When Nintendo remastered the Famicom Detective Club games a couple years back, it was a pleasant surprise, but I didn't have "the series gets a third game after 35 years" on my 2024 bingo card. Famicom Detective Club wasn't the first mystery adventure game (that would be The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983), but you can see its DNA in a lot of subsequent Japanese adventure games such as the Ace Attorney series. Despite being fondly regarded, the series only got two entries before designer and writer Yoshio Sakamoto moved on to some obscure game about a space bounty hunter . Despite some occasional 80s clunk, The Missing Heir (1988) is a solid mystery game that takes a lot of inspiration from Seishi Yokomizo's books ( The Village of Eight Graves particularly, IMO). The Girl Who Stands Behind (1989) is a great mystery game, whose oppressive atmosphere of paranoia builds into a memorably creepy finale that lingers long after you beat it. How does th...

“You dabble in mysteries you are not able to comprehend, like a child playing on the rim of a volcano. Imbecile, like the child, to think that which lies dormant cannot engulf you.” Since I started (and fell off) my blogging chronicle of the 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library , there has been an entire effort to create a new list with over 500 novels . Very cool! I’ll stick to blogging about the original ones for now, but looking forward to that project. Today’s entry is Rim of the Pit , a horror-themed mystery where the culprit may or may not be that ghost with the ugly mug on the cover. The edition I read was actually this one , which instead shows a cozy mountain cabin with a subtle nod to the impossible crime. The Locked Room: Rather than a single impossibility, Rim of the Pit is packed full of magic tricks, phony séances, and two fantastical murders which, frankly, each could have supported a book. Although the séance that kicks off the novel is fake, the pr...

When you left us, you told me that Koichi’s journal could form the basis for a new type of detective novel, unprecedented anywhere in the world. I would rather you read it simply as the record of one man’s blood and tears. My touchstone for Akimitsu Takagi’s work is The Tattoo Murder Case (1949), which shows up often enough on “best impossible crime” lists. First published in English in 2003 (tl. Barry Lancet), it was slightly ahead of the curve in terms of honkaku offerings in the anglosphere. Pushkin Vertigo republished it in 2022 as The Tattoo Murder (tl. Deborah Boehm), and last year followed it up with Takagi’s other best-known novel, The Noh Mask Murder (tl. Jesse Kirkwood). The Chizurui family is haunted; not just by family maladies, the lingering effects of World War II, or the suspicious death of its radiochemist patriarch, but by a sinister figure who stalks their halls in a Hannya Noh mask . Taijiro, the current head of the Chizurui household, c...

Originally posted January 6, 2025. Recently, I’ve been killing time while my wife is commuting home by checking out the offerings on Acorn TV. The streaming service has a lot of mysteries and a lot of British shows, but it also has quite a few Australian shows that I’d never heard of, which made for a nice change of pace. Mr. and Mrs. Murder (2013), a witty mystery series about a plucky married couple whose cheerful attitudes contrast with their grisly job as crime scene cleaners, was one of these. Verdict: watchable, if you have nothing else to put on. I initially assumed that Mr. and Mrs. Murder was following in the footsteps of the British comedy series The Cleaner (2021), until I realized that it had actually been released in 2013. In that case, it would seem to be the first anglosphere take on the German TV series Der Tatortreiniger (“Crime Scene Cleaner”), which debuted two years earlier, in 2011. That, or it’s just one of those weird cultural zeitgeists where...

Originally posted January 1, 2025. “In the gloomy darkness, I revealed my accursed face.” When I read The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji, I happened to guess the killer early—what almost felt like unfairly early, as there was a good two-thirds of the book left to go. Which is not the worst problem to have; at least I got to feel very clever for figuring out this fiendish mystery based on a totally, totally unjustified guess. Nevertheless, when I got to the follow-up book, The Mill House Murders (tl. Ho-Ling Wong), I was looking forward to a cunning surprise. “There’s no way I’ll guess the culprit a third of the way through again,” I thought, and I was right. This time, I guessed it… in the prologue. Rats! Let’s rewind and talk about the plot. The Mill House Murders is set in the eponymous mansion, an eerie place nestled in the mountain woods, whose power is generated by three enormous mill wheels in the bordering river. The master of the house is Fujinum...

Originally posted June 17, 2024. Somehow it had never occurred to me, in the hundreds—maybe thousands—of hours I’d spent bingeing stories just like this, that every whodunit really involved a double murder: of the victim, but also of some intangible but deeply vital part of the killer’s own humanity. Ah, murder mystery games. So much more fun in theory than they are in practice. I won’t deny daydreaming about blowing $1000 to deduct in costume at an isolated ski lodge, even though my experiences with the budget version range from the group coming up with an elaborate spy theory while missing the cigarette clue to “Oops, we all accidentally read our entire character sheets and now have to pretend we don’t know who did it.” They end up being more of a conversation piece for buzzed socializing than an exercise in narrative. On the bright side, you rarely have to wonder if one of your guests is an actual murderer, like the unfortunate protagonist of All Dressed Up by Jil...

