“Malice, secret and triumphant, is an unholy thing. It might seek a fresh victim.”
The quote Through a Glass, Darkly has been used as the title of many, many other works, but after reading this, I think Helen McCloy’s novel holds the strongest claim on it. Everyone else can go home.
The Locked Room:
Actually… there isn’t a locked room in this one. Hang on.
The Impossible Crime:
A teacher is witnessed killing another teacher she hated at her former school, while simultaneously ensconced in a hotel room in a different state and engaged in a long-distance phone call. Could the killer be her doppelgänger?
The Story:
Faustina Crayle, a lonely, sickly art teacher at a girls’ school, is being terrorized by a doppelgänger. Or rather, her students and colleagues are being terrorized, leading to poor Faustina being ostracized and then fired for the crime of being in two places at once. This is a terrible blow, as being fired without cause will lead people to think Faustina is some sort of terrible monster, like (gasp!) “a kleptomaniac or a Lesbian!”
Perhaps Faustina is cursed by some kind of psychic gift, like Émilie Sagée, a schoolteacher who supposedly existed in the 1800s who could manifest a telepathic double. Or perhaps this is all some kind of prank. But psychiatrist Dr. Basil Willing senses a malicious hand behind these strange events. And indeed, the doppelgänger’s actions, initially just unsettling, take a turn for the homicidal.
The book’s hypnotic power lies in how it shakes your confidence that there really is a non-supernatural explanation for what’s going on. We start off with some very young witnesses, but even a reliable one like Gisela von Hohenems (Faustina’s only friend and Basil’s love interest) sees plenty of evidence of the doppelgänger. Sure, the obvious explanation is either an illusion or a conspiracy, but could a conspiracy really extend to so many unrelated parties? Could an imposter fool people in broad daylight, for several minutes, or at close proximity? And even if they could, would that be enough to scare to death a skeptic who knew Faustina well?
I liked the plot overall, despite dipping a toe in a certain negative stereotype at one point. (ROT13: juvyr vg vfa’g gur phycevg’f fvghngvba, avpr yvggyr erzvaqre bs whfg ubj qver vg jnf naq vf sbe genaf jbzra jura Onfvy cbvagf bhg gb gur zheqrere gung “znfdhrenqvat nf n jbzna vf grpuavpnyyl na bssrapr.”) The characters and prose are engaging, and McCloy makes you both feel for Faustina and feel the growing unease as the bilocations get more sinister.
Solution Satisfaction Rating:
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
As a novel, this is easily the LRL book that I’ve enjoyed the most. However, it’s not a locked room, and isn’t even really an “impossible crime” unless you think Faustina is the murderer. The idea that Faustina is the murderer and used an alibi trick is not really considered—merely that she could have used telepathy. If she’s not the murderer, of course, it’s a crime that isn’t impossible at all. Meanwhile, if she subconsciously scared her enemy to death through psychic bilocation, that’s impossible, but arguably not a crime. I liked it a lot, but I’m not really sure what it’s doing on the list.
I guess the real mystery is (a) how someone could create such a successful illusion that Faustina is in two places at once, and (b) why on earth anyone would go to so much trouble to do so. For the most part, the answer was sensible. Both the tone and solution reminded me strongly of a certain film, and in fact the similarity put me onto what’s going on here, too: Gung jbhyq or qvnobyvdhr, gur zbivr nqncgngvba bs fur jub jnf ab zber. Snhfgvan ornef n pregnva erfrzoynapr gb Puevfgvan.
One difference from said film is that Through a Glass, Darkly never fully discards its supernatural suspense trappings. Basil comes up with a reasonable explanation of all the facts and how the doppelgänger phenomenon was created, but the individual he names as the killer never stops maintaining that they are innocent and there really were psychic phenomena at play. With only scanty circumstantial evidence, the power of logic never fully succeeds in banishing the things that go bump in the night. We might have a complete picture, but there’s a hairline crack in the glass.
Sometimes the Detective Galileo novels will include an exchange like this:
Kusanagi: *Sigh* Remember back in the day, when I was just a young gun, and you were just a physicist who I consulted about science crimes? We solved so many baffling incidents, like the one with the flame poltergeist. Yukawa: Yes. The flame poltergeist case was a simpler time. Not like this dark tale…
And I’ll be like, “Hold up, can we hear more about this flame poltergeist?” But I had no real hope that these original stories would ever make it to the anglosphere. Well, I guess Netflix couldn’t get the rights to the Suspect X movie, so against all odds, we get a translation of a nearly-twenty-year-old Japanese mystery series shot on video about murdering people with laser beams.
When the police encounter a baffling death that seems like a case of spontaneous combustion, homicide detective Shunpei Kusanagi (Kazuki Kitamura) enlists the help of his uni badminton partner Manabu “Galileo” Yukawa (Masaharu Fukuyama), a brilliant but cantankerous physics professor, to prove it was murder. The TV series departs from the stories here, because Kusanagi is too sexy to work. In the first few minutes, we see him leave the department amidst a mob of adoring fan girls. Instead, he directs rookie detective Kaoru Utsumi (Ko Shibasaki) to Yukawa’s lab, and she acts as the assistant character for the full run.
