberg's "The Invisible Bullet" were ahead of their time in their respective regions. I seriously wonder if Rampo, who could read English, was aware of this particular story.

Akechi Kogorō appears on the scene in the final ten pages of the story to play a little cat-and-mouse game with Gōda, but this merely to give the story, which has already been told by this point, a tidy ending.

So very much like my rereading of Akimitsu Takagi's Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948), I appreciated "The Stalker in the Attic" a whole lot more the second time around. An important and well-done story that ought to be better known among a Western (locked room) mystery readers. Highly recommended!

A couple of notes for the curious: "The Stalker in the Attic" is the only good story collected in The Edogawa Rampo Reader, but the essays are really interesting and recommend "Fingerprint Novels of the Meiji Era," "Dickens and Poe" and "An Eccentric Idea" to every genre historian/scholar. Secondly, there's a Western hybrid of the detective and horror story, namely Ed Bryant's "The Lurker in the Bedroom" (1971), which reads like it was inspired by Rampo. Lastly, I clearly remember there was a floor plan of the boarding house, showing the attic route, but apparently, my memory deceived me. There's no floor plan.