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.

Tragedy in the Rain

"In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred,' as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before.'"

– C. Auguste Dupin (Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" originally published in Graham's Magazine, 1841)

Three months ago, John Pugmire of Locked Room International published a landmark anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017), that collected 26 impossible crime stories from across the world and one of the eye-catchers was a short story by Szu-Yen Lin, "The Miracle on Christmas Eve," which beautifully captured the spirit of the holidays – as well as whetting the reader's appetite for the then upcoming (English) release of one of his novel-length mysteries. That book was finally released early last month and can tell you that it definitely falls in the category of grand-old locked room mysteries.

Death in the House of Rain (2006) is the second of, so far, eight (locked room) novels by Szu-Yen Lin, who's "one of the rising stars of Taiwanese detective fiction," which began with the tantalizingly titled The Nile Phantom Mystery (2005). I hope his debut will get translated and published by LRI in the future, but his second one was picked on account of it being "the most Carr-like" with strong overtones of Grand Guignol.

The setting for this grandiose tale is "a huge monster," a three-story mansion, which stands atop a mountain in Taiwan and was designed as "a three-dimensional representation" of the Chinese character for "rain" – which is best seen from a bird's-eye view. John Pugmire and Fei Wu note in their afterword that "the peculiar architecture" of the setting places Death in the House of Rain squarely in the Japanese shin honkaku camp.

They also point out that unorthodox architecture is a particular feature of shin honkaku and how "the special structure of the architecture is necessary to the execution of a seemingly impossible murder." Or could serve as a clever red-herring. Some fans, like myself, love the diabolical ingenuity and the vast array of (new) possibilities these architectural marvels have to offer. On the other hands, you have critics who find it unbelievable that anyone would erect such extraordinary dwelling places. However, these eccentric buildings are more credible than they might imagine.

I think credibility largely depends on the character of the person who ordered the construction of such a place and the available resources, which actually has a pretty well-known, real-life precedent – namely Sarah Winchester's Mystery House. I recommend you look into the history of that place, because the House of Rain looks a plain, common-place domicile when compared to the Winchester Mansion!

Jingfu Bai was a renowned entrepreneur and, in life, owned one of the most famous motor companies in Taiwan, which made him a fortune and this allowed him to commission a celebrated architect known for his "unique artistic style." The entrepreneur had intended to spend retirement in his mountain home together with his wife, daughter and sick father, but the latter passed away shortly after they had moved into their newly finished home. The real tragedy occurred when the remaining three residents were brutally murdered.

One year after the murders, Renze Bai, professor of English, takes possession of his late brother's house and moved in there together with his daughter, Lingsha Bai, who studies English literature and two maidservants – Ru and an Indonesian girl, Cindy. Not long after moving into the house, Bai receives an email, head "The Identity of the Real Murderer," which is followed by a coded message and a photograph of his brother's body is attached to the mail.

So he contacts a young assistant professor of philosophy, Ruoping Lin, who is slowly acquiring a reputation as an amateur detective. Lin is not the only guest at the house.

There are classmates of Lingsha, six in total, who were invited to spend the winter holiday at the house, but it quickly becomes apparent that the group of students aren't a close, tightly-knit group of friends. On the contrary. Some of them are positively horrid to each other and then they begin to die, one by one, while they're inside rooms that were either locked or barricaded from the inside. And there are no less than four seemingly impossible murders between the pages of this book!

Xiangya Yue, "a doll-like girl," is the first to go and her death is arguably the most astonishing of all four impossible murders. Yue receives a note from Chengyan Fang, a young man who had asked her out several times, asking her to meet him at the library on the second floor, but there he tried to drug her and she ended up locking herself into an empty storage room – after which she falls completely silent. So they have to take a hatchet to the door and when they finally gained access to the room they make a gruesome discovery: Yue's head had been torn from her shoulders and was nowhere to be found inside the locked room! But it doesn't end there.

A second victim is brutally strangled to death in a changing room and the only unlocked door opened on a tennis court where "the ground of the red clay court was completely intact." Not a single footprint defaced its surface. A third victim, inexplicably, is defenestrated inside a locked room and the last person apparently committed suicide in a bedroom with furniture moved against the inside door.

It has often been remarked that quantity doesn't always mean quality, but the locked rooms here bristle with originality and added a new ideas to the pantheon of impossible crime fiction. My only gripe is that three of the four impossibilities required a stroke of luck to work, which quite an amazing coincidence that it worked three times in a row. However, the author was well aware of this fact and offered a defense for these string of coincidences with the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe acting as a character-witness (see opening-quote). 

I also liked how these three impossibilities stand in relation to the fourth and final locked room murder, which has a genuinely clever explanation and provides the book with a tragic who-and whydunit element – which nicely dovetailed with the previous three deaths and the family murders of the preceding year. So I decided to refrain from nitpicking and accept the defense given by Lin.

Szu-Yen Lin

Death in the House of Rain truly has all the hallmarks of a Japanese shin honkaku mystery novel and stands comparison with its illustrious predecessors such as Soji Shimada's Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981), Yukito Ayatsuji's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) and Alice Arisugawa's Koto Pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989).

I pointed out in the past how these shin honkaku mystery novels also left an indelible mark on the anime-and manga corner of the mystery genre, which includes such popular and long-running series as Detective Conan, The Kindaichi Case Files and Detective Academy Q, but this time they might also had an influence of a shin honkaku-style author. Not only did this story read like an elaborate Conan or Kindaichi story-arc, but Lin also kept referring to a suicide note as "a death note." I might be sorely mistaken, but I think that's as obvious a reference as referring to the unknown murderer, stalking the twisty corridors and locked rooms of the house, as a hollow man.

So, that's about all I can, or have, to say about the book, because, while Death in the House of Rain, has plot that revolves around four impossible crimes, it's also an incredibly lean story. One that you can blaze through like a short story or novella, which might be the only true weakness of the book. The readers arrives at the final chapter way too fast. Otherwise, this is a dark, moody locked room novel in the grand tradition of John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot and Paul Halter. Definitely recommended to all of my fellow locked room fanatics!