I’m realizing in hindsight that Utsumi’s abrupt introduction in Salvation of a Saint was because she’s a character created for the TV series [1]. I have mixed feelings on the swap. In itself, I think it’s good to include a woman in the main cast, so overall this was a good choice. But the dynamic with Yukawa can sometimes have uncomfortable implications when the gullible, believer-in-the-supernatural sidekick is a woman. Even though the material was originally written for a man, the optics end up as the kind of “men are good at Logic and women are good at Feelings” duo that you see in many, many mystery series. And naturally, now that the detective is a woman, there has to be “romantic” “tension” between the leads. Look, I know I’m gay, but I just wasn’t seeing it. On the other hand, I tended to like a lot of her scenes with the female coroner, Jonouchi, played by Miki Maya (not in a shipping way, although if they’re taking suggestions…). Generally speaking, I liked both Yukawa and Utsumi when they were not interacting with each other.
The mysteries are pretty neat, though, all circling around some seemingly impossible or supernatural phenomenon that has an unexpected grounded solution based on science trivia. “The murder was done with a sophisticated device that uses some obscure or expensive bit of technology” is generally not considered a sporting solution, but in Galileo, that’s the whole premise, and the detective is a physicist, so those sorts of problems are as fairly clued as they could possibly be. That meant that there were a lot of novel ideas that I had never encountered before.
In the episode’s climax, Yukawa will always have an epiphany about how the trick was worked, and start scribbling mathematical formulae on the nearest surface. We then go inside his brain to see a bunch of calculations (artistic reconstruction to the right). The first time this happened, I was like “Ah yes, of course, he’s using trigonometry to determine the angle that the shot came from,” which was a reasonable course of action in the episode. But when it kept happening, I realized that this was more like an eye catch in a superhero show. In the ones where no math is required, I can only imagine he’s writing stuff like “FrictionGhosts = μEctoplasm× Abnormal Forces = NOT REAL”.
Okay, I’m taking the piss a little bit, but in my defence, it is a very goofy show. Here were three episodes whose mysteries or scientific elements were particularly interesting:
Burns (S1E1): A group of rowdy hoodlums bothering a neighbourhood are terrorized themselves when one of their heads spontaneously combusts. The clue to the truth lies in a “red thread” that a little girl saw on the night of the murder.
Float (S1E2): The suspect in a murder case may be innocent, but the only “witness” is a young boy who claims to have seen his car through astral projection.
Foresight (S1E7): A businessman’s mistress phones him to threaten suicide in the apartment directly across from his. She dies while he watches. The strange part is, he saw the same scene play out days earlier…
Unfortunately, I can’t rate S1E4, since it’s been scrubbed from TV due to (it seems) licensing issues with the guest star.
I’m not sure how many episodes are based on Higashino’s stories. I have to assume at least some of them aren’t, based on the extreme escalation in the season 1 finale “Transcription” / “Explosion”. Here, Yukawa is a good physicist facing off against an evil physicist who just wants to make bombs, sort of like Black Jack and Dr. Kiriko. You will never guess how “Explosion” ends. This episode gets very cartoonish, not least of all when, during the climax, Yukawa says “I should have watched more anime.”
[1] Funnily enough, by the time Salvation of a Saint is adapted in the second/sequel series, Utsumi has been replaced by Kishitani (who is a woman in this version).
“I have never been involved in a case where the suspect’s guilt has seemed so apparent, yet I have been so convinced of his innocence.”
Back with another John Pugmire translation of a French author, this time Paul Halter. The only Halter I had read prior to this was “Jacob’s Ladder,” a short story that appeared in The Realm of the Impossible. I recognized this as a huge lacuna in my mystery reading, to the point that I started reading The Tiger’s Head last year, and then, well. Oops.
I had better success this go round.
The Locked Room:
Another multi-impossibility.
Locked Room #1: A serial killer disappears from a flower girl’s room moments after the murder, having inexplicably filled the bathtub with flowers.
Locked Room #2: A retired army officer claims his cane (a carved brass weapon that looks like a tiger’s head) can summon a genie, and locks himself in a room with a skeptic. Both men are found bludgeoned, and the survivor claims the genie was the culprit.
The Story:
There is a lot going on in this one, which is why I fell off it the first time I read it. The first half of the book alternates between two plotlines. “On the Trail of the Suitcase Killer” follows Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Hurst as they hunt a serial killer who has been leaving suitcases containing the arms and legs of dismembered women at train stations along the London-Oxford line. “The Leadenham Chronicles” takes place in the time leading up to the serial killings, in a sleepy town where one of the bodies is discovered. In the latter, we hop between several different perspectives, of a newlywed whose husband has serial killer vibes, a reverend and his wife involving themselves in a string of baffling thefts around the village, and a retired army officer who regales his neighbours with ghoulish stories of his time in India, who is then mysteriously murdered. Could it be the curse of the tiger’s head?
Changing perspectives can already slow momentum, and between the serial killer, the thefts, and the aforementioned genie locked room murder, I couldn’t help wondering how any of this was going to tie together. Halter can be quite funny, at least, such as in the borderline-comedic opening scene where the suitcase killer swaps suitcases with Twist’s while he isn’t looking, or in this exchange:
“What I think,” [Twist] replied, absorbed in his task, “is that the theory I recently advanced clearly doesn’t apply.”
