The New Kindaichi Files (1994) by Seimaru Amagi

Two years ago, I reviewed Seimaru Amagi's Dennō sansō satsujin jiken (Murder On-Line, 1996), a so-called "light novel," which is the Japanese, manga-like equivalent of young adult fiction complete with illustrations and penned all nine light novels in The Kindaichi Case Files series – published between 1994 and 2001. Only four of the novels were translated as part of the Kodansha English Library, but copies have become scarce over the past two decades. 

Ho-Ling Wong commented on my review to explain that "these books were not really intended for the international market," but to help Japanese readers who were learning to speak English and the reason why there are English/Japanese vocabulary lists at the end of the books. So not that many copies journeyed to the West.

Nevertheless, when has the obscure, out-of-print status of a tantalizing-sounding detective novel ever stopped any of us? John Norris has obscurity serve him drinks while reading. I managed to get hold of a copy of the first novel in the series, Operazakan – aratanaru satsujin (Opera House, the New Murders, 1994), which appeared in English under the nondescript title of The New Kindaichi Files. But don't let the bland title fool you. The book is an important entry in the series mythos and a sterling performance of the theatrical mystery novel with a five-star locked room-trick! 

The New Kindaichi Files is a sequel to the very first Kindaichi (manga) story, Operazakan satsujin jiken (The Opera House Murder Case, 1993), published in English in 2003 by TokyoPop as The Opera House Murders, which brought Hajime Kindaichi to the Hotel Opera on Utashima Island – where he was confronted by a string of murders modeled on Gaston Leroux's Le fantôme de l'opéra (The Phantom of the Opera, 1909). Kindaichi would return to Utashima Island a total of four times to solve Phantom of the Opera-themed murders. Ho-Ling reviewed the first three cases in 2012 in his blog-post "Three Act Tragedy" and discussed the fourth story in two-parts, which can be read here and here. But, for now, let's take a closer look at the second story that once again bathed the small island in blood.

Kazuma Kurosawa is one of the top five directors in Japan, reformer of modern drama and "the man behind the commercial success of theater" who had written and directed eight hit versions of The Phantom of the Opera. Ten years ago, Kurosawa had bought the island and spent six years restoring and converting the Georgian-style vacation home into a hotel with theater, which opened four years before The New Kindaichi Files. And what happened during its opening can be read in The Opera House Murders. Four years later, the old theater had been torn down and a new one built where Kurosawa plans to stage his ninth version of The Phantom of the Opera.

Hajime Kindaichi, Miyuki Nanase and Inspector Isamu Kenmochi all receive an invitation to the grand reopening of the Hotel Opera, because they were caught in the middle of "the serial murders at the Hotel Opera" and it was Kindaichi who unmasked the Phantom – although it was Kenmoichi who received the credit and the Metropolitan Police Superintendent's Medal. When they arrived on the island, Kindaichi experiences "a twinge of nostalgia" and "something less pleasant." A strong feeling that something bad is about the happen and the cast of characters for the impending tragedy have already taken their place on the stage.

The stars of the Genso theater group and play are an husband-and-wife acting duo, Kozaburo and Seiko Nojo, but they're not particular warm, or pleasant, people to be around. Yukio Midorikawa, Atsushi Takizawa and Rio Kanai are the other actors of the troupe who have one, or more, roles to play in the production. There's also a university student, Rokuro Eguchi, who works on the island every summer and a reclusive painter, Seiji Makube, whose features are obscured by a surgical mask. Dr. Eisaku Yuki rounds out the party and he was also present during the first series of murders on the island. Only eight hours pass before all hell breaks loose on the isolated island.

A small piece of paper with an ominous warning is found, saying "Carlotta sang farewell as the chandelier fell," signed "P," but when they investigate the theater with "an enormous chandelier" suspended over the stage, it's discovered completely empty. So they fastened the door from the outside with a padlock, but a short time later a crash shakes the house and rattles the windows, which unmistakably came from the theater. The door is opened in full view of everyone and what they discover is Seiko Nojo's body on the stage, "crushed beyond recognition," among the smashed and shattered remains of "that massive piece of intricate glasswork." More shockingly, Seiko had been strangled before the murderer dropped the chandelier on her. But how?

The whole auditorium had been "completely locked up," but somehow, "the murderer carried the body onto the stage" and "dropped the chandelier on it" before vanishing from a theater where "one set of doors was closed from the inside" and "the other entrance was shut with a padlock" – not a window to be found. Honestly, The New Kindaichi Files is the best and most original locked room mystery I've come across since Tokuya Higashigawa's Misshitsu no kagi kashimasu (Lending the Key to the Locked Room, 2002) and James Scott Byrnside's The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020). Amagi crafted a minor gem of a locked room mystery, while flexing his plotting skills, peeling away the layers as he added new ones. Such as giving away part of the trick early on in the story, but at the same time complicating the whole problem with pesky alibis, unclear motives, more murders and a false-solution to the padlocked entrance. Only to deliver a knockout punch in the end with a thoroughly satisfying and original solution the murder in the locked theater. A solution that even takes into account the illogicality of presenting the murder as an impossible crime and what gave the murder the idea to stage such a trick.

