Cherry Blossom Memories: Case Closed, vol. 66 by Gosho Aoyama

The 66th installment of Gosho Aoyama's hugely popular, long-running Case Closed series, published in Japan as Detective Conan, turned out to be the first volume in ages that was completely underwhelming with only one of the three (complete) stories being any good – an impossible crime tale about a hungry, haunted store house that eats stolen treasure. But more on that delectable story later.

This volume opens with the concluding chapter of the "mystery of bloodred wall" that introduced police-detective of Takaaki Morofushi, of Nagano, who has a personal link to the tragedy that took place in "the Manor of Death." A mansion built by a millionaire and gifted to a group of artists, but one of them died tragically and ever since the place has garnered an unfavorable reputation. This reputation was compounded when another artist was starved to death in one of the room that had been blocked from the outside. However, the victim left an elaborate dying message.

One of the walls had been painted red and two wooden chairs had been nailed together, back-to-back, which were respectively painted black and white.

I've seen this dying clue referred to as fantastic and epic, but I think that would be overstating it. Nevertheless, the dying message deserves to be praised for tackling a problem often encountered with these clues, because they're regularly altered, destroyed or faked by the murderer – occasionally they were even left unfinished. So they don't really work as dying message stories, but here the victim had the time needed to create a destruction-proof dying message. And he did by simply giving it a double meaning. I only know of one other example in which the victim had the time to protect his dying message, which was in the Columbo classic Try and Catch Me (1977).

So I would definitely rank this story as a notable example of the dying message and something tells me Ellery Queen would have approved of it. Something tells me they would have appreciated the true meaning behind the painted wall and chairs.

Regrettably, the next story is a poor example of the unbreakable alibi. The Junior Detective League are at the cinema to see the latest monster movie, Gomera Final, where they find a familiar face, Inspector Santos, who's mooning about his unanswered love for Detective Sato. She changed his life when, as children, a soda drink decorated with paper cherry blossoms. The cherry blossom is "the emblem of the Japanese police" and that makes it "the flower of courage." One of the woes of the ongoing saga known as the Metropolitan Police Love Story.

At the cinema, they meet a woman who confides in them that she's being stalked and when they accompany the woman back to her condo, they discover the body of her boyfriend. Everyone knows she committed the murder, but the problem is that she was with Santos and the Junior Detective League at the cinema watching a movie. However, the alibi-trick is ridiculous with a lot that was left to chance, such as "befriending the people seated around her," establishing her alibi, but the whole trick was risky, particularly how the witnesses were used, everything could have gone wrong – like a certain someone waking up or a late moviegoer taking one of the unoccupied seats. And how she established her presence in the cinema, during the murder, was plain ridiculous.

Christopher Bush and Freeman Wills Crofts have rekindled my love of the alibi problem, but this alibi-trick was unbelievable rubbish that, even in a comic book setting, was hard to believe.

The next (locked room) story is my favorite from this volume and begins with the news of "a string of thefts," but the Junior Detective League are discussing the story of "the monster store house." A class-mate of Mitch was playing hide-and-seek in the neighborhood and was looking for a friend when he peeked through the top-floor window of an old store house, but the place was filled with expensive looking antiques – someone was staring at him from behind the treasure. The door was locked and nobody answered when he called. According to the owner, the building had been locked for years and nobody could possible be in it. And, when he unlocks the door, the place was entirely empty!

The store house was designed by a 19th century craftsman, Kichiemon Samizu, who also constructed the impenetrable vault from volumes 64 and 65. The place is reputedly haunted and, if you place anything inside, "a monster will gobble it up."

So they decide to take a look at this haunted store house and Conan witnesses this vanishing mystery first hand, when he looks through the top-floor window, but the room is, once again, completely bare when the owner unlocks the door – except for footprints in the dust. You can probably guess the nature of this locked room trick. However, it was still nicely constructed story with a nifty way to resettle a 19th century-type of locked room story in a contemporary setting. There is a nice side-story in which the members of the Junior Detective League try to upstage Conan. And he has to figure out who's giving them support in the background.

So a nice, old-fashioned impossible crime story that reminded me of Keikichi Osaka's short-short "The Hungry-Letter Box" (The Ginza Ghost, 2017).

The next story brings Harley Hartwell and Kazuha all the way from Osaka to Tokyo, because they need help finding a student attending Teitan University, Teruaki Kunisue, who grew up next door to Kazuha. Kunisue was in Osaka on holiday and Kazuha had made him a lucky charm, but Harley had accidentally given him Kazuha's charm. And she has a good reason to want it back before Harley can lay his hands on it and discover her secret.