“Gosh, does that happen to you often?” asked the inspector sarcastically.
Solution Satisfaction Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Tie together they did, though some links were better than others. The thefts were incorporated cleverly into the murders, but the two murders had a very tenuous connection to each other. I wouldn’t say that I wished the book had been cordoned off to just one, because there is a very good reason for both murder investigations to be in the same book that was the source of my favourite trick here. It’s more like a sort of genre dissonance between them. All these poor young women getting brutally hacked to death in their own homes sort of makes the guy getting killed by a genie seem comical by comparison.
Perhaps this is why, despite turning out to involve a mystery trope I despise [1], the serial killer plot engaged me more than the pure locked room murder, even though the latter had the better mechanical trick. I wasn’t sure if the “prime suspect was locked in the room but it really doesn’t seem like he did it” would end up closer to The Judas Window or Through the Walls, which I found to be a bit of a letdown. It gave me a chuckle, then, that (ROT13) va n whqnf jvaqbj frghc, gur phycevg qvq whfg raq hc yrnivat guebhtu gur npghny jvaqbj.
At one point during the summation, Dr. Twist proposes a solution for the famous unexplained magic trick known as the Indian rope trick (though the rope part isn’t explained). I found this element to be rather difficult to visualize. I would love to see a diagram of what he’s talking about here.
As far as the ending, this is my first Dr. Twist book, so maybe he always does this sort of thing, but I found his actions regarding the murderer incredible. No one is ever allowed to be mean to Nero Wolfe for being mercenary again.
[1] I’ve always called it, a little derisively, “zheqre va n unlfgnpx,” juvpu vf gb fnl, gur phycevg pbzzvggvat ahzrebhf rssbegshy ubzvpvqrf gurl qba’g unir n zbgvir sbe CHERYL gb qvfthvfr gur bar zheqre gurl qvq unir n zbgvir sbe va gur cvyr. Funnily enough, I’m reading the fourth Mario book now, and it includes a humorous monologue about why no one would ever follow this trope in real life, and also name-drops/spoils the most famous Christie book to include it.
I’m continuing my read of Takemaru Abiko’s Mario series, about ventriloquist Yoshio Tomonaga and his crime-solving alter ego/puppet Mario, by jumping from the manga to the third book: 人形は眠れない (The Puppet Is Up All Night). It’s a bit different from the previous two. The original stories were, well, short stories, and the second book (apparently, it’s not available as an eBook) was a standalone novel. According to the author’s note, Abiko was not very happy with how the second book turned out, and so what we have here is effectively a series of short stories woven together into a bigger narrative.
I’ve previously commented on how cute the cover for this book is (pictured left), but I could not have been more wrong about the tone (let alone guessed what the characters are looking at in the illustrated scene). The Puppet Is Up All Night features arson, murder, and low-key cheating on your boyfriend with an insurance salesman.
It’s the middle of a blisteringly hot summer, and kindergarten teacher Mutsuki is on summer vacation, which should give her plenty of time with her boyfriend Tomonaga. But there’s trouble in paradise. After attending her coworker’s wedding, Mutsuki is feeling listless about their relationship, which hasn’t progressed much in a year (also her bestie Ms. Nosaka has cooled on Tomonaga following an incident in the second book, which I guess I’ll never learn about). So when she meets hot, successful office worker Sekiguchi at the party, and he takes an almost obsessive interest in her, she is simultaneously annoyed and flattered. Thus begins an ill-advised love triangle. If that isn’t explosive enough, there are two separate arson cases plaguing the city—and Sekiguchi might be the culprit.
The most interesting of these stories are the “locked room arson” case and the flashback case “The Secret Story of Mario’s Birth”. The locked room arson is one of the better stories in the series, I think, in which the residential unit of an electronics store is burned down from the inside in the middle of the day while it’s raining, with seemingly no possible culprit. The stories being interwoven leads to interesting connections and false avenues between them: Are the two arson cases connected? Do they have the same culprit? Did Sekiguchi commit one of them, or the other?
In my post about the manga, I mentioned that “The Secret Story of Mario’s Birth” was more interesting in situ, and that’s because here, it’s directly related to Mutsuki and Tomonaga’s relationship struggles. Mutsuki feels like Tomonaga is still keeping her at arm’s length after dating for a year, and here he is opening up about a painful event from his past. Unfortunately, it’s immediately after she went out with another guy and feels really weird about it. While the latter was not technically a “case”, it was a fun reverse-whodunit angle, as Mutsuki attempts to hide her plans with Sekiguchi from her boyfriend, The Great Detective Who Is Good At Subconsciously Noticing Stuff.
The other two cases aren’t as strong, although they’re bolstered by having a frame narrative. The string of arson cases ends in a way that the narrative even points out would be quite difficult for the average person to solve. Despite the dark subject matter, it feels like one of those cases where Abiko is teasing the reader. And the final case, surrounding Mutsuki’s harassment by a woman claiming to be Sekiguchi’s mother, has an ending that would be completely unacceptable in any series other than this one.
