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 ...

"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...

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 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 May 29, 2024. “One of my names,” she said, “is Nemesis.” “Nemesis? And what does that mean?” “I think you know,” said Miss Marple. “You are a very well educated woman. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end.” — Nemesis, by Agatha Christie When my wife gets home from work, we like to unwind with vaguely investigative popcorn shows. The latest that we’ve finished is Ms. Ma, Nemesis ( Miseu Ma: Boksuui Yeosin ) (2018), a Korean thriller-mystery serial created by Hong Chang-wook with writer Park Jin-woo,that loosely adapts the Ms. Ma rple series by Agatha Christie. I was inspired to check it out by the glowing review over on Ah Sweet Mystery! A creative re-imagining of Christie that re-tools the component stories into one longform thriller? Sign me up! We had a great time with it, and the series is an interesting adaptation—but some of its original elements were the parts I liked most. The series is based on five Ms. Marple boo...

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 ho...

Originally posted May 13, 2024. “I’m asking you not to rob anyone.” “Even those who deserve it?” Arsène Lupin, gentleman burglar, might work on the opposite side of the law, but his adventures often sidle along detective story beats, whether that’s the riddle of the Hollow Needle or Lupin matching wits with an unknown serial killer. Occasionally Leblanc dabbled in straightforward mysteries… including ones that were politely stolen. ‘A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues,’ from Confessions , is quite openly just ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ with the framing device of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost Special’. The overall effect is of someone blusteringly recounting the plot of ‘Rue Morgue’ over the phone in the minutes before they have to catch an airplane. It’s not good, basically. This wouldn’t be the last time that Lupin directly played amateur detective. Leblanc revisited the concept in the stories collected in L’Agence Barnett et Cie . The complication...

Originally posted May 8, 2024.   An early footnote in The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story summarizes Edogawa Ranpo’s A Taxonomy of Mystery Tricks . One such trick is the ‘narrative trick,’ clues which are disguised through the presentation of the story. But, the game assures us, “such tricks are considered impossible in films & TV.” Anyone who’s seen Poirot ‘s awkward adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd would probably agree. But a suspicious player might well wonder if The Centennial Case , a PC/PS4/Switch game presented in live-action FMV format, will attempt to invent one. Haruka Kagami is an up-and-coming mystery novelist whose science consultant, the biologist Eiji Shijima, invites her to his family succession ceremony—apparently for research purposes, but secretly because an unidentified hundred-year-old skeleton has been found under the Shijima family’s cherry tree. To identify the skeleton Haruka and her editor Akari Yamase dig into records of strange...

 Originally posted May 3, 2024. “Maybe we’re all guilty. If we didn’t exist… if she had no fans… Miki might have been able to retire without hesitation.” A group of men sit in a room to determine, through conversation, the truth behind a death they weren’t present for. As details come out, tempers flare. It almost sounds like 12 Angry Men (1957), with the small difference that the closed cast, rather than jurors, are members of a fan forum for a local swimsuit model. Sprinkle in some slapstick, and you have Kisaragi (2007), a Japanese film directed by Yūichi Satō. Iemoto (“Master/Guru”) is the moderator of a fan forum for small-time gravure idol Miki Kisaragi. On the one-year anniversary of Miki’s untimely death, Iemoto invites four of the forum regulars to a fan party, with each introducing himself under his online handle. Although the film starts off with light-hearted comedy (including some frustrating gay jokes—I don’t miss the 2000s), the proceedings frog...

Originally posted May 1, 2024. Is mystery fiction anti-art? Jorge Luis Borges didn’t seem to think so: a mystery enthusiast, he encouraged translations of various European novels into Spanish. In fact, Borges’s first work in English translation was the short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , translated by mystery novelist and editor Anthony Boucher. While that story is better-known when you think “Borges” and “mystery”, Borges also produced a volume of humorous detective stories alongside his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, writing under the pen name H. Bustos Domecq. The Don Isidro Parodi stories are an affectionate, well, parody of the genre, and a satire of cosmopolitan Buenos Ares—anti-art in a different sense. Don Isidro is a stationary consulting detective, the ratiocinating kind, who solves problems brought to him merely after having them described. In a turn that the foreword tongue-in-cheekily...

Originally posted April 29, 2024. I do love a good psychological mystery, where characters review and re-review memories, trapping themselves in an ant spiral of rumination until you’re no longer sure what the truth is. The Conversation (1974), Anatomy of a Fall (2023), Kisaragi (2007). Riku Onda’s excellent The Aosawa Murders belongs to this genre, as does her second book translated in English, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight (also translated by Alison Watts). The Aosawa Murders being a personal favourite, when I saw Onda’s latest at the library I grabbed it instantly, and while I didn’t like it quite as much as its predecessor, it was an interesting character study, if not particularly mysterious. The narration alternates between our two protagonists, a former couple who we eventually learn are named Hiro and Aki (short for Chihiro and Chiaki). This is their last night in their apartment, stripped bare before they individually move out, and thus their last chance to hash ou...

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...

Originally posted April 22, 2024. What better way to kick off a mystery novel blog than by reviewing a book with extensive genre references to ones I haven't discussed? Takemaru Abiko's The 8 Mansion Murders was one of the books that kicked off Japan's shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) wave of the 1980s. But unlike Yukito Ayatsuji's The Decagon House Murders , The 8 Mansion Murders is overtly comedic. I was happy to finally check out Locked Room International's release, translated by Ho-Ling Wong. (Unfortunately it no longer seems to be available as an eBook, but the physical edition is still for sale.) We open with a prologue from the murderer's perspective, in which they praise their own cleverness in designing a brilliant murder trick that exploits the unique layout of the book's eponymous estate. The Hachisuka family home ("Hachi" is homonymous with the Japanese for "eight") is a rectangular building with an interior courtyard with an...