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...

“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 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 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 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 15, 2024. People hunger for epiphany, you think, they clamor for it, but given a chance, who among us would actually recognize it? Happening across West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman at the library, I was intrigued by its promise of a metafictional murder mystery (“the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader”) that combined elements of noir and fair-play detection, and in which “everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective”. Given that description, I wasn’t expecting a conventional solution, but unfortunately I still came away disappointed—as much as it was the initial draw, I almost wished that this hadn’t been metafiction at all. West Heart Kill is aggressively fourth-wall-breaking, but I’ll start with the in-universe plot: It’s 1976, and private investigator Adam McAnnis has joined his university friend James Blake for a Fourth of July party at an exclusive hunting club owned by the Blakes and five other wealthy f...

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...