The romantic drama, however, was very compelling. The interpersonal issues and slow ramping up of Sekiguchi’s creepy behaviour were both portrayed with some nuance. While I figure that it’s only partially authorial intent, if at all, I remain continuously fascinated by what the Mario series has to say about heterosexual relationships. The ideal marriage is a sham, and one that makes people desperately unhappy as they suppress their individual idiosyncrasies in order to wedge themselves into a box determined by society. Like it or not, people are still, to paraphrase-translate Mario, “saddled by the norms of the society [they] grew up in.” [1] This can be seen in the relationship trade-up that motivates the murder in the flashback case, Mutsuki’s love triangle between the eccentric Tomonaga and the “attentive (which is, I think, not quite the same thing as being kind)” [2] Sekiguchi, and the way that plotline resolves.
Maybe Tomonaga and Mutsuki’s unconventional relationship, then, provides a positive alternative to all this—although as Mutsuki reflects at the end of the book, hopefully it’s not just about her willingness to accept her partner’s harmless eccentricities, and he does find her attractive, too?
Abiko seems to have sensed that the third book was more about romantic drama than locked rooms, since in the second author’s note for this edition, he says he’s concluding the series, as continuing on with it would have caused the story to “become something other than a mystery”. [3] It seems that the manga gave him a second wind, as he later wrote a fourth book that marries both mystery short stories and… marriage.
“You really are pinning your hopes on the flimsiest of leads! Flimsier than the filaments of a spider’s web!”
Keigo Higashino’s Galileo series has had an interesting trajectory. Starting off as the kind of highly technical mystery short stories that make publishers cry, the series gradually transformed into the more melodramatic style of police procedural, while still coyly maintaining that fair-play aspect. The Devotion of Suspect X had a great alibi trick, but in some ways, I feel like its smash-hit status had less to do with that than the cat-and-mouse tension and the bitter, shocking ending.
The latest translation in the Galileo series, Invisible Helix (tl. Giles Murray) is perhaps the furthest towards “procedural melodrama” yet, a tale of chance interpersonal connections and surprising links.
When the police find Ryota Uetsuji’s body in Tokyo Bay, having been shot in the back, they only intend to ask the girlfriend who reported him missing, Sonoka Shimauchi, a few routine questions—until she goes on the run, that is. Now, the police find themselves in a race to determine where Sonoka is, and who the mysterious woman is fleeing with her, and whether either of them have anything to do with Ryota’s murder. But the suspects all have tangential, deeply-buried connections to each other, which may be the key to solving the case. You could say it’s like… a chain that you can’t see. And shockingly, one of the links is Manabu “Galileo” Yukawa, for once putting him at odds with his homicide detective friends.
“The motive for murder is a secret connection between characters of which no evidence exists” is an interesting hook, as is “Yukawa is working on the side of the suspect”, but the premise also means that, by necessity, Kusanagi and Utsumi (the series-regular cops) don’t have a whole lot of leads to investigate. This made the first 200 pages feel a bit like pulling teeth. Do the police think Sonoka did it? No, she has an alibi. Do you, the reader, think Sonoka did it? You might, on the strength of other Higashino books like Suspect X or Salvation of a Saint, where a woman with an unimpeachable alibi kills her extremely unsympathetic partner. Then again, both of those were reverse-whodunits where we knew pretty much off the bat that the lead suspect was the murderer.
The last third of the book has twists left and right, although again, since there really are no leads, most of them are delivered in the form of flashbacks from the major suspects. Yukawa has a bit of a leg up, due to his own personal connection, which is probably the strongest point of the book. The sharp-tongued, analytical physics professor is usually there to cut through Gordian knots, but Invisible Helix shines a spotlight on Yukawa-the-person. “I’ve never imagined him in any sort of family setting,” Utsumi opines at one point. “Yet nonetheless, there he is, living at his parents’ place to help care for his mother.” Yukawa’s painful family history is bound up in the mystery, and more than usual, he’s not willing to share.
“When I heard it had been knocked down, I realized that the person I was then was a completely different person than the little boy who had tried so hard to be a good and obedient son in that house—that that little boy had died long ago and left his invisible corpse in that old house somewhere.”
Invisible Helix isn’t the strongest entry in the Galileo books, although I’d still probably rank it above A Midsummer’s Equation. The main draw for series aficionados is probably the insight into our protagonists’ personal lives.
She pretended, against all odds, not even to have seen him! But he hadn’t gone through the wall! They hadn’t found even the slightest crack.
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 for help with a nighttime intruder, who he suggests might be from a smuggling gang, looking to psychologically terrorize him into disclosing rival gang secrets he’s not at liberty to reveal. Maubritaine helps him stake out the upper floor of the house, and even lays eyes on the intruder, only for him to elude them during a Scooby Doo-style chase sequence through the connecting bedrooms and bathrooms. Following this, each member of the family is attacked, either in a room no one could enter, or that no one could enter or leave without being seen.
What makes all of this even more baffling is that, while Maubritaine is able to make some sensible logical deductions about who would have the means or motive to do any one of the murders, none of the involved parties has the motive to do all of them–that, or they’re already dead or otherwise out-of-commission by the time more incidents take place. “I-I’m the murderer… it could only be me…” Maubritaine finally declares, unable to find a solution. At the end of his wits, he comes to M. Allou, Vindry’s magistrate-detective, to attempt to make sense of the sequence of events.
