Fossils of the Universe: Q.E.D, vol. 4 by Motohiro Katou

Back in July, I reviewed the 3rd volume in the Q.E.D. series, created by Motohiro Katou, which comprised of two excellent, well-balanced novella-length stories that fleshed out some of main-characters and gave the reader a classic, puzzle-oriented detective story – set in an abandoned star observatory on a lonely, snow-capped mountain peak. I ended my review with the half-promise to read the next two volumes in the weeks ahead, but, as you probably noticed, it's 2020 now. And no further reviews have materialized over the past six months.

So, as my belated New Year's resolution, I intend to get as close to volume 10 as possible before end of the year, because I really like Q.E.D. Even though I can't quite put my finger on what exactly intrigues me about series.

The fourth volume of Q.E.D. opens with "1st, April, 1999," a story demonstrating the difference between Q.E.D. and Case Closed, Detective Academy Q or The Kindaichi Case Files, focusing on a scam coinciding with an April Fool's Lying Tournament. Curiously, the scam has a slight hint of Ruritania!

Sou Touma is the 16-year-old protagonist, a boy genius and former MIT graduate student, who won the 1998 April Fool Club's annual contest "to see who can tell the best lie or pull the best prank," but now he has to participate again to defend his title – or else "everyone will be mad." Particularly, the club member who came in second, Miss Gria Elenoar. A second plot-thread is introduced when Touma meets an old acquaintance from his days as an MIT student, Cliff Bhaum, who's Vice-Minister, of Foreign Affairs, of a developing nation, the Kingdom of Clavius. Bhaum is in Japan to entice a group of greedy businessman, who have preyed on his country before, to reinvest a big sum of money and resources into Clavius. But this time, the offer is actually a baited trap. Touma's energetic, plucky school friend, Kana Mizuhara, convinces him to help Bhaum.

Bhaum approaches the group of businessmen, representing D Corporation, with an unappealing, hardly profitable offer to invest in the development of an iron ore mine, but a simple remark gave them second thoughts. When the meeting ended, Bhaum regrettably remarked that "the Japanese are not willing to research "The Fossil" together."

The fossil in question is a tiny, magnetic stone that only has a southern pole. A compass placed on any side of the stone will always "point towards the south direction," which means the stone is made up of monopole particles that, until now, had been purely hypothetical and referred to as fossil particles – as they are considered "a remnant of the beginning of the universe." A discovery that would grant humanity access to "large amounts of energy" and "fame and fortune to the one who finds it."

So you can probably see where this story is going. It's classic con/scam story in which greedy people want to get something for practically nothing and are given practically nothing for something, but don't expect any rug-pulling or surprising reversals that cast the story in an entirely different late. What you see, is what you get. "1st, April, 1999," is a minor, but amusing, story that handily brought two very different plot-threads together in a satisfactory way. The ending was a nice, gentle touch to the characterization of Touma and Mizuhara.

A note for the curious: Mizuhara gives the businessman a demonstration of the monopole stone with a magnet, which you can classify as a quasi-impossible problem, but I can already feel JJ judging me.

The second story, "Jacob's Ladder," sees the return of two characters, Eva and Loki, who previously appeared in "Breakthrough" from the third volume, but what makes this story an interesting curiosity is that it's basically a techno-thriller with hints of a locked room mystery inside a computer-rendered environment! The story is obviously a product of its time.

Touma and Mizuhara are in the downtown area of Tokyo when all of the traffic lights go haywire, paralyzing part of the city with "large-scale traffic jams and train delays" due "to accidents," which ended with 58 injuries and no clear explanation given – suggesting to Touma that "the government is just trying to hush things up." A suspicion that is confirmed when Loki returns to Japan with the news that Eva has been arrested by the CIA in connection with the incident in downtown Tokyo.

Eva is the manager of the Artificial Life lab, at MIT, where they were researching "Artificial Life in computers" and the crash of the traffic control systems was caused by her A.I. But how did it get out? The computers in MIT's laboratory are separated from external connections by "a barrier called a firewall." So how did the A.I. bypass the firewall and ended up on a Japanese server, where it connected with the internet, to wreak havoc on the traffic control system? A second incident shows the threat is spreading with the potential to "crash all the computers in the world." A potential crisis that was on everyone's mind at the time the story was published.

