Top of the Class: Q.E.D, vol. 7-8 by Motohiro Katou

Back in January, I reviewed volume 4 from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series and alluded to my intention to reach volume 10 before the end of the year, but we are nearing the halfway mark of 2020 and have only read two further volumes – discussed here and here. So I decided to speed things up a little bit with this twofer review of volumes 7 and 8.

The story opening volume 7, entitled "Serial John Doe," is one of the longest, most ambitiously written and complexly constructed stories in the series with a subversive play on the denouement. Some would probably call it an anti-detective story.

Sou Touma hardly needs an introduction at this point, but the plot of "Serial John Doe" makes it necessary to point out that Touma, a young genius, is an MIT graduate who moved back to Japan to live as an ordinary high-school student. Touma's day as an MIT student tend to come back to him, as seen in volume 2, which introduced one of his American friends, Syd "Loki" Green. Once again, Loki returns with some unsettling news. Someone has cleverly murdered the aces of the MIT departments of genetic technology and aerospace engineering.

The first victim, Kamenev, attended a lecture on quantum mechanics at the University of Moscow and was found dead the following day in a forest, more than 30 km from the city, but to get him "drunk and freeze to death" you would have needed "all the vodka in Moscow" – traces of a sleeping drug and a missing car confirmed there was more to the case. The second victim was the ace of the aerospace department, Liu Shen Chi, whose decayed body was found floating in a derelict boat off the coast of Macao, China. Liu had been poisoned with uranium and "a calculation ruler from old times," used to calculate logarithms, was found by the corpse.

Loki considers the possibility that more aces in other fields of study will also become victims and Touma, a former ace of the mathematics department, is very likely on the killer's list. So he asks Kana Mizuhara to keep an eye on Touma, but this weird story becomes impossible to describe any further. Needless to say, there are more murders, an attempt to kill Touma and a complex code with philosophical underpinnings, but, essentially, the story is a pure whydunit with the motive superseding the identity of the globetrotting serial killer. I still don't know whether, or not, I like the ending, but it certainly was something entirely different.

The second story, "A Melancholy Afternoon," is much shorter and simpler in nature, but with a good, solid plot and a warm, human touch to the characterization of the suspects.

On a lazy, Saturday afternoon, Touma and Mizuhara enter a floral shop on a whim and are immediately detained, because they were two of the six people in the shop when a sum of money went missing from owner's private office. The shop owner, Okuda Kousuke, had withdrawn a hundred 10,000 yen bills, one million yen in total, that morning from the bank to cover operational costs and paying wages, but left the envelope on the desk of his office – since the "room is like a safe" with the only window locked and equipped with a burglar alarm. And the only door was under constant observation of the three employees. There's a full-time employee, Ooshima Keiko, assisted by two students working part-time, Gotou Toshio and Watanabe Miyuki. But when the salaries were deducted, Kousuke discovered that he was 50,000 yen short. Someone had taken a pretty packet of money from the envelope! And there were only a handful of people who could have taken it.

Kousuke told the police that all three of his employees "wanted part of their wages to be paid up front this month," but the reason why they needed money is devoid of the usual selfish greed and gives the story a memorable ending when Touma finally decides to intervene. Touma does more than merely solving the crime. He fixes the problems of the people who work there and ensures the culprit is not punished, but, in order to do that, he has to explain how the money disappeared when everyone in the shop had an alibi. A clever trick, to be sure.

"A Melancholy Afternoon" is one of those rare examples of a high quality filler story and a good yarn to end this volume with! So, all in all, a slightly unusual, but good, entries in this often unconventional series. Recommended!

The first story of volume 8, "Falling Down," brings Touma and Mizuhara to Otowa Village, where they intended to bungee jump from a bridge, but the facility has been temporarily closed down when the instructor of the local fire-fighting academy, Oosawa Kunio, died there under mysterious circumstances – falling to his death from the bridge. An accident seemed unlikely and there was no motive for suicide. So everyone in the village suspected the universally respected firefighter had been pushed to his death. There is, however, one problem: only one person had a possible motive to murder the instructor, Hayami, a rookie firefighter who wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father. A firefighter who died in the line of duty when he saved a child from a burning building, but the instructor had kicked him out of the academy.