The action is entirely recounted events that Maubritaine is conveying after the fact to M. Allou, which had the effect of making it feel rather removed. I don’t think I ever got over the feeling that “this is a flashback”, when that flashback comprises 90% or more of the book. Allou’s methodology is to find “a theory which fits all the facts, then investigating anew, until the theory is proved or disproved.” But despite being a magistrate he doesn’t end up investigating at all, and finds the solution speedily in the final chapter through a series of logical deductions.
The LRI translation of this book is accompanied by some essays/interviews by Vindry, and those were quite interesting. Vindry shares my long-held theory that detective fiction doesn’t tend towards murder because its focus is police, or crime, or the human heart, or any of that. Rather, the murder provides the stakes and drama to carry a highly technical, rational puzzle. “Action dazzles the reader,” Vindry says. In fact, the real focus of the detective novel (or “puzzle novel”) is “the discovery of the criminal,” or even the act of “discovery” itself:
Its essence is a mysterious fact that has to be explained naturally; the criminal hides his activities and the detective tries to discover them; their conflicts provide convenient situations: the “givens” of the problem. That’s it.
I found it equally interesting that the reason Vindry eventually stopped writing mysteries–that “since [switching genres], I no longer play with my characters, I collaborate with them and I live with them.” The contrast of “playing” with characters rather than writing them as living people is definitely on display here. The cast members are the bare minimum necessary for conveying stakes and making the solution operable, but they are primarily parts in a mechanism. One of the central players (the daughter) never has any lines or physically appears in the story, embedded or otherwise.
Solution Satisfaction Rating:
⭐⭐
Rating: 2 out of 5.
Through the Walls strongly reminded me of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and not just due to a shared literary heritage. The solution to the central mystery is certainly “natural” but not all that interesting. It’s a fair solution, simple, and psychologically sound, but in the broad strokes, it’s also one that could apply to a great many mysteries, and there’s a reason it isn’t often done. Detective stories are similar to magic shows, except that they have the unenviable task of making the real solution seem equally astonishing. Here, it has that slightly deflating “oh… really?” quality of an explained trick. It’s all very tight, but a bit of a damp squib.
I was going to propose that I’d like to see an alternate solution to the same setup, but realized that in fact, there already is one, at least for the chase sequence: “The Dashing Joker” by Taku Ashibe (tl. Yuko Shimada in EQMM September/October 2020).
“I’ve finally figured out the secret of those three drawings. I can’t imagine the kind of pain you must have been suffering. Nor can I understand the depths of whatever sin you committed. I cannot forgive you. But even so, I will always love you.”
Strange Pictures, by horror Youtuber Uketsu / tl. Jim Rion, is a multimedia psychological horror/mystery novel told (partially) in the form of pencil drawings, where the reader, as detective, has to figure out the hidden meanings in each image. Overall, I felt like I would have liked to see more drawings, not just because the multimedia gimmick was the best part but because then, I would’ve spent less time having to read it.
The book’s prologue is an academic lecture about children’s psychological drawings, in which the lecturer discusses how a person’s subconscious character can be inferred from their art. Armed with this knowledge, we are then tossed into three short stories which all revolve around the mysterious significance of different drawings:
Two students investigate an abandoned blog about the writer’s marital life that abruptly ends with several years of content deleted and a cryptic final message that suggests that the blogger’s wife may have predicted her own death. Her drawings before she died point to a sinister truth.
A young boy in a single-parent household goes missing shortly after a school assignment to draw a portrait of his mother. Is the unsettling cloud over the apartment in his picture connected to the man who has been following him home from school?
A widely-disliked art teacher is brutally murdered while hiking. On his body, the police find a sketch of the mountain view, which is oddly simplistic, despite being drawn with guidelines. Could this sketch somehow point to his killer?
Readers who prefer their clues more tangible may groan at the premise. But believe it or not, the book is as much fair-play mystery as horror. The psychoanalysis is a bit of a red herring. Rather than an obsessive hunt for ambiguous shades of subconscious meaning, each story/drawing has something in the way of a puzzle, dying message, or other specific material clue contained within it. This gimmick was alright for what it was, and the drawings were realistic and unnerving. My trouble with the mysteries boiled down to two other issues.
First, the pacing is extremely rushed. I don’t want to lean too hard on the fact that the author is a video creator, but the content of Strange Pictures does feel quite bite-sized and social media-appropriate. The book’s length is padded with PowerPoint diagrams of simple concepts. Key deductions and solutions are written in boldface, perhaps to facilitate reading it at 1.25x speed. This grated on me, but was not as big an issue as the second point: the solutions to the mysteries do not justify their respective tricks.
The last story (art teacher murder) frustrated me the most with this, because the initial explanation of the dying message is actually not half bad. The murder premise could have formed the basis for an acceptable hour of television. Except that the novel then tries to out-clever itself by flipping the explanation on its head with an additional twist that it does not have the page count to earn.
