Passport to Orthodox Crime

Originally posted May 17, 2024.

Despite cutting my teeth on Detective Conan, I only started reading its influences, writers of the shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) school of crime fiction, a few years ago. At the time, I was in a jaded period where I felt like I’d seen every trick that mystery fiction had to offer, and could no longer be surprised. I was gifted Murder in the Crooked House by Sōji Shimada, thought it was okay, at least enough to seek out his previous book The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. And, well, that one surprised me—enough that I had to put the book down and rest my head in my hands.

After that, I was hooked again. I made it my mission to read all of Shimada’s work published in English, which remains ‘not that much,’ and from there, some of his contemporaries. One strategy was to camp out Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine‘s Passport to Crime department, started in 2004, which publishes works in translation for the first time. Here are some of the scattered shin honkaku stories available in English via EQMM.

‘An Urban Legend Puzzle’ by Rintarō Norizuki

Norizuki was one of the pioneer authors of the shin honkaku school, alongside Yukito Ayatsuji, Soji Shimada, and Takemaru Abiko, but unlike those others his debut novel Mippei Kyōshitsu (The Locked Classroom) is unavailable in English. ‘An Urban Legend Puzzle’ appeared in the January 2004 issue of EQMM translated by Beth Cary, and was later collected in Passport to Crime: The Finest Mystery Stories from International Crime Writers and The Mammoth Book of Best International Crime.

‘Urban Legend Puzzle’ is very much following in the footsteps of Ellery Queen, with detective-novelist Rintarō Norizuki assisting his police detective father. Norizuki senior and junior discuss a murder modelled after the “dead roommate” legend—specifically via, of all things, the slasher movie Urban Legend (1998). It’s a ‘bust the alibi’ tale which, like some of the Ellery Queen stories, is meticulously logical (save for the informed motive); so much so that if you’re unlucky enough not to be taken in by the trick, it feels like you’re waiting for the characters to catch up to a very obvious deduction. Especially because the format is a cozy conversation, and the creepy events aren’t actually unfolding in front of us as horror-flavoured misdirection.

‘The Lure of the Green Door’ by Rintarō Norizuki

Another story featuring Norizuki-the-character, where Rintarō falls for a pretty young librarian (Queen expy that he is) only to encounter an “unprecedented” locked room murder at the mansion of an occultist book collector. Inspired by the H.G. Wells story ‘The Door in the Wall,’ the victim’s hermetically-sealed study contains an enticing second door which does not lock but is impossible to open… or is it? The real “lure” of this green door is the challenge to the reader of figuring out how a killer could possibly have used it. A brilliant puzzle with a novel solution.

‘Green Door’ was translated by Ho-Ling Wong in EQMM January 2014, and also appears in the anthology The Realm of the Impossible, which is where I read it. The whole collection is great, but it would be well worth recommending on the basis of this story alone.

‘The Locked House of Pythagoras’ by Sōji Shimada

‘Pythagoras’ features Shimada’s recurring detective Kiyoshi Mitarai, this time as a young boy, playing in a similar space to Detective Conan. An artist and his lover are murdered in the middle of judging a children’s art competition, and young Kiyoshi stuns the police by figuring out not only the baffling locked room, but the reason why the killer defaced all of the childrens’ paintings. I figure that job postings for Shimada culprits read something like “must have a basic education in architecture, yoga, and grade 12 physics, and be willing to carry piano wire and rubber cement on one’s person at all times.” This story is very much operating in that mode, but there are some details of the solution that were quite clever.

The story was translated in EQMM August 2013, and later collected in The Realm of the Impossible.

‘The Executive Who Lost His Mind’ by Sōji Shimada

This is one of two Shimada stories where, in my post-Zodiac Shimada-fugue, I actually tracked down and purchased the individual magazine issue containing it. This one appears in the August 2015 issue of EQMM, translated by David Karashima with John Pugmire.

