Journey to the West: Four Detective Stories from the East

Back in March, I posted a comment on a blog-post by John Pugmire, announcing "A New Paul Halter Short in EQMM," in which I suggested he used the, as of now, uncollected translations that have only appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine to compile an anthology of locked room stories – appended with some new material. Pugmire responded there were enough stories in the pipeline that "a second anthology is distinct possibility." Eventually...

So, not content with having to wait until the 2020s roll around, I decided to treat myself to an appetizer and read the remainder of the LRI impossible crime stories from Asia.

EQMM, August, 2014

Szu-Yen Lin is a philosophy scholar at the University of Auckland, who studied aesthetics and philosophy of the arts, but, more importantly, he the representative of the Japanese shin honkaku school of detective fiction in his native Taiwan. Lin has written eight mystery novels and nearly thirty short stories, of which three have found their way to the West. Death in the House of Rain (2006) is a brilliant locked room mystery with strong overtones of Grand Guignol, while "The Miracle on Christmas Eve" (collected in The Realm of the Impossible, 2017) is a disgustingly adorable story about a father who proves to a group of children that Santa Claus exists, but Lin's first short story to appear in English has always eluded me – until now. So let's get started!

A translation of "The Ghost of the Badminton Court" was published in the August, 2014, issue of EQMM and is a very old-fashioned locked room murder in a new setting.

Szu-Yen Lin series-character is Ruoping Lin, an assistant professor of philosophy, who has made a name for himself as an amateur detective. This brings Captain Jhang, of the Hualien County Police Bureau, to his doorstep. Captain Jhang has been investigating a murder committed in the gym of Pacific Ocean University, but the case "features a rather bizarre and inexplicable puzzle" preventing the police from reaching a satisfying conclusion. So his superior advised him to consult the philosopher-detective.

The body was found in the badminton hall, on the second floor of the four-story building, on the morning after the badminton team had their weekly practice and locked up the place. Syu Jhiming, the court manager, walked around the courts, checked the windows and locked the door behind him – depositing the keys in a lock-box under supervision of Mr. Chen. A new employee without a shred of a motive to commit the murder that was discovered when the door to the badminton hall was opened the following morning. One of the team members, Jiang Weisin, lay face-up near the door "surrounded by three lines of shuttlecocks" forming "a white triangle."

Evidently, the only person who could have feasibly committed the murder is the court manager, Jhiming, but evidence suggests he had been nothing more than a pawn in a carefully contrived murder. So who did it? And how?

A long-time, semi-obsessive reader of impossible crime fiction will immediately know the crux of the locked room-trick when they see the floor plan. A trick very familiar to locked room readers, but how it was executed is a different problem altogether. The result is a pleasantly knotty problem with many moving parts and a new variation on an old locked room-trick.

I think it's to Szu-Yen Lin's credit, as a mystery writer, "The Ghost of the Badminton Court" is still the weakest of his three detective stories published in English. So I hope more will follow in the hopefully not so distant future.

EQMM, August, 2015

Earlier this year, Pushkin Vertigo published the eagerly anticipated translation of Soji Shimada's second detective novel, Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982), which is a modern locked room tale that felt like a genuine Golden Age mystery – a more than worthy successor to Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). Even if it missed some of its macabre grandiosity. However, these are not the only works from the hands of the doyen of shin honkaku. There are two great short stories!

"The Executive Who Lost His Mind" ("Hakkyō-suru jūyaku," 1984) was published in the August, 2015, issue of EQMM and is a bizarre, not easily defined impossible crime story, but a modern take on John Dickson Carr's classic radio-play "The Dead Sleep Lightly" (collected in The Dead Sleep Lightly, 1983) would be a fair description. In any case, the story is a minor tour-de-force.

This story doesn't feature his astrologist-detective, Kiyoshi Mitarai, but his secondary series-character, Takeshi Yoshiki, who's (as far as I could gather) an interpreter of alternative facts and here he listens to a story that could have come "right out of a tale by Poe" – which is told to him by a policeman, Yoshiki. A story that begins long before the executive director of the K Trading Company is found in his private-office "staring wild-eyed at a high-heeled shoe perched on the desk in front of him."