You see, Hayami is "dreadfully afraid of heights" and "couldn't even bring himself to cross the bridge." On top of that, Hayami has an alibi for the time of the murder. So, if he did it, how did he manage to toss a strong, sturdy and experienced firefighter from a bridge he didn't even dare to cross?

So another one of those quasi-impossible crime stories with a highly unconventional, but original, alibi-trick only marred by the lack of clueing. Nevertheless, the trick is a good example of the ingenuity found in these shin honkaku detective stories.

The second and last story of volume 8, "School Festival Melody Mania," begins on the eve of the school festival and the students of the various school clubs stay behind at school to prepare the various stages and a haunted room – including Touma and Mizuhara. On the following day, they discover that most of the stages have been wrecked during a blackout that occurred the previous night. The security guard swore that, other than the students who stayed the night, nobody else went into the stage area. So the culprits have to be among them. However, a time table clearly shows that "every club who had a motive has an alibi."

Once again, Touma has to reluctantly play the role of high-school detective and, one by one, collapses all of the alibis and the solution turns out to be a tricky, but amusing, play on a very well-known detective novel. A second thing worth mentioning is the character development of Touma, a typical lone wolf, who suddenly finds that "the world is slowly, bit by bit, becoming integrated" with himself and he's actually began to interact with the people around him. Something he's not used to and "it just feels weird." And he didn't like it either when a member of the music club was performing his mating rituals around Mizuhara.

So, on a whole, these two volumes weren't quite as strong as the stories collected in volume 5 and 6, but they were still pretty good full with good and experimental ideas, clear continuity, original tricks, great settings and better characterizations than usually found in these anime-and manga detective series – which are usually very plot-driven series. This is makes Q.E.D. such a strange, but fascinating, detective series to explore. So you can expect another twofer review of volumes 9 and 10 in the comings weeks.

Sleightly Lethal (1986) by Patrick A. Kelley

Patrick A. Kelley is, or was, an American magician from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who performed magic tricks at banquets and children's parties in the 1970s, but I had to dig deep to find that obscure, biographical detail in the internet archive of the Altoona Mirror – advertising as "Magician Entertainment" in the August 11, 1975, edition. Ten years later, Kelley had gone from doing magic tricks at children's parties to writing detective novels about a down-on-his-luck magician, Harry Colderwood.

During a brief period between 1985 and 1988, Kelley wrote a handful of detective novels that all have "sleightly" in their title, beginning with Sleightly Murder (1985), but these books have done very little to immortalize his name.

I stumbled across the series by pure chance! You can only find most of the book covers and a list of titles online, but barely anything about their content or any reviews with exception of a 2014 interview, "Getting to Know Tracy Revels," in which Revels names Harry Colderwood as one of her favorite detective-characters – praising the books as "really clever." So, the Colderwood series is surprisingly obscure considering it was published relatively recently and had a magician-detective as its protagonist. A normally popular figure in the traditional detective story.

So the series was probably garbage, I reasoned, but the book covers were very close in style to those of another, 1980s writer of traditional, puzzle-oriented detective novels, Herbert Resnicow (see The Gold Deadline, 1984). Some of the titles and capsule plot-descriptions suggested they could be impossible crime novels not listed in either Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) or Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). Sleightly Invisible (1986) is the most obvious example with the usual shenanigans during a séance, but the title that caught my eye was Sleightly Lethal (1986). A book with an intriguing cover showing a clown stuffed into a safe and telling the reader "it was murder, not magic, that put a dead clown in a locked safe."

Sleightly Lethal is listed online as the third title in the series, but it could just as well be the second title, because Kelley wrote two Harry Colderwood mysteries in 1986, paperback originals, and my edition only gives Sleightly Murder under "other Avon books by." No mention of Sleightly Invisible. Anyway...

