As I mentioned in the masterpost for this blogging endeavour, French mystery authors are a bit of a lacuna in my mystery knowledge. Noël Vindry is one such author, a mystery novelist who wrote a string of meticulously fair-play "puzzle novels" in the 30s and 40s before quitting the genre, and is apparently almost as forgotten in French as he is in English. Thankfully, I don't have to lean on my shoddy French skills, as John Pugmire translated several of his best works into English through Locked Room International, including Through the Walls . The Locked Room:   A family is menaced by a mysterious intruder who leaves the house's upstairs without having entered, can kill in locked bedrooms and in broad daylight while facing the victim, and vanish in plain sight. The Story: Through the Walls leans towards the far extreme of the puzzle plot, which is to say, there's vastly more puzzle than plot. Petty bureaucrat Sertat comes to Police Commissaire Maubritaine looking...

Sometimes you discover something isn't available in English and kick rocks in disappointment. Other times, at least if you're me, the fact that something is not available in English, and barely anyone has talked about it at all, only drives a stubborn obsession with tracking it down regardless. That was what happened with the Mario books after I read "A Smart Dummy in the Tent", the sole English-translated story from 人形はこたつで推理する (The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu), by Takemaru Abiko (tl. Ho-Ling Wong). The Mario series is about a ventriloquist, Yoshio Tomonaga, who solves mysteries with his puppet Mario. The trick here is that, as you might guess from the title, it’s the puppet, and not the ventriloquist, who’s the detective. (Mario is, as the series puts it, Tomonaga's "alternate personality", although "imaginary friend" might be more accurate.) This leads to comical hijinks in situations where it would not be appropriate to do a puppetry ...

“But rest assured, my indications will lead you to the truth.” He paused. Then he said: “And perhaps, then, you would wish that they had not led you so far. You would say instead: ‘Ring down the curtain.’” The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was one of the first mystery novels I read, the one that arguably made me Someone Who Is Into Detective Fiction. The other two Poirot novels that my school library had were Murder on the Orient Express and Curtain: Poirot's Last Case . Quite the reading order. What you might call a speedrun. Which meant that this grand summation of Poirot flew way over my head the first time I read it (where is Styles, anyway?). I've now read, I think, just over half of the novels, so more of the references to past events made sense. On a reread, I would still say Curtain 's mystery has its underwhelming elements. But oh, that ending. The Locked Room: A man is found dead in his locked room (which the narrator saw him enter), holding a gun and with a bullet h...

"All living things in this world go to war. It doesn't matter if they're big or small. As long as life exists, we'll all keep killing each other." Two lovers reincarnate in an endless cycle across history, destined to always find one another, cursed to always kill each other with the same dagger. Not a premise you look at and think "sounds like a fair-play locked room scenario", but that's exactly what you get in The Lapis Lazuli Castle Murders , an unconventional detective novel by Takekuni Kitayama. It's the second book in his Castle series, which could be compared to Yukito Ayatsuji's Mansion series (each case is themed around a weird castle) except that as far as I'm aware, the detective doesn't carry over. Kimiyo is a young librarian suffering from terminal brain cancer. One day, the mysterious Kito comes to "the Library at the End of the World", claiming that Kimiyo was his lover in a past life, that she was once...

How terribly alone one was, among all one's friends... Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand is widely regarded by anglophone mystery readers as a top-notch locked room mystery with a devious solution, but it was technically left off the actual Locked Room Library list due to the French translation changing the ending. That only made me more curious to know what all the fuss was about. Some of the other entries are more properly "impossible crimes" than "sealed rooms", but this is one of the most thoroughly sealed rooms out there. The Locked Room: An actress in a medieval pageant is killed onstage: strangled by hand and her body apparently dropped over a balcony by the killer. But the set was locked on the stage side, and the only other exit is in full view of the audience.   Of course, as Inspector Charlesworth points out, "in sealed room mysteries, the solution is never really anything to do with the room being sealed. The murderer has always gone into...

"No point living if you've nowt to die for." The first book in D.L. Marshall's John Tyler series, Anthrax Island , was a surprise COVID-era gem. It got several rave reviews from the mystery blogosphere, and personally I found both the setting and the clever locked room mystery to be highly original. The version I read had this rather dour cover , so I was pleasantly surprised on picking up Marshall's second book Black Run to see these new editions pictured to the left. They really nail the tone of the series, that tone being "cheese popcorn". If you're not familiar with unconventional detective John Tyler, let me paint a picture: he's a grizzled super-spy from Yorkshire whose body is decorated with scars and "tattoos from everywhere he's done jobs". Some days he's stabbing a man in the throat with a screwdriver, and other days he's sat in a cafe with a Maigret novel drinking hot chocolate with mini marshmallows. He d...

  Recently my wife and I were discussing the best and worst video games we played in 2024, and she was surprised that I ranked immersive murder mystery sim The Painscreek Killings so low. I was surprised that she was surprised, since I remembered excoriating it, while she remembered me giving a glowing opinion. It turns out I had done both, at different times, so here is my second-chance attempt at synthesizing my evidently mixed opinion into a holistic review. The Painscreek Killings is a first-person mystery game that "mimics real world investigation". You play as journalist Janet Kelly, who has come to Painscreek to investigate the cold case murder of philanthropist businesswoman Vivian Roberts and the subsequent abandonment of the town. Armed with only a camera and whatever real-life notes you choose to take, your goal is to solve Vivian's murder and get a front page snapshot for your story. Of course, the game is called The Painscreek Killing s , and as you in...

"They were trying it with a bogy, but for a bogy to be effective its terrors must be known to the victim." This is the actual Rex Stout book chosen for John Dickson Carr's 10 Best Detective Novels , and I realized on cracking open the first chapter that I had read it in high school, despite remembering nothing about it. JDC chose Stout for his "literary" skill and character work: In the powerful story called The League of Frightened Men, with its tortured figure of Paul Chapin, you will find Wolfe the psychologist drawing a moral which might well be heeded by many writers of the too-hard-boiled school. A group of Harvard boys seriously injure an underclassman in a hazing prank, leaving him with a permanent leg disability. They guiltily form a "League of Atonement" to take care of him. What they don't realize is that their victim is Moriarty. Twenty-five years later, he is apparently taking his revenge by killing off the League one by on...

"If this is all true—you knew it last night, didn't you? Why the hell didn't you spill it when the sheriff was there? When the cops were there on the spot?" "I represented no interest last night, sir." Part of my motivation for reading Some Buried Caesar was that I came away from John Dickson Carr's essay 'The Grandest Game in the World' thinking that it was his one of his favourite mystery novels . When I looked up the essay again recently, I realized that the full list was written out elsewhere in the book it was collected in (if I had just turned back a couple chapters) and this was not one of them. Egg on my face, and the post has been amended accordingly. Well, I can still point to the other motivation, David Bordwell's lengthy and fascinating essay on Rex Stout's novels, which points out that in this one, Wolfe forces the killer to commit suicide. What on earth leads up to that? Some Buried Caesar is an atypical entry i...

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...

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 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...