Discovering the Prelude to Murder in THE DEVIL’S FLUTE MURDERS (1951)

Originally posted April 26, 2024.

It is a melody of bitter hatred, as if it were drenched in foul blood.

The Pushkin Vertigo imprint has been great for crime fiction in translation. The Kōsuke Kindaichi series by Seishi Yokomizo, in particular, seems to have stuck, with five books and counting of the series’ 77. I’ll keep reading them as long as they keep publishing them. Kindaichi can be a frustrating detective at times—he’s a deceptively savvy investigator with a rumpled appearance and a self-effacing manner, and very likeable, for the same reasons as your Father Browns or Columbos. But he’s also not very good at his job. The books often feature high body counts, as Kindaichi endeavours to figure out the reason behind a string of murders to protect the next victim. He proceeds to fail at this on every conceivable level. Rinse and repeat. In one particularly notable example, almost every other named character in the setting is killed off before he “solves” the case. By that standard, I guess The Devil’s Flute Murders is one of Kindaichi’s luckier outings—if everyone who hears about it is apparently driven mad with horror.

The book opens with an ominous author’s foreword, warning the reader that this one will be particularly miserable and salacious, even by genre standards. He doesn’t want to write it, and you sure as hell shouldn’t read it! Don’t say he didn’t warn you:

Even as the author, I cannot predict what the final sentence will be, but I fear that the relentless dread and darkness that precede it may end up overcoming the readers and crush their very spirits in its grasp. By their nature, stories of crime and mystery leave little enough good feeling in their wake, but this case in particular is so foul that even I feel it is perhaps too extreme.

Cue Kindaichi fans waggling their fingers in glee.

As for the tale of woe itself: not long before the events of the story, a horrific mass murder takes place in Tokyo after a man posing as a doctor puts a business under quarantine and poisons all of its employees. The survivor’s description of the killer is suspiciously close to Viscount Tsubaki, a mild-mannered flautist, who disappears in the subsequent police investigation only to later turn up dead in an apparent suicide. Kindaichi’s client is the viscount’s daughter Mineko. While she identified her father’s body, her mother Akiko is convinced that he’s still alive—a conviction that seems increasingly justified as Akiko’s family, the Shingus, are stalked and picked off by a sinister figure who plays a haunting tune on Tsubaki’s golden flute. As Kindaichi investigates, he realizes that the current murders extend not just to the mass poisoning incident, but the history of the Shingu family.

It’s all typical postwar Yokomizo: a mouldering and dysfunctional noble family with distinct Gothic trappings, the trauma of WWII bombing and military service echoing through the present murders, and a fair-play locked room to solve. The locked room was solid (not his best, but with a nice simplicity and sensibleness that’s unusual for the style), though the explanation of the mysterious symbol felt like something out of an adjacent genre. But the novel makes up for that with plotting and atmosphere. The motive/background of the crime is quite elaborate, and certainly delivers on that doleful warning of dark deeds from the introduction. Yokomizo is right: even a modern reader is likely to squirm at the big reveal. All of this makes The Devil’s Flute Murders one of the more memorable entries in the Kindaichi series. And hey, the client even survives, this time!

Side note: There’s a tendency in anime dubs to “translate” certain Japanese dialects to American ones—often New York or Texas. I once joked that (not being from the US) this wasn’t localized enough for me, and translators should really be using regional UK dialects. Well, cue monkey’s paw curling inward, because the midsection of The Devil’s Flute takes us out to Hyōgo prefecture, where Yokomizo was born, and in English localizes the characters to have rural English accents.