Shintaro Inudo is the absolutely ruthless, forty-one-year-old executive director of the trading company and he has cultivated a reputation "as something of a womanizer." This is why his private-office was so plush, because he liked to bring woman back there after his regular late-night drinking sessions. Oh, he has a wife and kids at home, but the most shameful, ongoing episode from his double-life is when he raped a young woman, Ikuko Koike, who he then continued to blackmail. Forcing her to sleep with him and giving him money. What he really got off on was the control he had over her. Their one-sided affair culminated in his private-office when Inudo took away Koike's clothes and forced her to stay there until he returned, but she had to get home before her husband returned.

So she simply vanished under inexplicable circumstances from the private-office on the top-floor of the trading company. Koike was never seen again.

Several months later, Inudo is visited by a young woman who not only like Koike, but is dressed exactly like her on the day he raped her, which twenty years ago, but this ghostly visitation is a human being of flesh and blood. Someone who knows too much and has to be silenced. So he throws the woman out of the window of private-office, on the fifth floor, but this is when the absolute impossible happened, because the body he finds below is that of a mummified woman with a completely emaciated face – two black holes where the eyes had been. Somehow, the body had rapidly deteriorated at a supernatural speed during its fall from the fifth floor window!

The solution to these series of unlikely and downright impossible occurrences is brilliantly daring and came about during "a set of amazing coincidences" stretched across several months. 

This story is not one of Shimada's intricate jigsaw puzzles (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders) or three-dimension locked room enigmas (Murder in the Crooked House), but an elaborately laid-out pattern of domino stones, linking everything together, which is revealed when all the domino stones have fallen. A pattern formed by the Merrivalean blinking' cussedness of things in general. This story is the absurdly bizarre done right. Just like Carr's The Hollow Man (1935) or Hake Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman (1942), which also deals with a body decomposing at a supernatural speed. Shimada really is a modern-day Carr or Talbot.

The third story of this review is another impossible crime story by Shimada, "The Running Dead" ("Shissou suru shisha," 1985), which was published in the November/December, 2017, issue of EQMM and has one of Shimada's grand-style tricks. One that kind of reminded me of those you often find in Detective Conan.

Kiyoshi Mitarai is back here as the story's detective and is a guest at the apartment of Genji Itoi, the owner of the jazz bar Zig-Zag, who entertains jazz players and music aficionados every other Saturday. One of the guests, Namura, performs a mind-reading act involving numerous items, mainly watches, a ring and a pearl necklace, after which they play music together and this scene has Mitarai playing the guitar – which is suddenly interrupted by a power outage. Another guest, Kubo, enters the darkened room and snatches the pearls from the table. They decide to pursue Kubo and Namura saw him climb over at one end of a T-shaped corridor, on the eleventh floor, which has no emergency staircase. Just a sheer drop to certain death, but where did the body go? Nothing is found on the street below. As if he "disappeared in midair."

The body of Kubo is found a short time later on an elevated, three-story high railway track, run over by a train, but the medical examiner found strangulation marks on his throat. 

EQMM, Nov/Dec, 2017

So how did a dead man manage to steal a string of peals, vanish miraculously from a dead-end corridor on the eleventh floor and cover the distance between the apartment and elevated railway track, in the middle of a storm, to be just in time to be run over by a train? This is patently impossible, but still happened and the problem of the running corpse reminded me of the impossible resurrection from my favorite Jonathan Creek episode, The Black Canary (1998).

Admirably, Shimada dazzles the reader with a solution as complex and involved as its premise, but, as fantastical as it may seen, it's compelling and strangely believable. I think you can put this down to human cunning and a fluke of circumstances coming together to create a truly baffling brainteaser. There's a reason why Japanese mystery fans refer to Shimada as "God of Mystery." Seriously, if more of his work gets translated, Shimada might become a serious treat to Carr when it comes to the #1 slot of my favorite mystery writers. Shimada is the iconic mystery novelist of our time and it's a crime only two novels and three short stories have been translated into English.

By the way, I loved the maps, challenge to the reader and the casual, almost bored way in which Mitarai rushes through the "obvious" solution, because he doesn't want to miss a concert on TV. And then he tells the policeman to get back to him when he has "a case that’s more complex than today's." What a way to put your detective over!

Finally, I have a short story from the 1930s to close out this review, namely "The Spider" ("Kumo"), which was first published in English in the December, 2015, issue of EQMM and collected in Foreign Bodies (2017). The story was written by Saburō Kōga, a contemporary of "Edogawa Rampo," who debuted with Shinjuto no himitsu (The Secret of the Pearl Tower, 1923) and seems to have been, like Rampo, a follower of Edgar Allan Poe.