A multi-layered locked room-puzzle that clearly shows the difference between Amagi and the series co-creator, Yozaburo Kanari. Amagi understands what makes a detective-plot ticks and Kanari clearly doesn't. Something that's also reflected in how Amagi managed to cleverly subvert the series formula to (temporarily) hide the murderer. It's why it took me longer than usual with this series to catch on to the murderer, which gave me a pretty good idea about the real angle of the motive. But not the locked room-trick. The trick I envisioned was amateurishly stupid and clumsy in comparison. Amagi is the Soji Shimada of the anime-and manga detective story.

Only weak spots in the solution is that the story conveniently ignores how easily a padlock can be picked open, or refastened again, and long-time mystery readers unfamiliar with the series will likely have an easier time spotting the murderer – because they don't know what they're supposed to expect from the setup. Other than that, The New Kindaichi Files is not merely a good and solid entry in the long-running Kindaichi series, but an excellent and beautifully executed theatrical locked room mystery in its own right. I can't exactly tell you why, but this is the most fun I had reading/watching Kindaichi. Highly recommended, if you can find a copy!

So let me end this review with a plea to Kodansha to reprint those four light novels that were translated into English during the 1990s, which would now be a welcome addition to the steadily increasing stream of shin honkaku translations. Now there's an actual audience for them. A good alternative would be a four-in-one volume from Locked Room International with Ho-Ling, a huge fan of the series, writing the introduction to give new readers a crash course in all things Kindaichi. Even better would be brand new translations of all nine novels, but that's perhaps asking too much. Well, here's hoping something will materialize in the not so distant future.

On a truly last note, my edition is a thing of beauty: a paperback with dustjacket with the back and leaves covered in Japanese writing, but you can actually read the story inside with the detailed floor plan of the theater, diagram of part of the locked room-trick and illustrations of the characters/scenes as the cherry on top – giving you the best of all worlds.

Unseen Thorns

"The point is that there are a million ways for you to die that you can't possibly guard against."

- Lincoln Forrestor (William Gray Beyer's Death of a Puppeteer, 1946)

The Rosenkreuz Mansion Murders is a five-part (episode) story-arc in the Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi R) series and arguably has the best all-around story-telling and plot of all the episodes previous reviewed on this blog, which largely rests on a pair of clever locked room murders and the role played by Kindaichi's nemesis – who acts here alongside the high-school detective. And for a very good reason!

Yoichi Takato is talented magician and criminal, known as "The Puppeteer from Hell," who designs perfect crimes for people with a deep-seated grudge and controls the executioners of his schemes like stringed puppets, which he showcased in The Prison Prep School Murder Case. However, this time he has to dance to the tune of another plotter with a talent for murder.

A mysterious person going by the moniker of "Rosenkreuz" is sending out invites to celebrate the completion of the Blue Rose at the Rosenkreuz Mansion, but the letter delivered to the Puppeteer also contained a threat. One of the invitees to the party is his long-lost sister and he has to attend or else she'll leave the mansion in a body bag.

So this places Takato in a precarious position and he dislikes "the thought of unseen thorns," but what he excels at is murder, "not at the inverse," which gives him the idea to slip "a joker" into whatever game Rosenkreuz has planned – namely Hajime Kindaichi. Takato strikes a deal with Kindaichi that if his sister is among the guests, and she makes out of the mansion alive, he will turn himself in to the police to atone for his past crimes. It's an offer that proved to be impossible to ignore or turn down and this gives the story a very different dynamic, because Takato acts a secondary detective.

Someone who's right next to Kindaichi to help him in every step of the investigation, but whose role always appears to have a shadow-side. As you can never be entirely sure how much of a hand he (might) have in the unfolding drama. I found this to be a pleasant divergence from the unusual, often formulaic, narrative of the series.

Takato, Kindaichi and Miyuku arrive at the mansion, which is a European-style, cross-shaped house encircled by thick, impenetrable hedges of rose bushes that could have been pulled from the Queen of Heart's hedge maze. The person known as Rosenkreuz plays the role of absentee host and only communicates with his guest through letters delivered by the butler of the mansion, Mouri Mikado. So there you have the first suspect, however, the remaining guests are also an interesting bunch.

One of the first surprises for Kindaichi and Miyuki is that their biology teacher, Shiraki Benine, is among the guests and she has shown a personal interest in (blue) roses at the opening of the episode – which she shares with the others who received an invitation. There's a CEO of a biotechnology company and a rose garden manager, but also several artistically inclined people such as a photographer, a kimono designer, an artist and a flower poet. So this nicely sets the stage for murder and the first body turns up before the ending of the first episode.

On a brief note of negativity, the first two murders were rather disappointing as the first body turned up, impossibility, on the dinner table, but this piece of cheap trickery was (thankfully) almost immediately explained. The second person died when he tried to escape from the premise by going through the rose bushes, but the thorns had been poisoned and he dropped dead on the spot. Very, very pulpy. Luckily, these two murders did not set the tone or quality for the remaining four episodes.

The third murder is discovered when a note by Rosenkreuz commands everyone to come to the circular reception room on the north side, where he will reveal "the blue rose," but what they discover is a locked room and they make a gruesome discovery when they inspect the outside windows – inside lays the body of man on a cross-shape bed of flower petals. A wooden stake has been driven through his heart!