This volume was originally published in September 10, 1999, when many people feared the "Millennium Bug," or Y2K, would crash the computerized world upon the rollover from '99 to '00, which makes the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900 to computers – potentially setting humanity back to the pre-industrialist age. Touma, Mizuhara and Loki have to try to prevent this in order to clear Eva's, which provides the story with a technically fascinating, possibly unique problem. What makes a "clan" of artificially intelligent units tick? Why did this stable, harmonious and peaceful artificially-rendered world ended in an all-out war of aggression? Can an answer be found in one of the four core commands that the units have to obey, no matter what? A set of rules comparable Isaac Asimov's The Three Laws of Robotics. Just not used as fairly as in Asimov's masterpiece, The Caves of Steel (1954).

"Jacob's Ladder" is a techno-thriller mystery story with a ton of plot exposition, explaining all the technical background details to the reader, but the story has a surprisingly depressing ending that humanized "computer programs bound by a set of rules" – steeped in biblical imagery. So, a story with an interesting and even original idea, but the temptation to relay on the "secret passages" (hacking) of detective stories/plot-threads centering on computers killed it as a fair play mystery. Sadly, the reason why the blocked-by-firewall mystery didn't turn into a one-of-a-kind impossible crime. I still sort of liked it though.

On a whole, I don't think the fourth volume was as strong as the previous one with two stories that had better premises than solutions, but, in spite of their imperfections, I quite enjoyed reading them. So you can expect a review of the next volume by springtime (let's start slowly).

The Chinese Gold Murders (1959) by Robert van Gulik

Robert van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat, sinologist and writer who penned fourteen novels, two novellas and eight short stories about the 7th century Chinese court magistrate, Judge Dee – a fictionalized rendering of the historical magistrate and statesman, Di Renjie. Van Gulik was not the first writer to place the modern detective story among the vestiges of the distant past, but the Judge Dee series was pivotal in popularizing the historical mystery novel. And helped it evolve into a genre of its own.

The Chinese Gold Murders (1959) was originally published in Dutch as Fantoom in Foe-lai (Phantom in Foe-lai, 1958) and have always considered it to be the best of the Judge Dee novels. But this judgment dates back to the mid-2000s. So it was time to put my long-held conviction to the test and reread the book to see whether or not the story would hold up. Let's find out!

Set in 663, The Chinese Gold Murders is, chronologically, the first, auspicious steps Judge Dee took in a long, distinguished legal career that began with a humble magistrature and ended in the highest office of the country, Lord Chief Justice of China – recorded in Murder in Canton (1966). Only title in the series I've yet to read. Anyway, The Chinese Gold Murders begins with an vigorous, 34-year-old Judge Dee, who has grown "sick and tired" with "dry-as-dust theorizing and paper work" at the Metropolitan Court. So he requested to be assigned to the vacant post of magistrate of the district of Peng-lai.

Peng-lai is a port city on the northeast coast of Shantung Province. A dismal place of "mist and rain" where, according to the stories, "the dead rise there from their graves" on stormy nights and "strange shapes flit about in the mist." Some even say that "weretigers are still slinking about in the woods." What attracted Judge Dee to this dreary, demon-haunted district is the strange, unsolved murder of his predecessor, Magistrate Wang. An apparently impossible to solve case to the test the mettle of legal mind!

Two weeks before, a house steward reported to the senior scribe, Tang, that the bed of the magistrate had not been slept in and the door to his private library was locked on the inside, but there was no response to the insistent knocking. So the headsman was summoned to break down the door.

What they found inside was the body of the Magistrate Wang, lying on the floor in front of a tea stove, with an empty tea cup near his outstretched right hand that had traces of "the powdered root of the snake tree," but the method of administrating this poison is somewhat of a mystery – because the magistrate had been tea enthusiast with a very particular routine. Magistrate Wang fetched his own water from the well in the garden and boiled it on the stove in the library. The teapot, cups and caddy "valuable antiques" that were locked away in a cupboard under the stove. And the tea leaves in the caddy were not poisoned. So how was the tea in the cup poisoned?