"The Spider" is a detective story masquerading as a turn-of-the-century horror story and centers around the bizarre, isolated laboratory of Professor Tsujikawa.

EQMM, December, 2015

Professor Tsujikawa used to be a leading authority on physical chemistry, but he gave up his seat as a university professor and started research on a completely different topic, spiders, which is why had a tube-like laboratory constructed on the outskirts of Tokyo – resembling "a misshapen lighthouse" or "a time-worn fire watchtower." The bizarre laboratory was filled with "the strangest spiders from all over the world." Every time the world had forgotten the professor, the laboratory was brought back to everyone attention by two particular events. A friend and colleague from university, Professor Shiomi, fell to his death from the laboratory. Four weeks later, the professor is bitten by "a poisonous tropical spider" and is rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Where he died a week later.

Slowly, the narrator discovers that there was a cunning, but disturbed, mind behind these deaths. A mind that went to extreme lengths to commit the perfect murder.

"The Spider" is a detective story in the tradition of L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898) and Keikichi Osaka's The Ginza Ghost (2017), but with a grotesque touch of Poe and Rampo. Not a classic by any means, or even baffling, but I still enjoyed it for what it was.

So, all in all, these were all good to excellent short stories with "The Executive Who Lost His Mind" as the standout of the group. I would even say it's a minor classic and they all deserve to be gathered in a brand new locked room anthology, but, hopefully, with a ton of new material. Because, you know, I have already read these ones (sorry, John). What more can I say except that I hope will be flooded the coming years with translations of these ingenious Japanese detective novels and short stories.

Murder in the Crooked House (1982) by Soji Shimada

Last month, I posted a review of Soji Shimada's bloody tour-de-force, Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981), which I decided to reread in eager anticipation of the long-awaited release of the English translation of Shimada's second locked room mystery novel, Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982) – courtesy of Pushkin Vertigo. An imprint of Vertigo Press specialized in crime classics from around the world, written between the 1920s and 1970s, by "international masters of the genre." So who better to represent the Japanese shin honkaku movement in their catalog than one of its founders, the "God of Mystery," Soji Shimada!

I'm glad I decided to refresh my memory and reread The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, because there's a vast difference between Shimada first and second novel.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has a plot composed of three separate cases, only linked by the family ties of the victims, which stretches across four decades and covers the entirety of the Japanese islands – capturing the imagination of the public until Kiyoshi Mitarai finally solved it. Murder in the Crooked House, on the other hand, takes place in a single location, Ice Floe Mansion, where a group of people have gathered to celebrate Christmas. So this is more of an intimate yakata-mono (mansion story) than a grisly jigsaw thriller.

Ho-Ling Wong described yakata-mono as "distinctly darker" than the Western country house mystery. A pile of brick and mortar that almost takes on a personality all its own. This can be achieved by either "strange architecture" or by "acting as a distinctly evil vibe." Some good (Western) examples are S.S. van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928), Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Y (1932) and Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932), but Shimada's Murder in the Crooked House is a great example of the pure Japanese yakata-mono detective story with its bizarre architecture, a sinister collector's room and no less than three impossible murders!

To be honest, Murder in the Crooked House read like someone smashed Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells and the Detective Conan 2000 TV-special The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly. Needlessly to say, I loved it.

On a cliff at the top of Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, sits "a peculiar-looking structure" that looks like Elizabethan mansion with its three-storey building and to the east of the house stands a cylindrical tower of glass that's "the spitting image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa" – which can only be entered by "a staircase in the form of a drawbridge." A glass tower with a Western-style building next to, on a snowbound cliff, somewhat gives the impression of "some kind of fairy-tale castle."

However, the most eccentric feature of the mansion is that it was erected on a slant and leans to the south.

Ice Floe Mansion has perfectly normal windows on the north and south side, but the ones on the east and west sides have been constructed "to run parallel with the ground outside." This makes people feel like "a hard-boiled egg that has been dropped on the floor" and "is trying to roll uphill," which is something the owner of the house had a lot of fun with whenever he was entertaining guests. Kozaburo Hamamoto, President of Hama Diesel, certainly was planning to have some fun when he invited a group of people to stay with him during the Christmas holidays.