A search that leads them to a sports bar, where Kanisue was assaulted, and Conan has to deduce, who of three suspects, had attacked him. I think the attacker was fairly obvious to spot for more than one reason. A simple and forgettable story.

Finally, the last chapter of this volume sets up an inverted detective story about the murder of a Gothic Lolita in the restroom of a dinner. As to be expected, Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan were present when the body was discovered. And that story will be concluded in the next volume.

So, all in all, this volume was rather underwhelming and only saved by the concluding chapter of the red wall case and the story about the hungry store house. Hopefully, the next volume is back up to its usual strength.

The Master Must Die (1953) by John Russell Fearn

Back in January, 2016, I read John Russell Fearn's The Lonely Astronomer (1954), originally published as by "Volsted Gridban," which was my introduction to the work of this astonishingly prolific English pulp writer and since then have burned through twenty of his detective novels, novellas and short stories – which were as varied in nature as the many genre's he had dabbled in during his thirty-year career.

Fearn had literally turned his hand to every form of detective fiction imaginable: impossible crimes, inverted detective stories, juvenile mysteries, genre hybrids, thrillers and even an early precursor of the contemporary crime novel.

The Lonely Astronomer is "an impossible crime science-fiction mystery" and one of only two novels featuring a 22nd century scientific investigator, Adam Quirke, who's a white-maned, six-feet-nine intellectual giant prone to uncontrollable fits of laughter. A very annoying characteristic that was (thankfully) not as prominent in his first outing as it was in his second recorded case. It's this first outing that I picked as my next read.

The Master Must Die (1953) takes place in the far-flung year of 2190 and Gyron de London "one of the most powerful industrialists to ever be spewed up from the financial and industrial deeps," which made him the power behind the government of the British Federation. De London climbed to eminence over "the bodies of less of less sagacious and less ruthless people," all of them long-forgotten, but one person had not forgotten about his victims and send him a threatening letter – promising that on March 30, 2190, he would die at the hands of a sworn enemy. The letter was signed with "THE MASTER MUST DIE."

De London has "enemies by the thousand," but his suspicions run in the direction of the people from his inner circle.

Against his wishes, De London's son, Harry, has married the daughter of a high-born Englishman and an equally high-born Martian woman, named Owena Tirgard, but he intensely dislikes and distrusts Martians – descendants of the original settlers who had severed ties with their home planet and declared themselves independent from Earth. After all, the stamp on the envelope of the threatening letter was a Martian stamp. I'm not sure what surprised me more: that people were sending snail mail from Mars to Earth or that a single airmail stamp covered the cost through the variable distances and zones between the two planets.

These are, however, more suspects to consider. Miss Turner is De London's "inhumanly efficient" secretary and has "gone down the hill of acid spinsterhood" during the "sixteen grinding, pitiless years" she has worked for him. De London is very much aware that she deeply resents him and that she had recently been on holiday to Mars. Secondly, there was Rogers, De London's chauffeur and general factotum, whose father was a brilliant physical scientist who got "swindled and crushed" by the big business. Something a son would naturally resent.

So there are more than enough potential murderers surrounding the powerful industrialist and, as March 30 draws closer, De London begins to take an extreme, overly expensive measure to ensure that nothing or nobody can get to him – which includes protection from lethal cosmic rays!

De London orders his engineers to convert half of his private-office into "a radiation-proof chamber of tungsten steel" with a lining of "a new type of lead composite" used on space ships to block cosmic radiation. A group of armed guards are stationed around this so-called "cube-room" throughout the day. De London is supposed to be untouchable within that vault-like, radiation-proof chamber, but, when he failed to reemerge from the room, they had to burn through the door. Only to find his body inside without a mark on it!

I have to point out here how similar the premise and setup of the impossible murder is to one from Christopher St. John Sprigg's "Death at 8:30," collected in Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017), but the difference between the two is that The Master Must Die has a pure science-fiction solution. An ingenious, futuristic method of killing someone inside a bare, radiation-proof room of steel that even Quirke found difficult to understand and reconstruct. So the reader has absolutely no chance whatsoever to work out the locked room trick for themselves, but the identity of the murderer was interesting. And somewhat solvable.