Just five years ago, Harry Colderwood was a relatively successful magician, but the graph of his career "shows a steady downhill trend" and had the graph been a cardiogram, he would have been "legally dead" two years ago – a nasty rumor has it he's now doing trade shows! A poor man's Alexander Blacke who travels the country in a ramshackle van loaded with magic tricks that are starting to break down. But when he sees an old friend on TV making a dire prediction, he races with the van to an old, magic-themed hotel in Roselle, Maryland.

Marcus Spillman is known to the world as Quimp the Clown and Colderwood catches an interview with him on television, in which he says to have no believe in psychics and fortune-tellers, but predicts that "Quimp is not long for this world" and he won't be checking out of the Fitch Hotel alive. Somebody is planning to do away with him!

Fitch Hotel is owned by Jack O'Connell, "a magic-lover," who turned the hotel into "a gathering place for magicians" overflowing with conjurers "pulling bouquets from nowhere, finding chosen cards" and "burning and restoring borrowed handkerchiefs." The Fitch is a never-ending magic convention and, once a year, the hotel hosts Magicade and Quimp holds the record for the most consecutive Magicade engagements, which is "the magic world's equivalent of an Oscar nomination." Unfortunately, the municipal council has condemned the whole block without exception and the hotel is in the process of closing down.

Portuguese edition

Colderwood arrives three days after the last Magicade at a partially closed and practically empty hotel, surrounded by torn down buildings, but just in time to be there when the hotel-safe is opened to reveal the body of a clown – crammed into the safe so tightly that knees touched chin. A clown who looks like the spitting image of Quimp. However, Marcus Spillman is very much alive and he has four people with him, dressed and made up as his clown persona, who are competing to become the next Quimp. So who was the clown in the safe? The dead man is identified as "a local punk," Perry Vaughn, but Sheriff Virgil Tarrant believes Vaughn had accidentally locked himself inside the safe during a botched burglary. Just one of those bizarre accidents under peculiar circumstances. Colderwood disagrees.

So, once again, the poor magician turns amateur detective and begins to poke around with an empty hotel and a clowning competition as a background, but a background with some complications.

One of the competitors is his former assistance and love-interest, Cate Fleming, who's the only person Colderwood trusted "to fire a .537 Magnum" in his face. But she's married now. Colderwood is also entangled in a friendly game of catch-me-if-you-can with a special field agent of the IRS, Jeffers, specialized in "tracking down hard-to-find citizens" and "serving them with audit notices." The so-called treasure room of the Fitch and a local serial murderer, christened The Soda Pop Killer, lurking in the background complete the mise-en-scène of the story.

The treasure room of the Fitch is a basement storage room filled with memorabilia and souvenirs left behind by magicians, which had become a tradition over the decades ("visit the Fitch and leave a piece") and the collection had become to big to keep on permanent display. I liked the scenes in which Colderwood was rummaging through the storage room, trying to figure out The Great Halsto's Mystic Box or watching a 1930s film reel of a comedy drunk-act, but particular appreciated when he came across a photo-album of the first Magicade and a picture of a famous Dutch magician, Fred Kaps – who's "pouring buckets of salt from an invisible shaker." His trademark trick!

Sleightly Lethal is a very specific, but kind of hard to describe, type of quasi pop-culture inspired mystery novel, often taking place during a convention, which were apparently popular during the 1980s. The story has a very similar feel to it as Bill Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981), Richard Purtill's Murdercon (1982) Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987), Richard A. Lupoff's The Comic Book Killer (1989) and Daniel Stashower's Elephants in the Distance (1989). I'm sure there are more.

However, Sleightly Lethal is not quite as good as some of its contemporaries and you blame that on how the plot-threads and clues were handled. Admittedly, the central idea with the dead clown in the safe was clever and somewhat original, especially how it played out, but the reader can't really piece it all together with the clues that were provided. And this took the punch out of the ending. So not exactly an example of the blazing surprise ending that makes the reader suddenly see the whole design.