Hamamoto has invited a business associate, Eikichi Kikuoka, who's the president of Kikuoka Bearings. Kikuoka has brought along his retinue. There's a private-secretary and mistress, Kumi Aikura, a personal chauffeur, Kazuya Ueda, and an executive of Kikuoka Bearings, Michio Kanai – who's accompanied by his wife, Hatsue. There are also three university students, Shun Sasaki, Masaki Togai and Yoshihiko Hamamoto, who are presented with an opportunity to procure his blessing to marry his daughter, Eiko. Only thing they have to do is solve the meaning of the design of the fan-shaped flowerbed around the tower.

So there you have relatively normal opening of the classically-styled detective story, but this all changes when they retire to their bedrooms.

Kumi is awakened in the middle of the night by a noise and gets the scare of a lifetime when she sees a horrendous, frostbitten face with a scraggly mustache and beard peering through her parted bedroom curtains. But she was sleeping in a room on the top floor. There was "no kind of balcony" or "overhang of any kind" under the window. Just a flat wall. On the following morning, pieces of a doll are found outside the mansion without any footprints around it in the snow.

Hamamoto has made a hobby out of "studying and collecting mechanical toys and dolls," especially Western automata, which are kept in the "Tengu Room" where the walls are entirely covered with "masks of that famous long-nosed demon of Japanese folklore" and the doll that was taken from this room is named Golem – a two-hundred year old, life-sized doll from former Czechoslovakia. Folklore has it that, "on a stormy night," this doll comes alive. This unsettling event is rather innocent compares to what they discover next.

They're unable to rouse Ueda, who sleeps on a folding bed in a storeroom, which is securely latched from the inside. And when they break down the door, they find him at the foot of the bed with a hunting knife in his chest. The body was twisted in a strange position and the right wrist was tied to the foot of the metal bed frame. Detective Inspector Okuma is struggling to get a grip on the case and fails to prevent the murderer from striking a second time right under his nose. This time the murderer is looks to have been even more impossible than the first one, which was committed in a bedroom with sturdy door of solid oak and equipped with triple-locks.

So his superiors decided that this kind of "monstrous crime" requires "the right kind of detective" and they decide to consult Kiyoshi Mitarai, astrologer and fortune teller, whose appearance on the scene would have made Dr. Gideon Fell beam with pride – making Okuma groan with cryptic remarks and saying the doll committed the murders. However, not even Mitarai can prevent the murderer from fatally wounding yet another guest and the room, once again, was completely locked from the inside.

These impossibilities are the meat packing the bare-bone structure of the plot, because the murderer is fairly obvious and the only person who could have carried out these murders. And even Mitarai was unable to deduce, or even guess, the motive. So were these three impossibilities able to carry the story? Well, two of them certainly did, but let's take them one by one.

The locked room-trick used in the storeroom was good, but fairly simple, of which I have seen numerous variations and was not solved by either Okuma or Mitarai, but by one of the students. So this locked room problem is only a minor piece of the puzzle, but how the murderer was able to kill the combat trained ex-soldier was clever. And the hidden dying message was a nice touch. However, the third locked room stabbing was, technically, a complete and utter cheat, but it served a purpose.

What makes Murder in the Crooked House is good and memorable locked room novel are the shenanigans with the doll and the awesome solution to the second murder in the bedroom with the triple-locked door. A locked room-trick with such wonderful clues as iron staircases, pieces of string, the architectural eccentricities of the mansion and its location, but my explanation was not even close to the brilliant trick Shimada imagined here. My vague idea is that the whole place was a giant mechanical contraption that used the glass tower as a rotating cylinder, to wind and unwind, the mechanical parts of the house that opened the ceilings in the locked rooms to drop a knife from – which would explain why the bed was bolted down. Shimada imagined a much more satisfying and entirely original solution to the locked room.

So, while Murder in the Crooked House has its imperfections and lacked the macabre grandiosity of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, Shimada crafted a modern detective story that feels like a genuine Golden Age mystery and the originality of one of the impossible crimes lifts it to the status of a classic locked room novel. A handful of diagrams, illustrations and a challenge to the reader were the icing on the cake. This was well worth the long wait. Hopefully, we don't have to wait another decade for the next translation to come around. I need my traditional Japanese mystery fix.