Usually, the murderers in Fearn's detective stories are not very difficult to spot, because he was more concerned with the nuts-and-bolts aspect of murder and probably the reason why he was so surprisingly good when it came to writing inverted detective stories – e.g. Except for One Thing (1947) and Pattern of Murder (2006). Anyway, the murderer here appeared to have presented himself on a silver platter to the reader in the run up to the murder and Quirke's discoveries, regarding the method, initially confirmed this character as the killer. By the end, Fearn settled on another character as the murderer, which was perhaps not properly clued, but this person possessed the motives, means and opportunity.

So not exactly a rug-puller of a surprise, but, after reading more than twenty of his mystery novels and short stories, I found this divergence from the usual pattern interesting. And this is really all that can be said about the plot of this very short novel.

I do want to note here the fascinating and, sometimes, hilarious fact that the vision of the future these classic science-fiction authors had primarily concerned big objects, like rockets, but rarely the small, everyday things. Fearn created a world in these two books were you can take a space liner to Mars, which has "a 3-D projected orchestra" as entertainment, but the cargo of this liner probably carried sacks of paper mail. All of them properly stamped. I also noticed this in David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944), which takes place in a fully colonized Milky Way, but courtroom photographers still used flashbulbs!

I'm not very familiar with the (classical) science-fiction genre and this could be something primarily found in the work of the second-stringers, because I believe Isaac Asimov got a lot right. However, I find it intriguing that these early science-fiction authors were able to envision space ships, asteroid mining operations and terra-forming alien worlds, but had a glaring blind spot as to how these technologies could possibly impact and innovate normal, everyday life.

On a whole, The Master Must Die is not one of Fearn's finest detective stories or even a noteworthy entry on the list of science-fiction (locked room) mysteries, but it was a fast, fun read helped by the fact that Quirke was not half as insufferable as in The Lonely Astronomer. So this one can only really be recommended to readers who like Fearn, pulpy science-fiction or genre hybrids.

The Back Bay Murders (1930) by Roger Scarlett

The Back Bay Murders (1930) is the second detective novel Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page co-wrote under their shared pseudonym, "Roger Scarlett," which cemented Inspector Kane of the Boston Police as their series-character and had the dubious honor of falling prey to "the most glaring piece of plagiarism ever to exist" – a "word for word copy" surreptitiously published in England. Curt Evans has an interesting piece on his blog about the cover-to-cover plagiarism of The Back Bay Murders in Don Basil's Cat and Feather (1931) with comparable samples. And the plagiarized passages have to be read to be believed. Don had cheek, that's for sure.

The Back Bay Murders opens with Inspector Norton Kane taking his friend and loyal chronicler, Mr. Underwood, to Mrs. Quincy's reputable brownstone boardinghouse in "the formerly sedate neighborhood of Boston's Back Bay."

Mrs. Quincy caters to solitary individuals, "entrenched in respectability," without immediate relatives and offers them comfort, luxury and human society. Only exception to this rule is Arthur Pendergast, a neurotic young man, who lives there with his mother and he has reported unusual case of housebreaking to the police. Pendergast's room had been ransacked and the floor was stained with thick, reddish brown substance, as if "blood had rained down from the ceiling," but even more curious was the white Persian cat playing in the room with a white feather – tossing it around and pouncing on it. A bizarre scene and Kane promises to let him know if anything turns up.

However, Kane and Underwood return to the brownstone the next day when Pendergast has been found murdered in his room. Someone had slit his throat and a white feather was left on the scene.

Inspector Kane is in fine form as he solves Pendergast's murder in short time and identifies a visitor to the brownstone, Alvin Hyde, as the murderer. Hyde came to the brownstone to deliver a record of Saint-Saëne's Danse Macabre to Mr. Weed and they listened to it together, which is when Hyde got out of the room and murdered Pendergast. But this explanation immediately poses another question: who's Alvin Hyde?

Kane reasons that Pendergast was a neurotic man without friends or acquaintances outside of the house, which means that without "a ready-made, practically self-confessed murderer" the police would looking for his killer among his fellow lodgers. So the murderer blazed a path of evidence leading straight out of the front door of the brownstone. And, had the police fallen for this scheme, they would forever be chasing a man who doesn't exist. A scheme as cunning as it's daring and especially liked the red herring of the faked fingerprints. Just one of the many clever little aspects that make up the plot of The Back Bay Murders.

During the second half of the story, Mrs. Quincy is scratched with a deadly dose of hydrocyanic acid in her bedroom and the circumstances of her death makes it a (borderline) impossible crime.