 

The Rose-Petal Locked Room

What makes this murder an impossible one is the door, which opens inward, but the flower bed, placed all the way up to the threshold, was undisturbed. So how did the murderer closed the door without sweeping the lower part of the petal cross into the hallway outside? The explanation proved to be as a good and novel as the locked room situation, which combined the flower motif of the story with certain aspects of the murder room to great effect.

I believe this is the kind of trick John Dickson Carr or Joseph Commings would have admired and something Yozaburo Kanari would love to pass off as his own.

The second impossible situation is of a different order altogether: a woman is being attacked in a room that can only be reached by taking a large detour around the house (some short cuts were boarded up). When they reach the section of the mansion, where the room is situated, the only person they find there is Takato and he swears nobody had passed while he had been standing there – which makes the murder they discover in the room an impossible one. The trick is yet another variation on the idea Seimaru Amagi played with in The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Kamikakushi Village Murders from Detective Academy Q, which even uses a similar sun-light clue.

Obviously, Amagi loves the idea of this trick and gets a ton of mileage out of it. Sure, it's an idea with a lot of possibilities and has barely been looked at by Western mystery writers (except for Paul Halter), but, in this case, I believe the first locked room trick is superior to the second one.

Anyhow, the combination of a collaboration between two enemies, Kindaichi and Takato, and a pair of excellently imagined impossible crimes is what, largely, made The Rosenkreuz Mansion Murders my favorite story from this series. But the identity of the (somewhat obvious) murderer and the underlying, hidden relationships were also of interest. As to be expected, there was the good old avenger-motif at the heart of the case, but this time there was an extra dimension to the motive as it answered why Takato had to be present and what the murders had to do with his sister. Fascinatingly, this showed the story was written around several characters with parallel relationships, which recalled similar, sometimes mirror-like, relationships found in Gosho Aoyama's Detective Conan (or Case Closed).

All of these parallel relationships, rose-themed clues and two locked room illusions that took full advantage of their surroundings created some beautiful plot-patterns together. The Rosenkreuz Mansion Murders completely exorcised the dispiriting disappointment left behind by The Legendary Snow Demon Murders.

Hopefully, the next story will be able to maintain this level of quality. So I guess it will be a coin toss between The Death March of Young Kindaichi and The Foxfire-Floating Murders. Any and all recommendations are welcome!

The Shanghai River Demon's Curse (1997) by Seimaru Amagi

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the co-creator of The Kindaichi Case Files, Seimaru Amagi, wrote nine "light novels" in the series and four were translated as part of either the Kodansha English Library or Kodansha Ruby Books, which were intended as an educational tool to help improve the English of Japanese readers – not to dazzle Western readers. Hence, each novel ends with a nearly thirty-page long English-Japanese vocabulary list. 

According to our resident expert, Ho-Ling Wong, the English editions enjoyed a long print-run in Japan and there must be "a fair number in circulation," but, in the West, copies have become as rare and elusive as a Kappa. Not quite rare or obscure enough to elude me forever!

Several years ago, I came across Dennō sansō satsujin jiken (Murder On-Line, 1996), which is possibly the first detective novel to use the internet meaningfully in a traditionally-styled mystery complete with an isolated, snowbound setting and ironclad alibis. You can borrow a digital copy from the Internet Archive. Next one that fell into my hands was Operazakan – aratanaru satsujin (Opera House, the New Murders, 1994), published in English simply as The New Kindaichi Files, but the plain, uninspired title hides a classic, first-rate theatrical locked room mystery – translating into my favorite Kindaichi title to date. Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998) is a very minor, short and somewhat flawed detective story, but you can cross-off some of its shortcomings against an imaginative piece of miniature world-building and an inventive impossible crime. So that left with me with one more title to track down. 

Shanhai gyojin densetsu satsujin jiken (The Shanghai River Demon's Curse, 1997) is the fifth novel in the series and the third to be translated, which turned out to be a bit of an odd duck. 

The Shanghai River Demon's Curse brings Hajime Kindaichi and Miyuki Nanase to Shanghai, China, where the famous Yang Variety Troupe performs a daily, two-hour variety show at the Mermaid Hall. An enormous ship moored along the bank of the Huangpu River. The main event of the show is an acrobatic underwater act, "The Legend of the River Demon," which is patterned after the tale of a creature that's half-fish, half-human that lives at the bottom of the river. A monster with the ability to curse, or even kill, human beings. In some places, it's considered "bad luck to mock such spirits on stage" like "in Japanese ghost stories."

Following a performance of "The Legend of the River Demon," the director of the troupe, Yang
Wang, is found in his office with a bullet in his head, but his body and the floor are unaccountably soaking – water has "the unpleasant odor of freshwater fish." Even stranger is that the murderer scratched a huge Chinese character for “spring,” a meter wide, on the wall. The first word of the lullaby of the river demon's curse. However, the Shanghai police have a very human suspect in their sights.