On a final, semi-related note: I'm convinced Shimada has greatly influenced Seimaru Amagi, who's the talented writer of the Kindaichi series, because their plotting-style are very similar and they both have an affinity for elaborate, architectural trickery to create seemingly impossible situations or cast-iron alibi – such as in The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Rosenkrauz Mansion Murders. I have read two of Shimada's novels and one short story, but he has very distinctive style of plotting, especially his locked rooms, which seems to have rubbed off on Amagi. Maybe someone in the comments can answer that.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) by Soji Shimada

On January 31th, 2019, Pushkin Vertigo is finally going to release the long anticipated translation of Soji Shimada's Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1981), his second novel to appear in English, which Ho-Ling Wong characterized as a detective story in the vein of "the classics of the good old age" – complete with an entirely original locked room-trick. So I decided to commemorate this upcoming release by rereading his bloody tour-de-force.

Soji Shimada is considered to be "the doyen of the Japanese form of Golden Age detective fiction," known in Japan as shin honkaku, which can be traced back to the publication of his debut novel, Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). A horrific, labyrinthine jigsaw-puzzle involving severed body parts and a seemingly impossible murder.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is the case of "the Umezawa serial murders" which took place in Japan in 1936. One of the most elusive mysteries in the annals of crime and the story opens more than forty years later, but is prefaced with the last will and testament of Heikichi Umezawa – a mentally unbalanced artist with a deranged plan. Umezawa is obsessed with creating "the perfect woman of supreme beauty," Azoth, who wants to bring into existence. A dark, demented fantasy requiring the body parts of "six virgins of different zodiacal signs" and fate has handed him the women he needs on a silver platter. Namely his daughters and nieces!

Umezawa begins to plot the genocide of his own relatives and strictly follows the rules of alchemy, in correspondence with the astrological signs of the victims, but he's inexplicably murdered before he could carry out his plan. Umezawa had installed iron bars over the windows and skylights. The door of the studio was "a Western-style, single-panel door" that opened outwards with a bar to secure it from the inside, which was in place when Umezawa was murdered. So how did his murderer enter or leave the studio?

However, this is only the beginning of what would become the "genocide of the Umezawa family" and "consist of three separate cases."

The second case is the murder of Umezawa's stepdaughter, Kazue Kanemoto, who was raped, beaten to death and her rooms were ransacked, which made it look like "a run-of-the-mill murder" to the police – probably by a burglar. You would think rape was the one crime you can't possibly use in an traditionally-structured, plot-driven detective novel, but Shimada actually shaped a disgusting rape-murder into an important piece of the puzzle. Finally, there are "the Azoth multiple murders." Someone had carried out the dead artist's instructions to the letter.

Over a one-year period, the six mutilated, often badly decomposed bodies of Umezawa's daughters and nieces are found buried all over Japan. The bodies were found in places corresponding with the metallic elements specified in Umezawa's notes. All of the victim's were missing various body parts. This added one last, tantalizing question to the case: was the murderer successful in "creating the monster," Azoth, and where's this patchwork body buried?

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders never stopped to capture the imagination of the public and it periodically became "a fad to try to solve the mystery," but the case remained unsolved for more than forty years. Until one day, Kiyoshi Mitarai, an astrologer, fortune-teller and self-styled detective, received a client with a letter from her dead father. The letter throws a new light on the baffling aspect of the disposal of the bodied, but the woman wants Mitarai to unearth the whole truth. And clear her father's reputation.

What follows is arguably one of the most composed, cerebral detective stories ever written. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has a plot involving dismembered bodies reminiscent of Resurrection (1999) and can go toe-to-toe with Michael Slade's Ripper (1994) when it comes to gory murders, but the story takes place forty years after the killings. So the investigation is purely focused on solving the puzzles.

Mitarai spends most of the first half listening to the narrator, Kazumi Ishioka, who's "a huge fan of mysteries" and gives him all the details of the case. During these parts, Mitarai comes up with good, but wrong, explanation for the locked studio that the police took a month to work out – helped by letter-writing armchair detectives of the public. A false solution that was obviously modeled on a very well-known short story by an English mystery writer. Once he has been filled on all the details, Mitarai takes Ishioka to speak with as many people as possible who were linked to the murders. And are still alive. The only real hitch they have in their investigation is that circumstances imposes a deadline on them, but the focal point remains piecing together all of the pieces.

My copy of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is the original 2005 hardcover Stone Bridge edition and is littered with crime-scene diagrams, maps, charts and illustrations, which helped selling the historical aspect of the 1936 murders. There are enough maps, charts and illustrations to give you the idea of a murder-mystery presented as a case-file story. I appreciated the story had not one, but two, challenges to the readers that fitted the pure puzzle aspect of the plot.