Dutch edition

When I read The Chinese Gold Murders in Dutch, I was honestly impressed with both the presentation and explanation of the inexplicable slaying of Magistrate Wang.

At the time, I believed poisonings in locked, or guarded, rooms were very tricky to stage as crimes that appear to be genuinely impossible and difficult to provide such a premise with a satisfying solution, but my locked room reading lacked depth in those days – since then I've come across many innovative takes on the impossible poisoning. One of Van Gulik's literary descendants, Paul Doherty, made the poisoning-in-a-locked-room kind of his specialty, but two excellent examples can be found in the Case Closed/Detective Conan series, "The Loan Shark Murder Case" and "The Poisonous Coffee Case."

So, admittedly, the locked room-trick here is not as impressive the second time around, but still stands as a good, elegant and original solution to genuine locked room mystery. A rarity in Dutch detective fiction! Only problem is the sporadic clueing. There are clues, or hints, an imaginative reader can use to put together a general idea of how the locked room-trick was worked, but don't expect anything along the lines of Christianna Brand or John Dickson Carr. However, the murder in the locked library is merely one of the many major and minor plot-strands that make up the story of The Chinese Gold Murders.

Van Gulik honored the age-old traditions of the Chinese detective story in which the magistrate is at "the same time engaged in the solving of three or more totally different cases." The Chinese Gold Murders is crammed with crimes, danger and intrigue.

A wealthy shipowner, Koo Meng-pin, appears in court during the morning session to report "the prolonged absence" of his wife, Mrs. Koo, who never returned from visiting her father, Tsao Ho-hsien – an eccentric doctor of philosophy. A third case concerns the gruesome discovery of two buried bodies on the property of a farmhouse and a potentially missing third body. There's even a small, quasi-impossible element to this case with three people apparently vanishing into thin air from a stretch of road, but this is still only a fraction of the plot. Judge Dee has an unnerving encounter with the ghost of Magistrate Wang in the courthouse and stories are told of "a headless monk slinking about" an old, abandoned temple. A weretiger is terrorizing the district, smugglers active, shady businesses are being conducted aboard floating brothels, an ever-present Korean element, murderous attempts on officials and a bit of sword play!

I believe the sword play here deserves a special mention. The story begins with Judge Dee traveling, on horseback, to Peng-lai with his right-hand man, Sergeant Hoong, but they're waylaid by two "brothers of the green wood," Hoong Liang and Chiao Tai. A group of outlaws whose code is to only rob officials and wealthy people. They known to help people in distress and have a reputation for courage and chivalry. Judge Dee engages them with his legendary family heirloom, Rain Dragon, the Excalibur of the Orient, which was a nicely done nod at the Robin Hood lore. There's even a touch of the Arthurian legends in the back-story of the sword!

So, while The Chinese Gold Murders didn't quite shine with the same radiant brilliance on my second read, but regardless, I tremendously enjoyed revisiting the story. 

Van Gulik never allowed his readers to be bored for even a single page by packing the plot, cover to cover, but held a firm grip on the various plot-threads throughout the story and tied them all together in orderly fashion by the end – of which the locked room murder is the best realized strand of the plot. There are, however, two elements of the large, overarching solution breaking two cardinal rules of the Golden Age detective story, but they were very well done. And even Carr broke one of those two rules. But, perhaps the best thing about this series, is Van Gulik's world-building skillfully merging history and fiction. I can see how the Judge Dee series helped to legitimize the historical mystery as a (sub) genre.

Long story short, The Chinese Gold Murders is not exactly the masterpiece I remembered from my first reading, but it's still an excellent and recommendable historical detective novel.

The Case of the Housekeeper's Hair (1948) by Christopher Bush

The Case of the Housekeeper's Hair (1948) is the 34th title in the ample Ludovic Travers series and one of Christopher Bush's transitional, World War II-themed detective novels in which he slowly began to move away from the elaborate, clockwork-like plots of the 1930s in favor of the American-style private eye format – a transformation that began with The Case of the Murdered Major (1941) and was completed in The Case of the Corner Cottage (1951). A novel reportedly to be a full-blown homage to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930), but I'll get to that particular title sometime later this year.