For a novel that opens with a psychoanalysis lecture, Strange Pictures really falls flat as a portrayal of realistic human behaviour. Mystery novels having unrealistic character writing is a critique stemming back to at least Raymond Chandler, but the characterization hoops being jumped through here are really quite extreme. The characters are constantly coming up with overcomplicated schemes while being absurdly passive towards their own imminent deaths. You really expect me to believe that a pregnant woman would (ROT13) erfvtarqyl npprcg ure zbgure-va-ynj cbvfbavat ure orpnhfr vg jnf jvgu fnyg cvyyf, naq vs fur qvq ercbeg vg, vg pbhyq or cnffrq bss nf na nppvqrag? Jul ner lbh fgvyy gnxvat cvyyf sebz fbzrbar jub jnagf gb xvyy lbh?! Sbe gung znggre, n zvqjvsr fubhyq xabj gung cer-rpynzcfvn pna xvyy gur onol, gbb.
As for the overarching plot (of course there’s an overarching plot): again, the solution was disappointing, implausible, and felt over-explained to compensate for the lack of build-up with these characters. One case didn’t even have a real motive. V xabj “fur whfg jnagrq gb or n zbgure!” vf jryy-gebqqra zvfbtlavfgvp zbgvir tebhaq, ohg abg jura gur punenpgre NYERNQL UNF N FBA. The big conclusion is “women are crazy”, or perhaps “crazy people are crazy”.
On Top Chef, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio often bemoans when chefs cook an ingredient “three ways”. To paraphrase, if you make something three ways, you have to make three dishes perfectly, which you likely won’t have time to do—so why not just try to make one dish perfectly? I would say the same applies to the three stories in Strange Pictures. If you took one of them (i.e. the third one) and made it three times longer, with more focus on the investigation and the characters, I think you could have had a solid story. As it is, the three very short stories hobble each other, with the only advantage being the twist that they are connected at all.
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 routine, which is most of them. The pair are accompanied by secret-keeper and love interest Mutsuki Seno’o, a kindergarten teacher who tends to do most of the deductive legwork.
I would not say the Mario series is amazing (the mysteries are often disappointing or outright jokes), but it is compelling. It belongs to a shared sub-genre with Detective Conan, which you might call “murder soap”. I ended up being surprisingly invested in the longform romcom between beleaguered kindergarten teacher and loopy ventriloquist, as well as the series’ general axiom that its okay to be a little odd.
Thanks to the power of digital bookstores, I’ve acquired two of the books as eBooks, along with the two-volume manga adaptation by Mika Kawachi, which is (in what is either a brilliant insight into the teenage mind or a bizarre marketing decision) aimed at young girls. The latter was great for me, as it is, if not at my reading level, at least at my “muddle through with a dictionary” level. The manga adapts five stories, mostly from the first book, and since it was so much trouble to read them, I’m going to cover them all in detail below.
The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu
This is the introductory story, and the mystery of a vandal menacing the kindergarten’s rabbit hutch has equal billing with what on earth is going on with Tomonaga and his puppet. Mutsuki discovers their secret as well as the fact that Mario can observe and remember things that Tomonaga is not consciously aware of, which allows them to solve the mystery (which has a typically deflating Abiko borderline-joke-ending). Reading this, I could see why they would choose to adapt it as a shojo manga, as Mutsuki does come off more on the pure-hearted heroine side than the beleaguered side.
The Puppet Deduces in the Tent
This is the sole story that has been translated in English, in which a circus performer is bludgeoned to death in a sealed tent dressing room, and when Mutsuki’s romantic rival Haruka seems to be the only possible culprit, she has to put aside her jealousy to help prove her innocence. The manga adaptation is quite faithful, with small differences an additional scene between Yoshio and Haruka and Inspector Odagiri (the police detective who they end up working with frequently) puppeting Mario during his explanation, presumably to add visual interest to a long talky bit. The one large change is additional foreshadowing for the joke epilogue. I have mixed feelings on this, as I felt like the total lack of foreshadowing more easily delineated it as a “punchline” rather than a weak solution that you couldn’t possibly guess, compared to the “real” solution to the puzzle component.
Mama Has Vanished Above the Sky
This is a story from the fourth book, and it’s a weak one. Mutsuki is concerned when the mother of one of her pupils fails to show up at take-home time, and when asked where her mother has gone, the little girl only says that she’s “above the sky”. The teachers suspect that there is domestic violence going on in the household, and when the girl is injured, it’s up to Mutsuki (and eventually Mario) to piece together where her mother is from her childlike words.
This story reminded me very strongly of a Detective Conan episode whose title I can’t find (where the nonsense phrase involves crabs), or “The Cross of Lorraine” by Isaac Asimov, except those made a little more material sense in terms of how the child would draw that conclusion. Here the core of the mystery is an untranslatable joke, and it’s filtered through kid-logic. (ROT13: Wbxr: “Jung vf nobir gur fxl (fben)?” Nafjre: Fuv. Nf va gur zhfvpny fpnyr Fb, Yn, Gv (be Fv va fbzr pbhagevrf, vapyhqvat Wncna). Lrnu, bbs. Zl erny fgvpxvat cbvag urer jnf ubj ba rnegu gur xvq tbg gb guvf wbxr sebz gur zarzbavp fur jnf NPGHNYYL tvira, fvapr gur eryrinag anzr bayl fgnegf jvgu “Fuv”.) The abuse material is also significantly darker than the preceding two stories. My best guess about why this was included was because it’s both short and Mutsuki-focused, when the next two stories are heavily focused on Yoshio.