There are, however, one or two blemishes. Firstly, the solution to the problem of the locked studio is fairly routine and surprisingly uninspired. I remember being slightly more impressed with it the first time around, but then again, there are nearly a thousand locked room stories between my first and second read. So I probably have become a bit harder to impress when it comes to the impossible crime genre. Secondly, the motive is weakly handled and tacked on at the end as an afterthought, which would explain the epilogue because it tried really hard to give the murderer the motivation need to carry out such a risky and insane plan – only it felt like it came way too late in the game. It actually came when the game was already over. The reader should have given hints to the motive a lot earlier in the story.

Nonetheless, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is an impressive debut and the central puzzle of the plot, tying all three cases together, is nothing short of ingenious. Stuff of classics! On top of that, the cleverly hidden murderer is as skillfully handled as John Dickson Carr's tight-rope act in The Plague Court Murders (1934; published as by "Carter Dickson"). Personally, I can't think of a bigger compliment to give to a writer of traditionally-styled detective novels than that.

I'm looking forward to the release of The Murder in the Crooked House and I'll probably be reading, or rereading, another Japanese locked room mystery for my next post. I just have to decide which one.

Art in the Blood

"Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world."

- G.K. Chesterton

Soji Shimada founded a neo-classical movement in Japanese crime literature, referred to as "Shinhonkaku," with the publication of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981), ensconcing a contemporary thriller within the frames of an orthodox detective story, and the only one of his books that's available in English.

Unfortunately, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders continues to this day to be the only one of his mystery novels that made it to the other side of the language barrier, but we can now enjoy a short story, "The Locked House of Pythagoras," in the August, 2013, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The story was adapted from another translation by John Pugmire, whose Locked Room International enriched many of our shelves with a Gallic taste of the impossible. And now LRI is looking at Japan!

Soji Shimada

"The Locked House of Pythagoras" features the same detective as in The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, Kiyoshi Mitarai, except for one notable difference, it's set during his school days in 1965 – making this story a predecessor, of sorts, to Japanese high school mysteries like Detective Conan and The Kindaichi Case Files.

Kiyoshi Mitarai is perhaps seven or eight years old at the time of the story and begins to meddle in a gruesome double homicide: a local and well-known artist, Tomitaro Tsuchida, is slaughtered alongside his mistress, Kyoko Amagi, at his two-story studio/apartment. Every door and window were found to be locked/latched from within and there was one set of footprints encircling the house without entering or leaving the premise. Tsuchida and Amagi were found behind the locked door of the guest room, lying side by side on the floor, which was covered perfectly with papers painted bright red. The police arrested Amagi's legal husband, Keikichi Agami, who confessed to the murder without explaining his miraculous escape from the crime scene – meaning that they still have little to hand over to the prosecutor. It looks impossible enough that they might have to consider taken advise from outsiders. Even if that outsider is a child with the attitude of early period Ellery Queen and tells them they've the wrong guy.

A bloody tour-de-force

Like in The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, Shimada does not bank on one idea or trick but constructs a multi-dimensional puzzle and that seems to be an approached favored by neo-orthodox mystery writers when tackling the locked room problem. They don't just focus on the doors, locks, windows or fool around with the presumptions of witnesses, but manipulate an entire setting in order to create the illusion. Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Deadline (1984) and The Dead Room (1987) are fine examples of locked room puzzles done on an architectural level, but certain parts also reminded me of Marcia Muller's The Tree of Death (1983) and Paul Doherty's Nightshade (2008). Interesting that these writers, separated by land and language in a pre-(modern)internet era, turned out to have very similar ideas about new ways to lock in on the impossible crime.

If there's one thing to nitpick about this story, as a locked room mystery that is, it's the three separate solution that together explain the entire locked house mystery, because two of them I've seen before and the last one was just lazy. But I hasten to add that the strength of "The Locked House of Pythagoras" lies in the overall solution. There's a smattering of clues and Shimada did a wonderful job motivating why a murderer would stage such an elaborate crime. For something that's just fewer than thirty pages, it's a rich story that will surely find its way into future anthologies and if you can suspend your disbelief to accept that a child can solve a double murder case, there's a lot to enjoy here.

Note for the curious: there's another childhood story, entitled "The Case of the Lily of the Valley," in which a five-year-old Mitarai solves his first case, but that's all I know about it.