Hydrocyanic acid causes instantaneous death and her husband, who was in the sitting room next door, heard her fall. The bedroom had second, unlocked door that opened into the hallway (see floorplan), but her husband heard no commotion or anything that indicated that a second person had been present in the bedroom – which is by itself not enough to tag this as an impossible crime. However, the murderer turns out to have a perfect alibi and, as Kane observed, it appeared to be "physically impossible" for this person to have killed Mrs. Quincy. And the explanation is a play on a well-known locked room technique.

So I decided to tag this review as a "locked room mystery" and "impossible crime." Even if it is, technically, only a borderline impossibility. Still, a very nicely done and cleverly conceived murder.

Honestly, I did not expect The Back Bay Murders to upstage its predecessor, because the series would not really find its own voice, namely that of a dark, gloomy yakata-mono (mansion stories), until the next novel, but here the authors were already getting comfortable with themselves – slowly emerging from the shadow of S.S. van Dine. This second mystery has a really knotty, complex plot littered with physical and psychological clues and hints, which range from a leaky roof, broken pieces of (crystal) glass and the psychological makeup of the murderer. There's always a hint of Freud in the Scarlett novels.

The personality of the murderer obviously took its cue from R.L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) and the only drawback is that this made the murderer's identity increasingly obvious as the story progresses.

Nevertheless, everything else was very well handled and showed two mystery writers who were growing and quickly finding their own stride. They would come into full bloom with their next three mystery novels and the result is a lamentably short-lived, but high quality, series of detective stories that simply cannot be recommended enough. Coachwhip and Curt Evans deserve a heap of praise for bringing this series back into print. Because these books belong on the shelves of every enthusiast of the Golden Age of detective fiction.

The Roger Scarlett Mysteries:

The Beacon Hill Murders (1930)

The Back Bay Murders (1930)

Cat's Paw (1931)

Murder Among the Angells (1932)

In the First Degree (1933)

Murder Among Children (1967) by Donald E. Westlake

Donald E. Westlake's Murder Among Children (1967) originally appeared under the name "Tucker Coe" and is the second of only five private-eye novels about a disgraced ex-policeman, Mitch Tobin, whose partner was shot and killed when making an arrest – while he was in bed with a woman who was not his wife. Tobin was summarily dismissed from the NYPD and withdrew from the world, into his suburban backyard, where he had began to work on a wall.

If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you're probably wondering why a fervent classicist, like myself, picked a relatively modern crime novel with a tormented ex-cop, soaked in guilt, as its protagonist. There's a perfectly logical and even predictable reason for picking this title.

Murder Among Children was brought to my attention by the Thrilling Detective Website, which has a page, titled "And Throw Away the Key! Locked Room P.I. Mysteries," listing "locked-room capers and other impossible crimes that good ol' regular joe private eyes cracked" – a list that includes such names as Lawrence Block, Henry Kane, Jonathan Latimer and Bill Pronzini. So that placed the book on my wish list, but what really aroused my curiosity was the publication date.

On his excellent website, Mike Grost remarked, in reference to Helen McCloy's The Further Side of Fear (1967), that "the late 1960s is an atypical era in mystery history for a writer to develop an interest in locked room puzzles."

The '60s was a dark decade for traditional, plot-driven detective fiction and impossible crime (short) stories were primarily being written by two masters of the short story format, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges – who kept the home fires burning in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. There are one or two notable (locked room) novels from this period, like McCloy's Mr. Splitfoot (1968), but then the movement within my beloved sub-genre pretty much grinds to a halt until the 1970 and '80s.

So I had become curious about this fairly modern, somewhat gritty locked room novel from the sixties. And I'm glad to report that Murder Among Children was far better than I anticipated. Let's dig in.

A slightly bitter and world wary Tobin has buried himself in the garden of his suburban home, in Queens, where he lives with his wife and fourteen year old son, but a widening rift exists between them. Particularly between Tobin and his teenage son. So he has began building a wall around the garden ("its construction was its own purpose"), but, one day, a distant relative turns up on a his doorstep, Robin Kennely – an 18-year-old with friends who are in a spot of trouble. Kennely has a boyfriend, Terry Wilford, who opened a coffee house in Greenwich Village with three of his friends.