The Secret Story of Mario’s Birth
Originally from the fourth book, this story describes Mario’s first case. A logical choice to include, and also one of the better stories, in my opinion. Shortly after graduating university, Yoshio receives a surprise visit from his former schoolmate Hatano, but when Hatano’s girlfriend dies under suspicious circumstances, he comes to believe that Hatano is the killer.
In some ways this is almost a reverse whodunit, and the evidence is circumstantial, but I think this works for the type of story that it is. The ambiguity is important, and the intense, soul-destroying focus on trivial clues felt like some Hitchcock movies. Also, the girlfriend’s corpse is weirdly sexualized? I expect this kind of artistic decision from Kindaichi, but it was pretty intrusive here.
Who Killed the Puppet?
And after two incidents of real violence, we’re back to the first book and its more lighthearted mysteries. Yoshio and Mario get spot on TV, which Mario is more excited about than Yoshio. After the show, Mario is found “murdered” (i.e. the physical puppet is destroyed), which takes a serious psychological toll on Yoshio. This one is more about the character drama than the actual mystery, and you can tell. Like in some of the stories in the books, most suspects never show up on screen, and the entire deduction is based on some incredibly specious reasoning from Mutsuki. I think the ending is another deliberate “punchline” that flagrantly breaks a common mystery axiom.
Still, I was really engaged with this one due to the commitment to the series’ bonkers premise. It’s not every day that the heroine has a heartfelt declaration of love for a puppet, in defence of the hero being pretty weird.
While the books are definitely better if you can get your hands on them, between the more nuanced relationship context and Mutsuki’s beleaguered narration, the manga plays up the drama, and also has the advantage of being significantly easier to read. I don’t know when (or if) I’ll be able to read the first book, but I will be covering the third and fourth eventually, when I get through them.
“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 hole in the centre of his forehead.
Apart from the suspicious placement of the bullet hole, that sounds like a straightforward suicide, but when there’s already been one murder…
The Story:
Poirot is dying, and in his final days he summons Hastings back to Styles, the location of their first adventure. The mansion is now a boarding house, at least one of the former owners having passed away due to old age, and the book is pervaded with a sense of melancholy, particularly from Hastings, about how different things are than they were back then. Britain is a waning colonial power! Ladies can become scientists! The times, they are a changin’, though perhaps not as much as you might think. Although Curtain was published 11 years after the release of that Bob Dylan album, it certainly isn’t set then. Apparently, it was written during WWII in case Christie didn’t survive the war, and as a result the timeline is murky. Past books are referenced, but not all of them, and while Hickory Dickory Dock was set in the 50s, it’s not clear that this chronologically-later entry is. Although, I was briefly struck by the incongruity of imagining Hastings’ daughter Judith with a pageboy cut and bell-bottoms.
They are here to catch the subtlest of murderers, a person Poirot knows the identity of but only refers to as “X”. X’s tangential involvement in at least five open-and-shut murder cases leads Poirot to believe that they had a hand in each case, and these wildly different events with known culprits are secretly the work of a serial killer. X is one of the lodgers at Styles, so Poirot, knowing that a murder will occur, has enlisted Hastings’ help for the last time.
Of course, this only draws Hastings further into his nostalgia ant-spiral about their happier days, but even on his deathbed, Poirot reminds him that things weren’t so happy for everyone:
“You may speak for yourself, Hastings. For me, my arrival at Styles St. Mary was a sad and painful time. I was a refugee, wounded, exiled from home and country, existing by charity in a foreign land.”
And if you’ve read The Mysterious Affair at Styles, you’ll remember that Hastings wasn’t so jolly back then, either.
I couldn’t help but be moved by the presentation of Poirot’s worsening health. His mind is as sharp as ever, but his joints are arthritic, his robust frame sunken, and his lips blue from a heart that is giving out on him. His mind is as sharp as ever, but “[t]he machine, mon ami, it wears out.” There is a marked contrast between someone who is very sick and someone who is dying, and that “Oh.” moment when you realize that someone you love has crossed that threshold is always lonely. I think anyone who has experienced it would recognize it here. The book suggests it would be condescending to pity the world’s greatest detective for having made it to the end of a long life well-lived, but in fairness to both Hastings and Curtain‘s gloomy tone, he is narrating while grieving the imminent loss of his friendship.
That’s the only angle on which I’ll be fair to Hastings, because this is one of his more grating turns. I’ve always felt that Hastings comes off like every unfair pop-cultural portrayal of Dr. Watson (“That’s not a clue, Hastings, that’s your jar of jam.”) You may notice that of the three introductory novels I mentioned above, Curtain is the only one that includes Hastings, and I’m sure that informs my bias against him as a character. When I read Curtain for the first time, I found his sudden and intimate presence in the narrative to be an unwelcome intrusion.