Once the show begins, with "animals like the tiger and monkey roaming around," the door to the dressing room is locked from the inside and it's "impossible for anyone from the audience to get in," which was still locked from the inside when the show ended. Nearly everyone on that side of the door had an alibi except the victim's son, Yang Xiaolong. His young sister, Yang Lili, writes her Japanese penfriend, Miyuki, a distressed letter saying her brother is suspected to have murdered their father. Miyuki decides to go Shanghai to help by bringing her childhood friend, Hajime Kindaichi, who's "the grandson of the master detective Kosuke Kindaichi" and "solved several cases for the Metropolitan Police Department." But his grandfather's name or reputation is not as well-known in China, which is one of the challenges facing the young detective who became a little timid when landed in foreign country for the first time in his life.

When they finally arrive in Shanghai, there are two big surprises waiting in the wings. Firstly, they find Detective Li Boer, of the Shanghai Police, in the company of their friend in the MPD, Inspector Kenmochi. Recently, the body in a decade old murder case was identified and "a small clue" led the Tokyo police to the Japanese director/producer of the Yang Variety Troupe. But is there's a link to the new murder? Secondly, Kindaichi and Miyuki get to witness a second murder during a performance of "The Legend of the River Demon" when a body plunged down from above the stage into the swimming tank. Another bullet to the head and the Chinese character for "summer" was slashed in the victim's back with a knife. So the murderer was intended to follow the grim lullaby. 

In spring, the boat is flooded,

In summer, the river turns a murky mauve,

In autumn, the traveler must drink putrid water,

In winter, fish no longer swim but sleep.

These murders also have an element of the impossible as the victims were shot with a derringer, which apparently can vanish, or materialize, whenever it's convenient to the murderer. The part of the ship between Yang's office and the dressing room was locked at the time of murder, which meant that nobody went in, or out, before the police arrived. So nobody had an opportunity to dispose of the gun, but they went over the entire ship with dogs and metal detectors without finding anything. They simply assume the murderer found a way to throw it in the river until discovering the second murder was committed with the same weapon! I've seen two variations on this type of vanishing weapon trick before and hated both of them. This one is marginally better, because Amagi tried to make it somewhat convincing. But the trick is still Yozaburo Kanari. Yes, Kanari's name in this context is a euphemism for shit.

Well, so far, it seems like a fairly standard and typical Kindaichi story with exception of the setting and its effect on Kindaichi's normally cocky attitude, but the story moves away from the series formula in the second-half – turning into a chase story with a coming-of-age angle. Kindaichi helps Yang Xiaolong to escape from police custody and they're chased to Shanghai as they make a run to the Yang's home village. A dirt poor place where the children had to grow up faster in order to make money, which is why Xiaolong and his sister acts so much mature than Kindaichi. But, while their on the run, they both find something of themselves they had either lost or never had. This comes at the expensive of the usual plot structure with the alibis, impossibilities and the nursery rhyme theme of the murders being heavily underplayed during the second-half.

I also hated that during the first-half an intriguing, quickly discarded plot-thread was introduced when Kindaichi learned of a former troupe member, Wang Meiyu, who was a superb swimmer, but a bit strange. Meiyu not only swam really well and could stay underwater forever, but "she only ate aquatic plants and freshwater fish." And it was her talent that lead the troupe to adopt the "The Legend of the River Demon" as their signature act. But then strange rumors began to circulate. Members began to talk that every time she took a shower, the bathroom would "reek of fish" with "large fish scales on the floor." So they began to avoid Meiyu and culminated in her committing suicide by jumping into the river from the toilet window. She left four characters scrawled in blood on the wall and has now risen from "the depths of that murky river" to extract revenge. But the plot-thread was quickly brushed aside. And given an even quicker explanation towards the end. So the only reason why it was even brought up was to give the book a snappy title.

Thankfully, the solution was not all bad with a pretty good alibi-trick and an inspired piece of misdirection, which successfully hid the murderer for a good chunk of the story. I eventually figured it out, because if you how the gun can vanish and reappear, you know who pulled the trigger. Not so good is that other parts of the solution stretches things considerably with an unnecessary, rather cruel twist nearly ruining the whole thing. I mean, this murderer is very likely going to be executed. So why throw that revelation out there? Amagi is the Soji Shimada of the anime-and manga detective story who is nearly unmatched when it comes to erecting grand-scale plots with majestic locked room-and alibi-tricks, but when it comes to characters, sometimes he goes one twist too far. Deadly Thunder has a similar problem.

So, on a whole, The Shanghai River Demon's Curse is not entirely without interest and its break with the formula and foreign setting makes it a worthwhile read to long-time fans of the series, but don't expect anything more than an average detective story. Regrettably, the weakest of the four translated novels.

This more or less closes the chapter on The New Kindaichi Files light novels with such untranslated novels as Yūrei kyakusen satsujin jiken (The Ghost Passenger Ship Murder Case, 1995) and Onibijima satusjin jikes (The Ghost Fire Island Murder Case, 1997) remaining tantalizingly out of my reach. Well, the novels are out of my reach, but not the '90s anime adaptations. So I might make one of those my next stop in the series.

The Vanishing Magician

"A good magic trick is like the perfect crime. Not a loose end in sight."