So, for the moment, let's settle down with The Case of the Housekeeper's Hair. A post-World War II mystery with a plot that, in some ways, anticipated Michael Gilbert's Death Has Deep Roots (1951).

The story begins with Travers telling Wharton that has "an idea that a certain man," Guy Pallart, "is going to commit murder." Travers met Pallart at the Regency Club, in London, where he confided to Scotland Yard's special consultant that he intended to perpetrate a morally justifiable murder in "the not too distant future" and Travers promises him, "if it isn't too cold a morning," he'll come and see him hanged – only to be told he hasn't "the faintest intention" of getting himself hanged. Somehow, Travers got the impression he wasn't pulling his leg. This places him in a highly unusual situation.

Travers has to opportunity to find the intended victim of a murder plot and "step in before it actually happens." A murder case in reverse! So he engineers an unexpected meeting with Pallart and easily secured an invitation to have dinner at house, located in "a tiny little spot in Essex," where Travers meets some peculiar characters.

Richard Brace is Pallart's nephew and his last living relative, which is why it was so shocking to his uncle when he discovered he was scrounging together a living by playing in a dance band. Something he's determined to prevent from happening ever again. David Calne is the person who introduced Pallart to Travers and has rented a piece of property from the former where he plans to immerse himself in his hobby of ornithology. Dr. Kales (pronounced Kalesh) is a Czech physician who had to fled Prague, to France, when the Germans marched in and is now staying in England as a guest of Pallart. And then there are the servants, Georges Loret, Susan Beaver and Fred Wilkins, who all have a role to play in the impending drama – such as providing the titular clue. So a very conventional setup to an unconventional, inverted murder case, but a boat trip unexpectedly clears the chess board of all its pieces. And the game has to be restarted.

During a brief excursion to sea on Pallart's steamer, Calne goes overboard and is picked up hours later by the coast guard with an ugly head wound. Only reason he lived to tell the tale is that he came across "a piece of lumber" to cling to.

Travers believes Calne's suspicious looking accident could have been the murder that had been foretold, but, a telephone call from the police, summoned him back to the home of Pallatt. A quite unexpected murder had been discovered on the premise and some of the clues point straight towards Travers himself, which forced him to bring Wharton into the case.

Travers and Wharton have to sort the relevant from the irrelevant clues, such as an unkind, but generous, will and the unfortunate mistake the housekeeper made with her hair. But, more interestingly, is the secret meeting that witnessed at the shuttered summer-house between the victim and a blonde, Aryan-looking man. This blonde man was probably one of the German prisoners-of-war who were bused around the countryside to work on farms. You often find references to the post-war malaise in British mystery novels from the late 1940s and early 1950s, but I believe this is the first time I came across a reference to German prisoners being put to work on farms to combat the shortage of agricultural workers. And this elusive German proves to be important cog in the machine of the plot.

The Case of the Housekeeper's Hair is not as tightly, or intricately, plotted as the earlier titles in the series. For example, you can easily spot the murderer, but the story still has a pleasantly puzzling and complex problem to present to the reader. What exactly went wrong with the plan, alluded to by Pallett to Travers, and why? The murderer has one of those pesky, unimpeachable alibis, which was not quite as brilliant as the alibi-tricks from Cut Throat (1932) or The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936), but certainly as daring and original as the one from The Case of the Hanging Rope (1937) – which all neatly tied together with an excellently done back-story. A back-story that had been deeply buried in the wreckage of war-torn France.

So what else is there to say except that The Case of the Housekeeper's Hair is a solidly plotted detective story from Bush's transitional period and provided a good example of how the winds were changing in post-war Britain. Recommended to every fan of Bush, Travers and Wharton!