A day or two after they opened, a plainclothes police detective, named Edward Donlon, dropped by to ask questions, make insinuations and harass their patrons by asking them for their identifications. So they think he either wants to make trouble for them, because he doesn't like their crowd of people, or wants a bribe. A non-money bribe! Tobin reluctantly promises to come down to the coffee house the next day, but, when he arrives there, Robin comes shuffling down the stairs holding a carving knife and smeared with blood – after which she collapses. Upstairs, there are two bodies slashed to ribbons. One of the victims is her boyfriend, Terry, while the other is a heroin-addicted prostitute.

The locked-off situation of the upstairs floor and the witness downstairs appear to eliminate the possibility of the presence of a fourth person, which results in the arrest of Robin, who has no recollection of what happened.

You would expect this is the moment when Tobin rises to the occasion and intrude on his former colleagues in order to exonerate Robin, but he tightly shuts the door to the outside world behind him and refuses to have anything to do with the case. This has deadly consequences. George Padbury is one of the three partners and was downstairs when the murders happened, who suddenly remembered an important detail, but Tobin resolutely refuses to talk with him over the telephone. So the next time he hears about Padbury, he has been killed in a hit-and-run.

So, inch by inch (or brick by brick), Tobin is slowly pushed out of his garden and is encouraged by his wife to "go on out and talk to people, nose around, do this, do that" and "find out who really did the killings." During his private investigation, Tobin is often assisted by one of three partners, Hulmer Fass, a young black man who helps him interview the pimp of the murdered prostitute and pretty much acts as a cultural interpreter. But the investigation also brings them to a religious group, New World Samaritans, who leased the building to the three young men and are lead by a blind man, Bishop Johnson.

Actually, Tobin finds the key to this case only a stone's throw away from this new age church, but the path he has to take to reach that point is littered with complications and corpses – which eventually gets him arrested on suspicion of Donlon's murder. And the policemen, who interrogate him, come up with a false solution that made him the perpetrator of the double locked room murder! A very modern interpretation of the Anthony Berkeley-style false solution, but this interrogation helped Tobin put the final puzzle pieces in their place.

Firstly, the solution to the locked room puzzle is not terribly original and merged to very basic techniques of the impossible crime story, but these techniques were put to good use here and made sense, because (like the whole solution) it hinges on the actions and personality of the murderer – who was not exactly in the right frame of mind. All of the pieces fitted nicely and logically together. My only real complaint is Robin's shocked state and amnesia, which was an incredibly convenient thing to happen for the plot. If you logically follow the sequence of events, there should have been three bodies on the second floor. Or, at least, Robin should have been severely wounded and unable to identify the murderer. Besides that, this was a pretty good for a detective story written and published in the 1960s.

Murder Among Children is the type of (locked room) P.I. novel Pronzini wrote in the 1980s and should be seen as a precursor of Hoodwink (1981), Scattershot (1982) and Bones (1985). So, if you liked any of those three novels, you will certainly enjoy Murder Among Children.

On a final, related note: I reviewed a number of locked room P.I. novels over the years that the Thrilling Detective Website forgot to list on "And Throw Away the Key." These titles are Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Solid Key (1941), Manly Wade Wellman's Find My Killer (1947), Bill S. Ballinger's The Body Beautiful (1949) and Roy Huggins' 77 Sunset Strip (1959).

Wobble to Death (1970) by Peter Lovesey

A year ago, I read the lively A Case of Spirits (1975) and the book was my formal introduction to Peter Lovesey's Victorian-era policemen, Sgt. Cribb and Constable Thackeray, who appeared in only eight historical mystery novels published during the 1970s – which began with Wobble to Death (1970) and ended with Waxwork (1978). I was recently reminded that the first book from this series was still precariously balanced, somewhere, at the top of the big pile. So decided to finally take it off.

John Dickson Carr reviewed Wobble to Death in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and praised Lovesey for his unvarnished depiction of Victorian England ("here are true Victorians, not pious frauds of legend") and described the book as "a first-rate story of sustained thrills," but Carr's endorsement was not the only reason why I wanted to make this one my next stop in the series.

Lovesey has set many of his Sgt. Cribb mysteries against the background of Victorian crazes and entertainment, like spiritualism, but Wobble to Death takes place during a six-day Go-As-You-Please contest – an endurance test for "Proven Pedestrians" also known as Wobbles.