- Akechi (The Magic Express, 1996)

I was inspired to pull The Magical Express (1996), which is the sixteenth volume in The Kindaichi Case Files series, from the congested shelves that give a home to my vast collection of mysteries after reading a post on Pretty Sinister Books – in which John elaborated on his past as a puppeteer and admitted to being a total magic geek. This put the cog-wheels of this Mycroftian brain of mine in motion and dredged up attenuating memories of one of Hajime Kindaichi's cases that is actually quite clever, The Magical Express, and decided to shed some light on those dimming impressions I had of the story.

The plot revolves around a wraithlike presence, emblazoned with the moniker The Puppetmaster or Hell's Puppeteer, who's in the middle of on-going magic trick to make a troupe of magicians disappear, one after another, from the grand stage called life – and one of these disappearance acts involves a brilliantly clued and ingeniously executed impossible situation situated in a train compartment under observation.

The first chapter of The Magic Express departs with the arrival of a sealed box at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Department, containing a twisted marionette, posed like a mangled corpse, and a dire warning that a spell of death and fear has been cast on a train bound for Hokkaido. It also has some wacky embarrassing high-jinx, involving an adult videotape Kindaichi has in his possession, but these are best glanced over and banished from your mind. Anyway, the line that owns the now star-crossed express provides a bit of entertainment for their passengers with a troupe of renowned magicians, who conjured up a reputation for themselves with a trick known as The Living Marionette, which involves a doll that is magically endowed with life and cuts his own strings before cycling across the stage, but before reaching the final terminal their leader is murdered – and his body disappears under miraculous circumstances.

Gentle Yamagami, a maven where fire illusions are concerned and head of his own enchanting pack of conjures, is found with the handle of a knife protruding from his left temple in an unoccupied compartment, scattered with roses and strewn with balloons, after the train was hastily evacuated after The Puppetmaster called in a bomb thread, but the remains are spirited away in front of several eyewitnesses – including Hajime Kindaichi! The solution is inspired, even though Yazoburo Kanari probably stole a page from the book of one of his fellow brethren, and the (visual) clueing is impeccable! Various parts of the solution, from the inexplicable disappearance of the magician's body to the identity of Hell's Puppeteer, are dangled in front of the reader, like a hypnotists' pocket watch, but it's so in your face that it's easily overlooked and can effectively lead you astray.

By and large, The Magical Express follows a predetermined track decided upon in previous entries, as there's an unresolved death in the past of the magic group, which betrays another avenger-from-the-past ploy to readers familiar with the tropes of this series, but there are some unexpected and pleasant departures along the way. The aforementioned plotting and clueing is one of them, which is continued after the death and disappearance of Gentle Yamagami, as the puppeteer happily dispatches more members of the troupe – saturating the pages with even more clues! It was also a refreshing to watch the murderer, during a theatrical dénouement, slowly morph in a different breed of killer than the ones that usually put in an appearance in these stories and that Kindaichi is accompanied by both Kenmochi and Akechi. Kenmochi continues the tradition that began with Lestrade, while Akechi acts as a foil to Kendaichi, but, more often than not, ends up playing second fiddle – like Simon Brimmer who only seems to fail when he works with his rival on the same case.

Overall, this is one of only two or three volumes from this series that I would unhesitatingly recommend to any mystery fans and shows how underutilized comics are within the genre. So much can be done with visual clueing and you can come up with a lot more labyrinthine-like solutions as they are visualized for you. Shortly put, an excellent mystery on nearly all counts.

Oh, and to everyone who wants to point an accusing finger at me that I pounced on this opportunity to tempt one of our own into reading mystery manga's and hoping that this story will function as a back door introduction to Detective Conan/Case Closed... well... you're completely right! ;)

Out of Time

"The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story—that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest."

- S.S. van Dine (Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories, 1928) 

I came across an entry for An Old-Fashioned Mystery (1983) by Runa Fairleigh while thumbing through Robert Adey's Locked Room Mysteries (1991), a regular feeder line these days, and the publishing date in combination with the detectives being listed put the book (possibly) in the same category as Herbert Resnicow's excellent Alexander and Norma Gold series from the 1980s. 

However, Sebastian and Violet Cornichon weren't the wisecracking, mystery solving husband-and-wife team I expected to find, but a brother and sister who exchange snappy remarks. Oh, and they're twins. Sebastian was born four minutes before Violet and therefore inherited everything, which now finances his lavish and loose lifestyle, and cultivated a penchant for making remarks/jokes that could be argued suffer from bad timing. In defense of my favorite character from the book, and to quote comedian Doug Stanhope, "they just died, it's perfectly timed." On the other hand, Violet had to work hard on her cosmetic line and earned the moniker of Society-Girl Detective by helping the police close one or two open cases – which proved to be the best kind of advertisement for her business money can't buy.

But first things first, because if I have to start anywhere, it's with the introduction, entitled "The Mystery Runa Fairleigh," written by crime novelist L.A. Morse, on the manuscript of An Old-Fashioned Mystery and the questions left behind by its author. Thee decades before, Fairleigh purchased one of the smaller of the Thousand Islands, somewhere near the border between the United States and Canada, where she lived the solitary existence of a hermit before disappearing from the face of the Earth – leaving only 288 pages of a type written manuscript behind. Morse ends the introduction with the following observation: "However, it might equally well have been titled The Last Mystery, since it is most definitely the mystery to end all mysteries. Indeed, it may be the eschatology of the mystery." Well, that's a case to be decided by the individual reader, but it's without a doubt one of the most flattering homage’s to Agatha Christie I have read to date. 