Seven Dead (1939) by J. Jefferson Farjeon

Last year, Martin Edward reported on his blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name, that there were some exciting reprints forthcoming in the Crime Classics imprint of the British Library in 2020, which will include a pair of once obscure, long out-of-print locked room mysteries – namely John Bude's Death Knows No Calendar (1942) and Peter Shaffer's The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951). So, in anticipation of these impending reissues, I picked a British Library title from the highlands of my to-be-read pile.

I've read less than a handful of J. Jefferson Farjeon's novels, but the superbly realized child narrator from Holiday Express (1935) and the gentle, snowy magic of Mystery in White (1937) indicated he was a less than conventional mystery novelist. Even the more traditionally presentable The Third Victim (1941) ended on an unconventional note with a solution hearkening back to the days of 19th century sensationalist fiction. And the only truly conservative aspect of Seven Dead (1939) is its continuation of that tradition.

Seven Dead has a strong, memorable opening with a hungry thief, named Ted Lyte, who's nervously graduating from "petty pilfering and pickpocketing" to housebreaking.

Lyte comes across a lonely place, Haven House, with an open gate, shuttered windows and half-dressed in dilapidated vines. So he grabs his courage together and finds a way into the house, where he helps himself to the silverware and food in the pantry, but, when he entered the shuttered room, he vacated the premise "as if he had been fired out of it from a cannon" – only to be apprehended outside. But the shocked man is unable to utter a word. When the police decides to inspect the burgled house, they make a horrifying discovery.

The shuttered drawing-room resembled a Chamber of Horrors with seven bodies strewn across the room, six men and one woman, who are "emaciated, filthily clothed" and "nothing on any of them to identify any one of them." As if they had gone through a Hellish ordeal. The shutters weren't merely bolted, they were nailed shut. A bullet hole disfigured a picture of a young girl hanging in the dining room and on the mantelpiece stands a slender silver vase with "an old cricket ball," green-yellow with age, on top. Most tantalizing clue is a crumpled piece of paper bearing the message "with apologies from the Suicide Club" and a cryptically penciled note scribbled on the other side of the paper.

One hell of a way to start a hard-to-define crime story! What follows is a two-pronged investigation by the protagonists, Detective Inspector Kendall and Tom Hazeldean.

Tom Hazeldean is a freelance reporter and yachtsman, who helped to apprehend Lyte, but his "romantic disposition" makes him want to meet the girl in the picture, Dora Fenner, who's the niece of the owner of Haven House, John Fenner – who has taken Dora to Boulogne. Hazeldean sets sail to France to find Dora and finds himself in the middle, what some have called, a romantic thriller with suspicious servants and silk merchant who seems to follow him around. Back in England, Detective Inspector Kendall conducts an investigation more in line with Freeman Wills Crofts as he reconstructs how, and why, the picture was fired upon, tracking down tire tracks and scrutinizing footprints. This is the only piece of genuine detective work in the story.

Just like Mystery in White, I think Seven Dead is too gentle to be a thriller (in spite of the body-count) and too light on detection to be a proper detective story, which you can only solve, if you happen to be a clairvoyant. And to a purist, like myself, that's an unpardonable sin. And then came that sublime ending! A conclusion that more than made up for any shortcomings the story has as either a detective or thriller story. If there's anything to complain about, it's that story has been told the wrong way round.

Seven Dead should have started out with that disastrous tragedy and expending those fascinating diary entries to fill the middle portion of the story, because who wouldn't want to read a detailed account of people battling an army of penguins? The last quarter should have told of the return to England, culminating in wholesale murder, ending with the discovery of the bodies and perhaps a newspaper clipping – reporting on the gruesome, inexplicable crime discovered at Haven House. I think this would have turned the story in a timeless classic and a lovely inversion of a famous detective novel published around the same time. Alas, the road not taken...

Farjeon was not your average, Golden Age mystery novelist, but a writer who spun fanciful yarns of wonder and imagination, which just so happen to take the shape and form of the detective and thriller story. Seven Dead is a fine example of how impossible it's to pigeon-hole Farjeon and his work. So he comes highly recommended to mystery readers who are looking for something a little different in their vintage crime fiction.