Sir John Astley instituted the endurance contests in March, 1878 and the sport, which even had championship belts, became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1880s. George Littlewood set the record of 623.4 miles in Madison Square Gardens (New York) in 1888 and a physiologist described Littlewood's endurance feat in Advancement Science as "probably be about the maximum sustained output of which the human frame is capable." Littlewood's record still stands today.

These six-day endurance contests, or Wobbles, have become an obscure relic of history, but to use it as a backdrop for a historical detective novel had me intrigued.

Wobble to Death is set in 1879 and takes place at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, where promoter Solomon Herriott has organized a Six Day Pedestrian Contest. A footrace in which the competitors have to make "the best of his way on foot," by walking or running, and whoever covers "the greatest distance" in the specified time will be crowned Champion Pedestrian of the World – a title that comes with five-hundred pounds in prize money and a championship belt. This is Endurance Championship Walking (ECW! ECW!! ECW!!!).

There were two classes of competitors and two tracks. On the inner, one-eighth of a mile track moved the Main Eventers, Capt. Erskine Chadwick and Charles Darrell, who were in a two-men race within another race.

The outer, one-seventh of a mile track was reserved for fourteen lesser "heavenly bodies," but the (top) competitors in this second-class of walkers were determined to take a shot at the prize money and title. There's Feargus O'Flaherty, "Half-breed" Williams, Peter "The Scythebearer" Chalk and Billy Reid, but the outer track also has a dark horse. A puny physician, F.H. Mostyn-Smith, who had "the style of an expert in egg-and-spoon racing."

So the six day Go-As-You-Please begins and Lovesey takes his time to set up both the plot and backdrop of the story.

A six day endurance race, set in the late 1800s, is a fascinating and original setting for a detective novel, but Lovesey is not given to romanticizing or decrying the era the story is set in. He simply represents Victorian life as it was at the time. This is most notable in the squalor and even unhygienic living conditions of the lower-ranked pedestrians. The grand Agricultural Hall is filled with fog, gas fumes and the smell of cattle-dung and Herriott is grilled over these conditions by the press, but simply dismisses them by saying that he's not a hotelier and how some of the second-class pedestrians may find it “a pleasurable experience to have any sort of roof above them” – even wagering a bet they would die from "want of exercise" before any of his competitors "dies from taking too much."

On the second day, Darrell collapses on the track and passes away shortly after being taken to his hut. Initially, they believe Darrell, who had walked barefoot with blisters, had contracted tetanus, but a post-mortem reveals there was enough strychnine in his body "to put down a dray-horse." The death of Darrell is followed by that of his personal trainer, Sam Monk, who took his own life by gassing himself in their hut out of remorse. Or so it appears on the surface.

Enter Sgt. Cribb and Constable Thackeray. They conduct their investigation as the race continues and this results in a humorous scene when Thackeray is instructed by Cribb to question Chadwick as he strides along the track, which was greeted with "delighted hoots of derision" from the stands – someone in the crowd even knocked Thackeray's bowler of his head with a well-aimed apple. By this time, Herriott has also dissolved the separate tracks and Chadwick, gentleman pedestrian and champion walker of England, had to walk among the "toughened professionals" of the inner track, which resulted in elbows being buried in his ribs and damaged shins. The gentleman pedestrian began to resemble a battered warhorse.

Sgt. Cribb reasons the solution not from physical clues, inconsistencies in statements or the movement of suspects, but by simply eliminating everyone who could not have done the murders or lacked a motive to do them in. Technically, this can be considered fair play, because there's logic to his reasoning, but this approach made the plot feel rather thin in hindsight. But there was than enough to make up for that.

Regardless, I greatly enjoyed my (brief) time with Wobble to Death. Lovesey wrote a breezily paced, well written and characterized detective novel with an original setting and background that had never been explored before, but the reader is not beaten over the head with historical references to help them remind the story takes place in 1879. This makes the book all the more authentic, which is easier said than done, and demonstrates why the Sgt. Cribb series is so highly regarded in the sub-genre of historical detective fiction. What a pity Lovesey only wrote eight of them.

The File of Young Kindaichi: The Hong Kong Kowloon Treasure Murder Case

The Hong Kong Kowloon Treasure Murder Case is a four-part episode that opened the first season of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi R) anime series and reviewed a bunch of episodes last year, which included a number of fine examples of the unbreakable alibi (The Prison Prep School Murder Case) and the locked room mystery (The Rosenkrauz Mansion Murders). After reading the surprisingly excellent The Headless Samurai, published in the original manga series, I wanted to return this series.