The first and obvious inspiration for An Old-Fashioned Mystery was And Then There Were None (1939) and the backdrop is an old, gothic-style manor house, complete with battlements, on the isolated Komondor Island. It's a place with a chequered history: a cursed place where rumors of buried treasure from the Revolutionary War linger on and people continue to die under mysterious or absurd circumstances. A previous owner and notorious prankster was shot in the face when he sneaked up on someone who was fooling around with a shotgun. Komondor Island is the place Rosa "Mousey" Sill has picked to celebrate her 25th birthday and gaining full control of her trust fund, but the party that has been put together couldn't have ended any other way than in bloodshed.

First of the unlikely table companions is Mrs. Cassandra Argus, Mousey's deranged godmother and involved in the boating accident that killed her mother, which took a toll on her mental conditions and now shrieks eerie sounding prophecies. Beatrice "Budgie" Dijon is Mousey's aunt and the wife of the insufferable Colonel Nigel Dijon, who seems obsessed with smacking people and actually shocked to find out the cook, Mr. Ching, is an "Oriental." You have to be pretty racist, if that is your first complaint considering the quality of Mr. Ching's cooking. Derrick Costain is Mousey's well-dressed fiancé and rumored gold digger. Mr. Eustace Drupe is the dome-headed lawyer and trustee of Mousey's funds, but, since this is a detective story, Drupe is one of those "Wicked Uncle Andre" types. Cerise Redford and the housekeeper, Mrs. Hook, round out the party and they mix, socially, as well as soccer fans of opposing teams and beer.

Fortunately, they soon stumble over the first body in the coal pile and it's been neatly chopped up, and from here on out the plot is compartmentalized in murder blocks: a murder is committed and Viola thinks she has pieced together the solution only to be upset by another murder. The (false) solution that tied together the first three murders can easily stand on its own (great clueing) and the case Violet made against her own brother was simply amusing – an (unconscious) spoof of the case against Roger Sheringham from Anthony Berkeley's Jumping Jenny (1933)? I surely got the impression Morse Fairleigh knew her classics. By the way, Drupe was killed in a locked room, but Violet completely forgot about the impossible angle until the story was nearing its end and the explanation was perhaps the only part of the story that should've stayed in the past (somewhere around the mid-to late 1800s). 

This compartmentalized story telling helped in keeping the insanity in proper bounds, until the end, because the mounting terror of being picked off one-by-one wasn't enough. There had to be a radio broadcast on the only station they could receive, Big Band Era station, announcing a mass murderer had escaped from a high security prison – and he's familiar with the island. On a side note: I suspect Kanari Yozaburo from lifting bits and pieces of the plot for The Legend of Lake Hiren (1994) and given his own interpretation to other aspects of the plot, which wouldn't be the first time. The Mummy's Curse (1993) is basically an abridged version of Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981). I know the line between emulation and copyright infringement can be sketchy at times, but Yozaburo walked that line as if it was the Silk Road during its heyday. Picking up ingredients here and there when it was time to hand in a new manuscript. But I'm getting off-topic here and long-winded. 

I'm not sure what I liked more about An Old-Fashioned Mystery: the story or the solution. The former has a lot of interesting detective work and a galore of red herrings for genre savvy readers to slip on. I had solutions based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Death on the Nile (1937) and After the Funeral (1953), but the actual explanation is something else. Originality is a bit of an overused cliché when reviewing books, but here you might actually have something that's original and you could even argue "transcends" the genre. Some will love it (I think I do), while others will probably hate it and call shenanigans, but it was fairly clued – though I can definitely see why some would label it a rule breaker. But if it's a rule breaker, it's a classic of its kind. A great play on playing with the readers' expectations. And appreciated the cameo of a famous mystery writer in the final chapter. 

I would recommend An Old-Fashioned Mystery the strongest to devotees of Agatha Christie and people who have read altogether too many mysteries. They'll probably appreciate the book the most!

Let the reader be warned: the book contains a few puns and word jokes. No idea why everyone hates them. And to readers new to Golden Age detectives and neo-classical mysteries: never, ever take Van Dine's rules too seriously.

Hell's Gate

"In this world, there's no such thing as the perfect crime!"

- Hajime Kindaichi

Last week, on the recommendation of our guide in the world of shin honkaku, Ho-Ling, I decided to take one last crack at the Kindaichi franchise with a recent animated series, Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi R), which was originally aired in Japan between 2014 and 2016. The third time proved to be the charm!

Hajime Kindaichi

I watched a two-part episode, The Blood Pool Hall Murder, which revolved around a very tricky murder committed during an annual Go tournament between two rivaling school teams. A short, clever and pleasantly put together detective story that made excellent use of its background and even had some Go-themed sleight-of-hand – such as the killer's alibi-trick and the victim's dying message. So I wanted to try a longer, multiple episode story next and one of them was recommended to me twice.