Rather than Mitarai, we have Shimada’s other detective Takeshi Yoshiki, and rather than a cozy deduction, this is a gruesome psychological tale of a corrupt sexual blackmailer on the receiving end of some apparent ghostly revenge. It reminded me a little of Beast in the Shadows by Edogawa Ranpo by way of ‘Blind Man’s Hood’ by Carter Dickson. But folded in is a fair, if bizarre, locked-room mystery.

‘The Running Dead’ by Sōji Shimada

At a jazz party attended by Mitarai, a thief steals a necklace and apparently jumps off the balcony—only to be hit by a train quite a distance above the apartment. The guests are even more baffled when it’s determined that the thief had already been murdered before he could have made the distance. Mitarai, in his Psych fake-astrologist mode, manages to explain how a dead man “ran” to where his body was found. “For those of you familiar with my work,” Shimada teases, “this case might be too easy.” That might be underselling it a little. Again, it’s a complex solution that completely hinges on the physical reality of the crime scene, although I think readers who have played a particular Phoenix Wright case might be able to guess how the impossible crime was accomplished, as there’s a variation on a similar theme in one of the games.

This story was translated in EQMM November/December 2017 by Ho-Ling Wong and John Pugmire.

 

‘A Smart Dummy in the Tent’ by Takemaru Abiko

This story appeared in EQMM July/August 2019, translated by Ho-Ling Wong, who also reviewed the rest of the collection on his blog. ‘Smart Dummy’ is one of four stories about a shy ventriloquist named Yoshio, whose puppet Mario has both a life of his own and remarkable deductive insight. I was a little flabbergasted to hear that this series existed, as I’d read the middling mystery manga Karakurizōshi Ayatsuri Sakon many years earlier, which follows a bunraku puppeteer named Sakon whose mechanical doll Ukon has his own personality that helps him solve crimes. Considering it came out five years after ‘Smart Dummy’, in 1995, you have to assume Abiko’s book was the inspiration. ‘Smart Dummy has a more farcical approach, though, with narrator Mutsuki having to nudge her crush into making deductions while hiding his secret. The original book covers are really cute, by the way: colourful children’s book-style illustrations that make the leads and dummy look like a couple on a trip with their baby (see picture).

In Sōji Shimada’s foreword to The 8 Mansion Murders, he described Abiko’s debut as, rather than designing a “unique” trick, combining pre-existing tricks “like ready-to-use modules,” and wonders if the book was “an early sign of the shortage of new, original tricks in mystery fiction that we are now facing twenty years after its initial release.” This sounded quite critical to me. But ‘Smart Dummy’ certainly revolves around a single, solid trick that I’ve never seen before, an original locked room variant that makes use of a circus tent. Like 8 Mansion Murders, though, it’s goofy and tongue-in-cheek, and the conclusion is pure punchline, poking fun at the shortcomings of the ‘stationary detective’ archetype. I’d love to read more of these.

‘The Dashing Joker’ by Taku Ashibe

“Maps are the flowers of Honkaku,” notes the enthusiastic narrator of ‘The Dashing Joker’. I, on the other hand, tend to find my eyes glazing over the minute a measurement or timetable shows up. So I felt very clever for solving the trick present here.

A security guard is hired as a one-time night watchman to guard a teenage boy accused of being a notorious serial killer and his support network. The guard witnesses a strange figure dressed as the joker (card game, not clown prince) run from one room to another in front of his eyes, only to appear behind him and clock him over the head. When the boy’s lawyer is found murdered, nobody believes this nonsensical story, but Ashibe’s lawyer-detective Shunsaku Morie shows how it could have been done. The human element here was really not to my taste (as nonsensical as the joker stuff) but the solution was solid.

‘The Dashing Joker’ appeared in EQMM September/October 2020, translated by Yuko Shimada with John Pugmire.

That’s it for my mini collection! Hopefully it will only grow over time.