And if anyone from the British Library happens to stumble across this review, you should consider reprinting the splendid and highly original Holiday Express. If there's one obscure, long out-of-print novel by Farjeon deserving to be reprinted it's Holiday Express.

There's No Such Animal: "Miracle on Vine Street" (1941) and "The Sematic Crocodile" (1941) by Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown was a wildly imaginative pulp writer of science-fiction and detective stories who was not averse to cross pollinating seemingly incompatible genres, "stretching the boundaries of any given genre" into his very own "strange, private geography" – giving us such wonderful oddities as The Bloody Moonlight (1949) and Night of the Jabberwock (1951). Recently, I stumbled across two of his little-known, somewhat anomalous, short stories differing greatly in tone and presentation from his more hardboiled, science-fiction tinged mysteries.

During the early 1940s, Brown penned two short stories for The Layman's Magazine, a periodical of the Episcopal Church, in which Rev. Roger L. Young, Doctor of Divinity, solves two so-called "slice of life" mysteries.

"No esoteric mumbo-jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no! His two feet were solidly planted on God's good earth."

The first of these stories, entitled "Miracle on Vine Street," was published in the January, 1941, issue of The Layman's Magazine and presents "the young Doctor Young," as he's known to his parishioners, with an honest to God impossible problem! Doctor Young learns a miracle has taken place on his street when his wife, Martha, asks him how a cat could have walked across a ceiling. One of their neighbors, Mr. Weatherby, had been painting and papering a new nursery the previous day, but, on the following morning, there was a track of paw prints on the ceiling – a track of prints made in pink paint! Before he went to bed, Mr. Weatherby had called his wife into the nursery to have a look at it and they both looked up at the ceiling, which they're "absolutely positively sure" was bare of any cat tracks. So how did they get up there?

Doctor Young tells his wife that he has no problem with people believing that "cats walk across ceilings" or that "the devil makes them do it," but when parishioners blame God, well, that's something else altogether. And he's determined to "take that cat off the ceiling" and "put it on the floor where it belongs."

"Miracle on Vine Street" is a very short story with a relatively simplistic plot, but not everything is shared with the reader and this will prevent you from working out the finer details of the solution. Nonetheless, it's still a fun, sweet little mystery with a likable and lively detective who has more than a touch of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. Particularly his personal outlook on what constitutes a miracle, which is not something as cheap as mere paw prints on a ceiling. I enjoyed it.

The second and final story, "The Sematic Crocodile," was published in the February, 1941, issue of The Layman's Magazine and is a cross between a juvenile mystery and a slice of life story. Something along the lines of Theodore Roscoe's "I Was the Kid with the Drum" (collected in The Argosy Library: Four Corners, 2015) and John Russell Fearn's "The Thief of Claygate Farm" (collected in The Haunted Gallery, 2011), but without any serious crimes.

Doctor Young is told by Sheriff Rance Clayton that his five-year-old son, Tommy, came home that morning with "a real whopper." Tommy had been playing outside when he came dashing home with the story that he had been chased by "an enormous crocodile" with "big red eyes," but the stream is only a foot deep. So his father finds it hard to believe he was chased by a fifteen foot crocodile and grounded him for the rest of the day. However, Doctor Young believes there's a kernel of truth to the boy's story and demonstrates there was something very human underneath the monstrous appearance at the stream.

"The Sematic Crocodile" is a minor, but charming, story with the kind of solution you would expect from one of Robert Arthur and William Arden's The Three Investigators mysteries. I enjoyed reading this one as well.

So, yeah, these stories are absolute lightweight mysteries, but showed a unexpectedly different side of Brown with surprisingly down-to-earth plots and homely characters that are the polar opposite of those usually found in his darker, grittier and more hardboiled detective fiction – which makes them standout among his work. You can read these stories in The Layman's Magazine of the Living Church, Numbers 1-20, on Google Books. Enjoy!