The Prison Prep School Murder Case consists of five twenty-minute episodes and offers an intricate, multi-layered plot with one hell of an alibi-trick. A trick that turns a string of gruesome murders into a large-scale impossible crime! So let's dig in, shall we?

As noted in my brief introduction of The Blood Pool Hall Murder, the protagonist of the series, Hajime Kindaichi, has an astonishing IQ of 180, but has earned himself a name as a lazy underachiever and his grades have finally caught up with his reputation – placing him in danger of having to repeat a year. Luckily, his long-time friend, Nanase Miyuki, knows of a good prep school and generously offers to come along on a cram course. There is, however, one problem: the prep school in question resembles and operates like prison.

Gokumon Prep School is a study retreat, known among its students as "Hell's Gate," where the first body is discovered as soon as Kindaichi and Miyuke stepped inside the school building.

One of the former students, Moroi Ren, who revisited the school to do a test is fatally poisoned in the counseling room and pressed the alarm bell in his death struggle. The poison was introduced with several needle pricks to his hand and the local police assumes the murder is a random act done by another student, who cracked under the pressure, but Kindaichi believes the murderer had singled out Moroi as a target and knows it was done – a trick known as "Magician's Select." Regardless, this doesn't bring them any closer to the person responsible for the poisoning and only established that something dark is bubbling beneath the surface of Gokumon Prep School.

During the final half of the opening episode, Kindaichi and Miyuke bump into two of their policemen friends, Police-Inspector Kenmochi and Superintendent Akechi. The former has been in charge of the school poisoning case, while the latter confirms Kindaichi suspicions that his old nemesis has a hand in the murder. A magician and criminal genius, known as the Puppeteer from Hell, who made his first on-stage appearance in The Magical Express, but eluded capture after being revealed by Kindaichi.

Now he "manipulates people like puppets" and "writes perfect criminal scenarios for people who bear grudges." So the young detective has quite a challenge ahead of him! 

Hell's Puppeteer appears in the crowd

The next episode moves the large cast of characters, including Kindaichi and Miyuke, to the secondary buildings of the school, called Moonlight and Sunlight, which are situated in a dark, sprawling forest with an hour's walking distance between them – something that becomes relevant when the impossible alibi-trick comes into play. But more on that presently.

Kindaichi and Miyuke are split up and assigned to two different groups. A science-and a humanities-oriented group, but this is also the point in the plot where the school demonstrates it's deserving of its nickname and reputation. The students are stripped of their personal belongings and clothes, which are replaced with prison-style jumpsuits. Some students with poor grades can even be locked up in solitary confinement to help them completely focus on their studies.

So you can say that the administration of Gokumon Prep went out of their way to conform to the nightmarish image we have in the West of juku (cram schools).

Anyway, the harsh, closely watched environment does provide safety to the students from the unknown murderer and even Akechi is present in the (undercover) role of instructor, but students still manage to go missing from the premise. One after another, students from both groups began to disappear after walking out of a full classroom. One was ordered to fetch a fresh piece of chalk from the hall closet, while another finished a test and was excused. The viewer is aware that they were murdered, but the bodies are nowhere to be found and everyone simply assumes they wandered into the woods – after cracking under all of the pressure. Something that's apparently not all that uncommon at Gokumon.

All of this takes up two-and-a-half episodes and this was, perhaps, too slow, but the pace picks up when all of the bodies, one after another, turn up in thematic fashion that alluded to the material they had been studying. So that was an interesting and unexpected twist in the plot. However, what really saved the episode is the unfurling of the complicated and involved explanation for the apparent impossibilities surrounding the murders over the next two episodes.

Initially, I feared my review of The Prison Prep School Murder Case was going to be lukewarm, because I erroneously thought I had figured out the who, why and how of the case, but it turned out my explanation had only touched upon the most elementary parts of the solution. And was completely wrong about the ingenious alibi-trick.

In my first review about this series, I mentioned a blog-post by The Reader is Warned, "But is it a Locked Room Mystery? The case of the impossible alibi," on which I commented what kind of alibi qualifies as an impossible problem and the episodes that make up this case tick all of the boxes – since every potential suspect were together, in the same room, when the murders happened. So none of them appeared to be, physically, capable of being the killer. I really thought I had stumbled to the truth, early on in the story, when one of the episodes showed a birds-eye view of the grounds surrounding both buildings. It's what gave me an idea how murder could be committed in each building while everyone was alibied. But my solution was childishly simple compared to what was revealed.

Sure, you can argue that the magnificent alibi-trick is too complex and involved, but my only real complaint about it is that the entire story was obviously written around this idea. The trick came first and the story second, which explains the shoddy pacing in the first two episodes and the extreme rules of the prison-like prep school. As the strength of the whole story hinges on the trick, the writer had not much to work with in the setup of the story and the tight regime was needed to make the plot work.

However, if you want pure, undiluted ingenuity, you will appreciate the overall plot of The Prison Prep School Murder Case. Arguably, it's one of the better examples of how an elaborate alibi can turn a detective story into a full-bloom locked room mystery. I really wish I could tell more about the nature of the trick, but that would be spoiling the surprise and that's a capital offense around these parts.