I was slightly disappointed with the conclusion, lack of an impossible crime and that the story gave me no opportunity to shoehorn in a "Doink brah, you makin' kids cry, brah" reference, but Sleightly Lethal was still a fun and entertaining read. So I'll eturn to the series to see what Sleightly Invisible and Sleightly Deceived (1987) have to offer. Or what that extremely obscure, final novel, Sleightly Guilty (1988), is about.

They Walk in Darkness (1947) by Gerald Verner

Gerald Verner's They Walk in Darkness (1947) is the second novel in a very short-lived series about a thriller writer and his wife, Peter and Anne Chard, who debuted in Thirsty Evil (1945) and rapidly descended into the catacombs of obscurity after their second outing – which was only dimly remembered as a locked room mystery. Astonishingly, this obscure, barely remembered detective novels reprinted three times in the past ten years!

Ulverscroft published a large print edition in 2011 as part of their Linford Mystery Library and Ramble House reissued the book in hard-and paperback in 2016, which was followed this year with an ebook version from Endeavour Media.

Regrettably, these various reissues seem to have done precious little to bolster the profile of the book and that's a shame, because honestly, it's one of Verner's best detective/thriller stories – certainly of the handful of titles I've read to date. I believe this has to do with the fact that Verner gave himself the space to tell the story. They Walk in Darkness is twice as long as, for example, The Royal Flush Murders (1948), Noose for a Lady (1952) and Sorcerer's House (1956), which showed Verner was closer aligned with the pulp-style thrillers than with the pure Golden Age detective stories. Verner evidently attempted here to write something more in line with the traditional mystery novel. Something that's more evident in the first than the second half of the book.

They Walk in Darkness opens on a cold, snowy evening, in late October, when the Chards are traveling to a small, East Anglia village to visit a close relative of Peter, Aunt Helen.

Fendyke St. Mary used to be "a hot-bed of witchcraft in the Middle Ages" and "the abominable orgies of the Witches' Sabbath," attended by Satan himself, were regularly practiced at a place known as Lucifer's Stone. There's also an old, derelict cottage, Witch's House, which used to belong to leading light of "a particularly virulent coven" and was burned to death in 1644. So with such a long, ancient history and tradition in devil worship, it's hardly surprising many villagers are only too ready to explain anything "strange and inexplicable" as witchcraft. A belief they apply to the terrors that has plagued the village for the better part of two years.

During a dinner party, Peter and Ann learn that a child murderer is roaming the village, but "the prelude to the baby murders" was the theft of several lambs, at various intervals, which were found back as cadavers – all of them had their throat savagely cut. And then the children began to disappear. One of them was taken from his pram in the garden and another never returned home for tea, but their bodies were eventually found in clumps of reeds somewhere on the edge of Hinton Broad. Only suspect the police has seriously considered is a mentally undeveloped man, Tom Twist.

However, the dinner party's response to the wanton child killings going on in the village is extremely cool, level-headed and very British. They shake their heads in disapproval, mutter something about a maniac and chide the local police for their lack of progress.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed They Walk in Darkness back in March and commented on the British stoicism of the characters "this wholesale murder of helpless children." I left a comment suggesting he read Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1996) and compare it with Verner's They Walk in Darkness, but had no idea at the time how apt my comparison really was.

The Vampire Tree is also set in a small village with a dark, bloody history and has become the playground of serial killer targeting children. This killer has pretty much the same modus operandi as the child murderer from Fendyke St. Mary and the characters have the same cool, detached response to the murders as they do here. I remember the children in Halter's story were allowed to continue to roam the woods, where the bodies were found, but Verner was even colder and had one of his characters suggest they use one of the village children as living bait ("like the old hunter's trick, eh?") by leaving the child in a lonely spot under discreet observation – a "tethered kid to attract the lion." One of those subtle hints that the English are, in fact, completely insane. The only reason they have been able to hide it so well is that they happen to share this continent with the French and Germans.