The Honjin Murders (1946) by Seishi Yokomizo

Nearly a year ago, the eagerly anticipated translation of the second locked room novel by the doyen of the Japanese shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) movement, Soji Shimada, was finally released by Pushkin Vertigo and comments on my review of Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982) mentioned another, long-overdue translation was in the work – a translation of the award-winning debut of the giant of honkaku era, Seishi Yokomizo. Louise Heal Kawai is the translator of the Murder in the Crooked House and turned up in the comments to tell us we could expect Yokomizo's Honjin satsujin jiken (The Honjin Murders, 1946) by the end of 2019. Yes, the book was published early last month!

Unfortunately, my blogging schedule had already been filled up for December and had to queue my review until January. Now we're finally here and can tell you the book was well worth the wait!

The Honjin Murders was originally serialized in Houseki magazine from April to December, 1946, before being published as a novel in 1947 (?) and netting the first-ever Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1948. And to cement its reputation as a landmark of the Japanese mystery novel, the story marked the debut of Yokomizo's iconic series-detective, Kosuke Kindaichi! So let's break open this classic locked room novel that can be called the Japanese equivalent of John Dickson Carr's The Plague Court Murders (1934) and The Three Coffins (1935). Don't worry, that's not a spoiler. Just an acknowledgment Yokomizo succeeded in creating an imposing monument of the locked room mystery.

The facts in the case of The Honjin Murders are related a decade after "the whole ghastly deed" took place, back in 1937, by a nameless mystery novelist (Yokomizo?) who had been evacuated to a rural village in Okayama Prefecture at the height of the bombing raids – where the locals keep telling him about, what they call, "The Koto Murder Case" or "The Honjin Murder Case." The narrator immediately recognized that "this was no ordinary murder." A killer who concocted "a fiendish method" to strike at the heart of the Ichiyanagi family and vanished like a wisp of winter fog.

During the Edo Period, the Ichiyanagi home was a honjin, or a high-class inn, where "ordinary members of the public were not permitted to say" and were reserved as rest stations for traveling daimyo (nobility). But during the late 1800s, the head of the family anticipated the collapse of the feudal system and purchased farmland "dirt cheap," which made the family rich landowners in their new home village. Locals considered them outsiders, upstarts and kappa (water goblins), but there was still "honour associated" with being descendants of a honjin family in rural Japan of 1937. Over the years, the family slipped quietly into "a conservative, traditional lifestyle" until the oldest son of the family announced his engagement.

Kenzo is a quiet, studious man who fell prey to a respiratory disorder and had to give up his teaching position and return home where he shut himself away from the world to write books and articles, which made him "a well-known academic" and an unlikely husband – until he met a young schoolteacher, Katsuko Kubo. A decision that didn't go down with the family, who were united in their opposition, because pride in "distinguished ancestry" was still important in rural communities. And his bride-to-be was only the daughter of a fruit farmer. Eventually, the family had to admit defeat and a wedding date was picked.

Several days before the wedding, a strange looking, worn-down man arrived in the village. A three-fingered man with a crumpled hat, old shoes caked with dirt and a face-mask covering his mouth, nose and cheek scar – asking the way to the Ichiyanagi residence. A man whose phantom-like presence would loom largely over the tragedies that are about to unfold.

a.k.a The Inugami Clan

On the night of the wedding ceremony, the (drinking) party went on until two in the morning before the newly-weds retired to the annex building, but two hours later the household was roused by a blood-curdling scream followed by "the eerie strains" of "a koto being plucked with wild abandon." The koto is a Japanese string instrument and its strings are "traditionally plucked" by the thumb, index and middle fingers!

The annex was separated from the main house by a sprawling garden, a tall fence and a garden gate, bolted on the annex-side, which had to be hacked open and all the while they heard the eerie sound of a koto coming from the annex. What they found upon entering the garden is that "the cotton-wool snow was completely untouched" except for a katana sword stuck blade-first into snow near the base of a stone lantern. The doors and shutters were all closely secured and locked from the inside. So they had to force an entry and discovered the slashed bodies of the newly-weds. A closer investigation by the police uncovered how the murderer entered the annex and movement inside the annex, but how the murderer managed to procure an escape from a locked house encircled by unbroken snow and family members rattling the garden gate has them completely stumped. So the uncle of the bride, Ginzo, asks a brilliant young acquaintance of him, Kosuke Kindaichi, to come down to sort out the mess.