Originally posted June 14, 2024. “But now, Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever.” When thinking about how to organize my blogging chronicle of the 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library , I settled on a randomly-generated order (with some leeway for availability) to avoid twenty straight weeks of John Dickson Carr. That means we’re kicking off the series with an unusual entry: Isaac Asimov’s science fiction murder mystery The Caves of Steel . Asimov is best known for the Robot series, followed by other influential SF like the Foundation trilogy, but he was a mystery lover who wrote some stories of his own, including the later Black Widower series (of which I’ve only read “The Cross of Lorraine”). Caves of Steel is both: a fair-play mystery follow-up to the stories in I, Robot , investigated by a human/robot duo, and the result is rather unique. The Locked Room: A pioneering roboticist is shot on his...

Originally posted June 12, 2024. ‘No darling,’ said Tedward. ‘That was a doings, very brilliant but not brilliant enough for the Yard.’ Christianna Brand’s work is a hole in my genre knowledge. She’s often pointed to as an underrated GAD author, with some unique and devious solutions. I checked out the one book of hers the library had some years back, and bounced off it for reasons of outmoded bigotry that I don’t remember the specifics of. I try to take a measured approach that (1) people are products of their society, and any author writing >50 years ago probably had at least some values that I would not agree with, but (2) that doesn’t mean it was acceptable back then, either. It can be useful to follow the throughline of tropes to modern fiction. Ultimately, though, I’m reading on my own time, and sometimes things just throw me out of the book. In any case, Fog of Doubt is one of the free mystery eBooks offered by Early Bird Books, so I took the chance to give Inspe...

Originally posted June 10, 2024. In a few previous posts, I’ve linked or referenced the 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library page compiled by the late, great John Pugmire along with fellow genre theorist and LRI editor Brian Skupin. It’s a fantastic place to start, and a few years back (during the height of lockdown-induced madness, ironically enough) I made an effort to try and read every book on the list. I made a dent but didn’t finish my goal. Given this blog’s mandate, I’ve been contemplating taking up the task again. I’ll update this list with a running tally as well as links to any blog posts I cover on here. Many of the books have since been translated into English since the original poll was made (yay!), so I’m listing them for personal reference under their English title. What with this being my reading blog, I’m arranging this list by which books I can, well, read, followed by those in my second language. I’m also including some of the entries that didn’t mak...

Originally posted June 7, 2024. “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized all impossible crimes can be summed up in one word: ‘Misdirection.’” In a genre full of mystery writers-turned-detectives, mystery-readers-turned-detectives, and mystery-actors-turned-detectives, an amateur sleuth who gets into the gig because her family’s construction company builds secret passages was a delightfully funny innovation that immediately drew me to Under Lock & Skeleton Key —the first in Gigi Pandian’s latest series, the Secret Staircase mysteries—which tackles a devious locked room from the perspective of an unusual type of expert. Tempest Raj is an elite Vegas stage magician ( another magician !) living under the cloud of a family curse: the eldest child of each Raj generation is fated to die by magic. The curse claimed Tempest’s aunt Elspeth in a gruesome guillotine magic trick, followed by her mother Emma in a suspicious stage disappearance, and it seems to ...

Originally posted June 5, 2024. “I’m not seriously a suspect?” Juliette said. “I mean, everyone’s a suspect.” “Are you?” “Well… no.” “Why not?” “I’m the narrator.” My conclusion about Benjamin Stevenson’s previous novel, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone , was that it was best treated as a sort of practical joke on the reader. While the title might make you think it’s something like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), an elaborate tale of family treachery and literal backstabbing, the actual story was a fairly standard mystery where most of your attention is on deciphering the truth about what you’ve been told you will be told. A self-proclaimed “reliable narrator,” Ernest Cunningham promises to be upfront and honest about the truth, then proceeds to bamboozle you with exact-words trickery in the manner of a particularly unfair cryptic crossword. So while I wasn’t sure what to expect of Stevenson’s follow-up, Everyone on This Train is a Suspect , I went in with ...

Originally posted June 3, 2024. The Wikipedia page for The Lamp of God by Ellery Queen mentions that it is “included by the mystery writer John Dickson Carr in his list of the ten best mystery stories ever written.” Naturally I wondered: what are the other nine? The thing was, though, the list didn’t seem to be transcribed. Anywhere. And when I went a-googling, the only other novel described as one of JDC’s “ten best” was The Greene Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine. To the source, then! The “list” is actually the essay ‘The Grandest Game in the World,’ originally written in 1946, and which is reprinted in the collection The Door to Doom —specifically the 1991 edition. Dickson Carr is quick to clarify that these are not the best novels, rather some of the best novels—this was originally supposed to be the introduction to an anthology that never happened. The essay itself doesn’t summarize the novels in an ordered list, rather discussing the significance of the ten author...

Originally posted May 31, 2024. Guy Howard: That’s private — Reporter #4: It’s in your series, mate. That makes it public in my book. Full disclosure: I don’t like true crime. I could point to the emotional voyeurism, or the “stranger danger” messaging, but beyond that, true crime is the antithesis of everything I like about, er, fake crime.In a fictional murder mystery, loose ends are tied up neatly. There is a definitive solution that builds order out of chaos. Perhaps justice prevails. In real life, an amateur re-investigation of an unsolved murder is unlikely to bring any particular closure—it’s all just speculation about real things that happened to real people, some of whom may still be alive. But I got a window into what appeal the genre holds from Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter, a mystery novel whose format imitates the transcripts of a fictional true crime documentary, while lightly satirizing the medium it’s doing. (It also fell into a few of the same...