There's also the curious coincidence that both They Walk in Darkness and The Vampire Tree have characters named Twist and an impossible crime of the no-footprint-in-the-snow variety.

After the Eve of All-Hallows, a group of four people from Fendyke St. Mary briefly go missing from their home and their bodies are found, seated around "a very old worm-eaten table" laid for five people, in the dirty Witch's House. They sat "strangely contorted" with their eyes turned towards the empty chair at the head of the table with an "expression of horror." A considerable quantity of cyanide was found in the wine glasses and one of the bottles, but the cottage had been locked and there were four tracks in the snow outside. However, the tracks only went in the direction of Witch's House, but there was none coming back!

So, this situation presents the Peter and Ann with two possibilities, which are both utterly impossible: the four people either committed suicide and the door magically locked itself, before the key miraculously vanished, or there was a fifth person present in the cottage – who somehow managed to lock the door and disappeared with the key from "a house surrounded by snow without leaving any tracks." An intriguing premise and the solution was only slightly soiled by the clumsily handling of an important clue, which has always been weakness of Verner. Yes, "the snow trick" is not terribly original and have come across a very similar solution recently, but, somehow, I didn't mind that here. That has very much to do with the identity of the murderer and strong motive.

I thought I would never come across characters more deserving of murder than the "victims" from Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933) and Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express (1934), but Verner served his reader four of such human abominations. This aspect reinforced many of the weak points of the overall plot and held the story together in the end.

The no-footprint-in-the-snow is, as mentioned above, hardly a classic of its kind and the second half of the book is written in the lurid style of the sensational, pulpy occult thrillers littered with adjectives (beastly, blasphemous, diabolically, horrible, etc), but the murderer and motive made up for a lot. I thought the vigilante mob scenes and the Biblical event that ravaged the region towards the end was a nice touches to the story.

They Walk in Darkness stands as one of the darkest, highly unconventional and spellbinding village mysteries, written by a professional story-teller, but not everyone is going to appreciate what Verner tried to accomplish here – either because the plot has its weaknesses or the unpleasant subject matter. This makes hard to unhesitatingly recommend the book to everyone. That being sad, if you liked Gladys Mitchell's The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) and Ellery Queen's The Glass Village (1954), both equally unconventional, you'll probably find They Walk in Darkness a fascinating and rewarding read.

And on a final, related note: when reading the book, I came up with an alternative solution to the impossible murders in Witch's House. An alternative solution that in no way resembles the actual explanation and wanted to share it with you. My solution placed two people inside the cottage, before the snow began to fall, which are the murderer and one of the four victims. They are preparing the cottage for their devil's banquet. When the snow stops falling, the other three arrive and, when they're dead, the murderer leaves the cottage by walking backwards – creating a fourth track of prints in the snow. Yes, I know walking backwards in the snow is an old, tired and hacky trick, but, usually, this trick is done by retracing a previously created trail of footprints. In this case, the murderer leaves an untempered track that's simply misinterpreted.

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.

Son of a Gun: "The K-Bar-D Murders" (1976) by Gerald Tomlinson

Gerald Tomlinson was an American school teacher, a full-time freelance writer and a consulting specialist in the field of education, who has edited many high-school grammar and composition textbooks, but, during the 1970s, Tomlinson began to write short detective stories – printed in such publications as Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. One story in particular attracted my attention.

"The K-Bar-D Murders" was originally published in the November, 1976, issue of EQMM and reprinted in the anthology Ellery Queen's Masters of Mystery (1987).

On his informative and detailed website, "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost briefly discusses Tomlinson's "The K-Bar-D Murders," which is where I learned of the story. Grost described "The K-Bar-D Murders" as "a brief but well done detective story" packed with as much details as possible about the characters, murders, sociological background and a plot with surrealistic touches – one of several points linking the story to the work of Ellery Queen. This sounded promising enough to place the story near the top of my short story to-be-read list.