This is all merely a glimpse of the premise of this classic locked room novel, which doesn't take into account the various characters and myriad of clues found in-and around the annex house, but, in spite of its monumental appearance, the plot is surprisingly compact when compared to Yokomizo's masterpiece, Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) – focusing almost entirely on the murders in the annex house. The Honjin Murders is also a much shorter novel than The Inugami Clan. So the story, appropriately, has a more intimate feel to it. Since this is the first in the series, the reader is treated to fascinating mini-biography of the Kindaichi.

Kosuke Kindaichi entered popular Japanese culture as scruffy-looking youth of twenty-five garbed in an old, wrinkled hoari jacket, a faded kimono with a splash-pattern dye and worn-out geta clogs under a hakana skirt of wilted pleat. Kindaichi has the tendency to stammer and vigorously scratches his tousle-haired head when thinking, but despite his shocking indifference to his appearance, Kindaichi has the "relaxed, easy-going demeanour" of A.A. Milne's Anthony Gilbert (The Red House Mystery, 1922) that tended to disarm people. So non-Japanese readers who remember him from The Inugami Clan might be surprise to learn Kindaichi lived in San Francisco as a student, where he became "one of those lost, drug-addicted Japanese immigrants," but "a famous and quite bizarre murder" in the Japanese community proved to be his salvation. Kindaichi used nothing except reasoning and logic in "a focused attack on the case." And this is how he tackled the locked room slayings here.

Japanese edition

A joyful highlight of Kindaichi's investigation is his delight at discovering a bookcase in the main house is crammed with detective novels, which not only have a part to play in the story, but the novels referred to by title shows whose footsteps Yokomizo wanted to follow. You have the previously mentioned The Plague Court Murders, Gaston Leroux's Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907), Maurice Leblanc's Les dents du tigre (The Teeth of the Tiger, 1921) Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932) and S.S. van Dine's The Kennel Murder Case (1933). But the promising titled chapter, "A Conversation about Detective Novels," failed to live up to it. So don't expect a Carr-style locked room lecture. However, these bookcase clues, or references, are always a joy to find in any kind of detective story.

The locked room-trick and overarching plot is delightfully tricky and complex, but still easy to visual imagine without the need for diagrams and floor plans. The kind of explanation you expect from a locked room mystery with a Grand Stature like The Honjin Murders. One element of the whole solution was a little too convenient to coincide with the murders, but, when it's as effectively used as it was here, it much more easily accepted. What really impressed me here was Yokomizo's unusual approach to the clueing.

Ho-Ling Wong noted in his 2011 review how The Honjin Murders feels "very much as meta-fiction." This is very much the case, but not merely for the references to other detective novels or the author gloating over his carefully chosen words. Yokomizo gave the readers all of the clues, red herrings and information in big chunks (clue-strewn crime scene) and expects the seasoned mystery reader to logically put all the parts together. You can compare it to an exam in which you have to understand the subject, instead of memorizing information, in order to answer all the questions correctly. For example, the locked room novels mentioned in the story function as a clue, of sorts, but knowing the answers to those mysteries will get you absolutely nowhere. You have to understand what makes their plot tick to extricate the relevant clue or hint. One of the novels mentioned is a particular good example of this.

Sadly, I either failed my exam or barely passed it. I had an idea how the locked room-trick could have been worked and who could have been behind it, but didn't reach the end with all the answers and had no idea how the three-fingered man fitted into the picture – which turned out to have a typical Japanese solution. So the conclusion, as the whole picture emerged, was immensely satisfying.

The Honjin Murders is the prodigious debut of a promising mystery writer that ushered in the honkaku era of traditional detective stories and deserving of its status as a classic of the Japanese locked room mystery. A highly recommend mystery novel that makes you wish more of Yokomiza was available in English.

Luckily, the translator, Louise Heal Kawai, left several comments on my review of Shimada's Murder in the Crooked House and a comment from early December confirmed Vertigo has plans to translate more from Yokomizo in the future! I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Gokumontou (Prison Gate Island, 1948), which Ho-Ling has called "the most respected Japanese mystery novel."