My impression hasn’t changed all that much. If Watson sees without observing, Hastings somehow contrives to narrate without thinking. After what seems to be multiple days of investigating, Poirot has to spell out for him that he is supposed to be trying to identify X’s potential victim. What had he been doing up till now?! By the time of that conversation, the reader has probably identified multiple interpersonal relationships among the ramshackle cast, as seen through his incurious eyes, that could be twisted into an airtight murder. At least one of them (you will not be surprised to hear) does end in murder. But when Hastings isn’t busy sighing wistfully, he’s mostly investigating his daughter’s love life, and even there he fails to draw some basic inferences. It’s telling that the murderer’s plan relies on Hastings being blind to the blindingly obvious. His emotional drama is alright, but good grief does he ever miss what is right in front of his nose.
Solution Satisfaction Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
“I could do it—and I was probably the only person who could,” Poirot says, after his rather shaky testimony about the victim’s temperament is believed in the inquest without question. The same could be said of Agatha Christie and Curtain‘s solution. It’s not that the locked room is such an ingenious trick, it’s that it could only be pulled off by Agatha Christie. You are fooled by the weight of decades of precedence for How Poirot Novels Operate. This is not the only, or even the first, example of this type of solution, but you can’t say she didn’t earn it.
As for X’s methods, I find them incredible. Like, literally. (ROT13: Gur vqrn bs n zheqrere jub pnwbyrf bgure crbcyr vagb pbzzvggvat zheqre gb fngvfsl gurve fnqvfgvp hetrf vf vagrerfgvat, ohg V unq gebhoyr oryvrivat gung (rira vs gurl whfg gubhtug gung gurl jrer gnpgyrff) nalbar jbhyq abg erzrzore K orvat fhpu n qenzn-zbatre. K qbrfa’g unir cflpuvp cbjref.) However, I would still maintain that the ethical dilemma presented here does more to turn Poirot from “caricature” to “character” than any other book or adaptation. Far better than any tacked-on backstory that he was secretly a Catholic priest.
“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. I read a fan translation by Mitsuda Madoy and cosmiicnana.
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 a princess named Marie and he was her loyal knight Raine. While Kimiyo is initially skeptical, she can’t deny the magnetic sense of familiarity and half-remembered dreams. Her colleagues at the library attempt to help her piece together the history of the cursed daggers and the impossible events surrounding them. From there, we jump to two historical encounters between Raine and Marie’s incarnations: a set of bizarre decapitations and vanishing corpses at the titular castle during the Albigensian Crusade, and an eerily similar incident in the French lines at Verdun.
Fair-play mysteries with supernatural elements are a subgenre to themselves at this point (particularly in video games), but to make it work the audience has to know what they can trust as “real”. Lapis Lazuli Castle does this by pragmatically explaining away an impossible incident in the very first medieval chapter. Further impossibilities are introduced and explained progressively over the course of the novel.
You might think from the premise that the Library at the End of the World is the grounding element for the audience, a framing device for the historical murders. This is eventually proven wrong, with as much carnage as possible, when the library serves as the setting for a multi-dimensional locked room murder that is the most grisly of the lot. Reading this, it suddenly made sense that Kitayama went on to write for the Danganronpa series.
There is still a distinctive supernatural atmosphere, even apart from all the reincarnation stuff. Lapis Lazuli Castle has a strange, almost hallucinatory setting. Even the library, the modern plotline, seems removed from reality:
When she began to doubt his attitude, everything about the Library at the End of the World began to look like the set for a stage play. She looked at the door. Was that door so noisy because it was a cheap, hastily set up prop?
Time is similarly vague and fuzzy:
A red circle marked the 25th, but as far as she could remember, that wasn’t the date.
(And no, it’s not because Kimiyo’s brain tumour is causing her to imagine the entire plot.)
The strangeness rolls over you like a warm bath, making you want to go with the flow, so that by the time a reality-hopping, foul-mouthed, genderless “angelic detective” arrives on the scene to tie all to tie all of the cases together, you’re ready to go “Yeah, why not?” My closest comparison point would be Umineko: simultaneously completely fair play in the mysteries, but also overtly supernatural in a way that is eventually the main focus of the plot.
The locked room tricks are all quite good (and some connected). It’s highly mechanical stuff that reminds me a bit of Soji Shimada’s work. The library case is the most jaw-dropping in its intricacy, but I think my favourite was actually the headless knights case at the eponymous castle. To be honest, the fact that all of these tricks land is impressive in itself.
So, you have (by my count) seven impossible crimes, a reincarnation-flavoured meta-plot, and eventually active time travel. That’s a lot to pack in to a slim volume, and that’s the only real weakness of the book. To draw another comparison between Lapis Lazuli Castle and Umineko, I’ve always felt that Umineko does not justify its length (word count) but absolutely justifies its length (arcs). Almost nothing overtly magical happens in the first arc. The second arc introduces the meta-game between Battler and Beatrice. The third arc turns the format on its head, etc. It takes a while to acclimatize oneself to the rules of an SFF mystery, and in Umineko you do go through an entire mystery before the rules are tweaked each time. Lapis Lazuli Castle, by comparison, is breakneck. I barely had time to register the rules of reincarnation before new twists were being added. It felt like my head was being knocked around. It would make a good 12-episode anime series, you know? A little more time with the characters in all the different timelines would go a long way to absorbing what is going on.
Still, I really liked this book. It’s original, and the mystery tricks are complex. I’d love to check out the other entries in the series, particularly Clock Castle.
Puzzles, Riddles, and Murders 