Robert Ollinger is a notorious syndicated newspaper columnist, whose column, Capitol Hot Line, ran "in 112 newspapers from Maine to California" and a quarter of a century of investigative reporting had left "a host of enemies in his wake." The terrible "price of telling the truth." Some have even tried to kill him.

However, Ollinger not only has enemies everywhere, but also paid informants and "electronic bugs." So there's always a hot tip, somewhere, down the pipeline.

When the story opens, Ollinger gets a rambling phone call from someone identifying himself as Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte from Honotassa, New Mexico, who tells him a guy by the name Poindexter is responsible for "the branding-iron jobs." A case referred to by the newspapers as the K-Bar-D murders. Someone has shot and killed four men, in four different states, after which he brands their foreheads with a branding-iron from the K-Bar-D ranch, but there are two problems – such a ranch never existed and the victim's don't have a thing in common. They didn't "serve on the same jury, or fight in the same platoon in World War Two, or take the same plane from Dulles to O'Hare, or receive the same coded message from Hong Kong."

Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte warns Poindexter is moving east and is going to kill the hard-nosed columnist, because he's so well-known Poindexter isn't likely to go through "a dozen phone books to find some other Robert Ollinger." So what does this mean? Ollinger orders one of his personal investigators, Mort Bell, to deliver him the K-Bar-D killer or else he can find himself another job!

The plot comprises of two mini-puzzles: finding the obscure link that chains the victim's together and the meaning of the K-Bar-D brands on their foreheads, which functions here as a dying message of sorts. The murderer is "a trigger-happy psychopath" who never appears in the story and is captured off-page by Bell. And this ending exposes the story's main weakness. It's too short.

Tomlinson crammed too much material in too short a story. The characters, premise and plot ideas were all excellent, but the story was too short to do them any kind of justice and should really have been expanded into a full-length, Golden Age-style serial killer novel – similar to Arthur W. Upfield's Winds of Evil (1937) and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949). So what we're left with is a story full of good and promising ideas, but the short story format prevented Tomlinson to develop those ideas further and deliver on their promise. You can't help but feel that a good mystery novel was wasted on this short story. All of that being said, "The K-Bar-D Murders" still makes for interesting detective story. What it does, it does well. So there's that.

Yes, my next post is going to be my long overdue return to Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's historical Carpenter & Quincannon series.

Zaregoto: The Kubishime Romanticist (2002) by NisiOisiN

Back in January, I reviewed Zaregoto series: kubikiri saikuru (Zaregoto, Book 1: The Kubikiri Cycle, 2002) by the palindromic "NisiOisiN," the open, stylized penname of Nisio Isin, who produced nine so-called "Light Novels" (Young Adult) in the fanciful, off-beat Zaregoto series – complete with manga artwork depicting the various characters from the stories. The Kubikiri Cycle is a traditionally-structured mystery novel centering on a group of people stuck on an island with someone who has a talent for murder. There are even two impossible crimes and the solution to the murder in the locked storage room is a paragon of the locked room story!

Zaregoto series: kubishime romanchisuto (Zaregoto, Book 2: The Kubishime Romanticist, 2002) is the followup to The Kubikiri Cycle and takes place a mere month after the murders on Wet Crow's Feather Island, but the plot is markedly less conventional.

The nameless narrator of the series is an apathetic 19-year-old university student, nicknamed Ii-chan, who considers himself "a broken thing" and developed a "go-with-the-flow type" of personality in order to avoid any kind of conflict or disagreement – someone who really prefers to be "a passive bystander." So he often downplays his own abilities and say whatever it takes to keep things as uncomplicated as possible, which also makes him an unreliable narrator. But a compelling one at that.

The Kubishime Romanticist opens in one of the practically deserted dining halls of Rokumeikan Private University. Ii-chan is grappling with his bowl of kimchee when a classmate, Aoii Mikoko, plops down in front of him, but he's pretty bad at even remembering personal encounters with people and is afraid "this might prove to be a painful encounter." And he's not entirely wrong.