Finally, I need to point out that, at times, the story tried too hard to touch a dramatic note, but regularly failed at it. And the final, over-the-top showdown with Hell's Puppeteer was preposterous! With his hell-fire magic, flower darts and high-school drama-class dialogue. Nevertheless, I did chuckle when the Puppeteer told Kindaichi he wanted to meet him again "on the stage of another atrocity." Oh, no, I thought, does that mean Yozaburo Kanari is going to write their next case?

Alright, alright! I promise that's the last swipe I'll take at Kanari in this series of reviews, I swear!

Detective Conan: The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly

Recently, our guide in the land of the Japanese detective story, Ho-Ling Wong, posted an enticing review on this blog of an old episode from a long-running anime series based on the popular manga often raved about on this blog, Detective Conan, which has been running since 1996 – culminating in 26 seasons and 900 episodes at the time of this writing. Understandably, the source material proved insufficient to keep the anime running for over twenty years and original stories had to be produced.

However, the TV originals are generally considered to be the poorer episodes and one of my reasons for sticking with Gosho Aoyama's original work. The other one is the frightful prospect of a backlog of hundreds, upon hundreds, of episodes!

The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly is episode 184 from season 7 and originally aired on March 13, 2000 as a one-hour special. According to Ho-Ling, this episode has not only been "lauded as one of the best anime original episodes ever," but is considered to be "one of the best episodes" period. So my curiosity got the better of me and decided to give the episode a shot. I can already reveal that the plot has a ghoulish gem of a locked room trick! An absolute work of art!

Anyway, in order to stay consistent with my on-going review of the U.S. publications of Detective Conan, re-titled Case Closed, I'll be calling the characters by the names used in the English version. Yes, I know. Heresy and all that. You may vent your purist anger in the comments.

The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly begins with Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan driving to the imposing mansion of Beniko Suo, President of Mahogany Promotions, which is a charity organization for children who lost their parents in a car accident, but they nearly crash themselves into a tree trunk that had been placed on the road – a note had been pinned to the trunk. It told them to turn around or "you'll regret it." The warning was signed with The Phantom of the Cursed Mask.

Not deterred by this threat, they arrive at the mansion and, upon entering, they're greeted by walls decorated with masks. There's even a mask room, or Chamber of Masks, which is the only room in the house connecting the east and west wings.

One part of the collection in the mask room are two-hundred, identical-looking masks that were made by a Spanish artist, Julio González, who was consumed by his work and committed suicide when he had carved the last mask. All two-hundred masks were found around his body and the blood made it look as if "the masks themselves had sucked it out of him," which helped them acquire the reputation of being cursed objects. As a precaution, every night at the stroke of twelve, the mask room is locked from both the east and west side, because "the masks like to do pranks" and after midnight "they will start to walk" – terrifying everyone unlucky enough to encounter them. And against this backdrop the other participants of the upcoming charity event arrive.

This group consists of a rock star, a well-known photographer, a popular baseball player and tarot prophet. The cast of characters is further rounded out by the assistant of the president and a pair of twin sisters who work at the mansion as maids. So the stage is properly set for some good, old-fashioned shenanigans.

During the night, Conan gets a phone-call from inside the house and the caller is nobody less than the Phantom of the Cursed Masks. The Phantom tells Conan that "the Cursed Masks are high for blood," a sacrifice and to hurry, or they won't make it, but there's a lot of confusing and running around – because the locked doors of the mask room separates the house in the east and west wing. However, they eventually arrive at the bedroom door of Beniko, but the door is double-locked from the inside. One of these locks is a big, sturdy padlock. So the window above the door is shattered and Conan climbs through the opening to open the room from the inside.

The "Case Closed" Look

The bedroom is littered with the González masks and Beniko is on her bed, a knife-wound to the throat, but nobody else is found in the room! A second door in the room was sealed years ago with bolts and the windows were shut air-tight. You couldn't fit an arm through the narrow bars of the grill above the bolted door. So how did the murderer enter and leave this tightly-shut bedroom?

I accidentally stumbled to the first step of the locked room trick, because the divided layout of the mansion and the bloodstained handle of the knife recalled Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932). You can say that these stories handle the knife in a somewhat similar way, but the comparisons end when the murderer of this story elaborates on this idea by creating a diabolic and nightmarish way to kill inside a locked room – an original idea complemented by the visual medium. You get to see the locked room trick unfold in front of your eyes and this ensures the explanation of this seemingly impossible murder is played-out to full effect, but the natural, down-to-earth solution does nothing to diminish the nightmarish quality of the murder's work. Some would probably argue that the trick is more terrifying than an unsolved murder with hints of the supernatural. Edgar Allan Poe would have approved.

The murderer and motive were easier to spot, but you only need a passing familiarity with a certain trope of these mystery anime and manga series to be able to do that. Somehow, the writers of these series have a fondness for a particular plot-motif, which tend to make the murderer standout in a crowd of suspects. Yozaburo Kanari mastered that like no other.

But the main attraction of The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly is the ingenious, nicely clued impossible murder and the combination of originality, execution and presentation makes it a (minor) classic of the locked room genre. Highly recommend!

I'll end this post with a thank you to Ho-Ling for bringing this delightfully macabre locked room mystery to my attention. Now we'll wait and see how long it will take me to get back to the Detective Conan movies!