The Hong Kong Kowloon Treasure Murder Case consists of four, twenty-minute episodes and the plot combines (mild) thriller elements with the usual Kindaichi plot, which involves kidnapping and three murders by a dark figure known as the "Poison Dragon" – whose back-story is deeply rooted within the Walled City of Kowloon. A densely populated, lawless labyrinth where the Kowloon Palace housed a dragon statue with "diamond worth billions" (*) as eyes. The diamonds are known as the Dragon Eyes and people believed them to be cursed. So nobody even dared to touch them, until Wang Long, "the so-called Emperor of Kowloon," pried them from the statue. They eventually went missing and are rumored to be hidden somewhere in Hong Kong.

An addendum to this back-story is that Wang Long was betrayed and murdered, twenty years before this case, but vowed with his dying breath that "all will die" when "the Poison Dragon awakens." I appreciated how the legacy and history of that "dark complex of maze-like buildings" lurked in the background of the story.

Two decades later, Miyuki gets an unexpected opportunity to do modeling work in Hong Kong when she's spotted walking down the street with Kindaichi by Ryuta Takigawa of Tokyo Girly Mode.

So he goes along with her to the Jewel of Asia and there they bump into a friend, Saki, who's an enthusiastic videophile constantly recording everything that goes around and has often assisted Kindaichi on his cases, but their merry reunion is shortly lived when Miyuki vanishes from a watched, curtained fitting room in a clothes store – an impossibility Kindaichi immediately solved. An antiquated, overly convenient solution that begs the question how the kidnapper knew Miyuki would use that specific fitting room. Or do all of the fitting rooms there go with a sliding panel?

Anyway, they go through the sliding panel and, when they come out in a back alley, they see an unconscious Miyuki in the backseat of a black car, which Kindaichi attempts to follow on a bike, but is unable to keep up the chase. And soon thereafter, he receives a text message from Miyuki saying that they will kill her if he goes to the police.

So he has to find her on his own and a another, very convenient coincidence puts him on a possible trail when they bump into a model, Yan Ran, who looks exactly like their missing friend and was reportedly missing – which is how Miyuki got her modeling gig. Yan Ran is directly tied to the past of the Walled Town and has a dragon tattoo with a hidden message, when deciphered, gives the location of the Dragon Eyes. This provides the story with a side-puzzle, as Kindaichi has to break the code in a race against time, because this supposed treasure could destroy the whole of Hong Kong.

Kindaichi in hot pursuit

So there you have the thriller elements, although mostly of a relatively mild variations, but there are also the previously mentioned murders and two of those killings provide the story with a traditional detective problem.

The Hong Kong promoter of the Tokyo Girly Event, Chan Yongu, is poisoned under nearly impossible circumstances during dinner when eating poisoned soup that had been served to everyone else, including Kindaichi, without any ill-effects. However, the poisoning does not hinge on a trick allowing the murderer to unobserved spike the soup and think most viewers can (largely) work out the method. But the second murder has some real ingenuity and originality.

A man by the name of Shin Li, who gave his place at the dinner table to Chan Yongu, is beaten to death in an apartment room across the street, but all of the potential suspects where under lock down and police guard at the hotel – giving them cast-iron alibis. This alibi-trick had been used before in the series, in regards to a locked room murder, but here it's used to craft a perfect alibi and what makes it somewhat original is the tool the murderer used. I don't think it could have been done as fast as the episode suggested, but the idea is a novel one and added a new ripple to the age-old trick of hiding something in plain sight.

However, the most important murder is the third one, which does not provide a puzzle problem, but has a subtle, tell-tale clue that, if spotted, tells you who the "Poison Dragon" really is.

The identity of the murderer, even if you don't spot the tell-tale clue, probably won't come as too big a surprise to the seasoned mystery reader, but the motive was interesting as it gave a twist to the motivation that drives most murderers in this series. It was that motive, but not in the way you imagined. And that was a nice touch.

So The Hong Kong Kowloon Treasure Murder Case is an often fast-moving detective story with thriller elements, code cracking side puzzles, a MacGuffin, the Poison Dragon murders and unbreakable alibis, which made it an entertaining four-parter, but the overall plot and story does not measure up to the best from this series. There was too much of everything and this diluted the stronger aspects of the plot. Still, they were not bad episodes to watch. And, hey, when I'm not overly negative about Kindaichi it says something about those volumes or episodes.

(*) I'm sure those billions are in Japanese yen.