Ii-chan and Mikoko-chan not only take the same core subjects, but they were in the same foreign language classes, who had been paired up in English class, which meant they had met and talked a number of time – only he couldn't remember her at all. Mikoko-chan is not difficult to remember, because she the hyper personality of child addicted to pixie sticks. She invites Ii-chan to a small, intimate birthday party of another one of their classmates, Emoto Tomoe, together with two of their fellow students, Atemiya Muimi and Usami Akiharu. All four of them are long-time friends. Naturally, Ii-chan doesn't remember anyone of them and doesn't want to intrude, because "a fifth person would throw off the balance," but his don't-rock-the-boat attitude makes him accept the invitation.

So why would a close, intimate circle of friends invite a solitary, anti-social outsider, like Ii-chan, to a birthday party? Obviously, Mikoko-chan likes Ii-chan, but he misses all the cues. Or did he? You can never be exactly sure with him.

Anyway, the birthday party, small as it was, can be considered a success, but the following morning, he finds two police-detectives of the Kyoto Police First Investigative on his doorstep. Emoto Tomoe had been murdered after the party ended and her four classmates are the prime suspects, but all four appeared to lack a proper motive and they all have alibis, of which the strongest is the double alibi of Ii-chan and Mikoko-chan – who returned to his apartment and the neighbor vouched for them. So who murdered the student mere hours after her twentieth birthday?

If you haven't read The Kubishime Romanticist, you would probably assume from all of this that the book is a fairly conventionally-structured detective novel, but the murder is not the focal point of the story. Ii-chan and his interactions with the other characters in the story are the focal point. And that brings us to one of the more unusual characters he interacts with.

Kyoto is plagued by a serial killer, christened "The Prowler," who has murdered and dismembered six random people when the story opened, adding six more to his body count before the end, but these killings are largely irrelevant to the plot. However, what's important is that Ii-chan has an unexpected encounter with this elusive serial killer, Zerozaki Hitoshiki. Ii-chan and Zerozaki turn out to be "the same breed," like "mirror reflections of one another," but with the difference that one of them is a passive bystander and the other an active serial killer – which gives them something to talk about. They even have a philosophical conversation in a karaoke bar, of all places, about their damaged personalities and the murders.

So here we have a protagonist, in what's still essentially a mystery novel, musing philosophically with a murderer about life, death and his crimes. Something I have always associated with the psychological crime stories and police procedural from continental Europe. This is something you would expect from a German krimi-series, such as Derrick, or Tim Krabbé's overrated novella Het gouden ei (The Golden Egg, 1984). But not from a zany, manga-esque Japanese light novel populated with quirky, anime-like characters.

Nosing around when "one of his classmates is murdered" and maintaining "friendly relations with serial killers" brings Aikawa Jun back in his life. Aikawa Jun is known as mankind's greatest private contractor, a jack-of-all-trade, who turned her hands to "walking dogs, solving locked-room murder mysteries or catching mass murderers." As long as there's buck to be earned, she would take the job. And what she wanted was The Prowler.

The Kubishime Romanticist is, plot-wise, a step down from the brilliant, traditionally-structured The Kubikiri Cycle, but the plot-threads surrounding the murdered university students was still pretty solid with a good alibi-trick and a nice play on the least-likely-suspect. I found one aspect of the second, quasi-locked room murder a little hard to swallow, which, considering the solution, could have been easily remedied. However, the plot stuck nicely together for a somewhat unconventional, character-focused mystery novel. And I really liked it. I'm also becoming fond of that cold, hardhearted narrator and would like to read more, if more of them get translated.

Well, here's where I can end this review with some good news about the Zaregoto series. The Kubikiri Cycle and The Kubishime Romanticist were originally translated and published by the now defunct Dey Rey, but Vertical has revised and reissued them under slightly altered book-titles, Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle and Strangulations: Kubishime Romanticist. Vertical is continuing the series with a brand new translation of the third book, Zaregoto series: kubitsuri high school (Zaregoto series, Book 3: Hanging High School, 2002), which is scheduled for release on September 24, 2019! So I will try to get to Hanging High School before the end of the year.