Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars (1996/2024) by Jun Kurachi (translated by Mitsuda Konno)

Image taken from Beneath the Stains of Time.

Jun Kurachi debuted in 1994 with a short story collection, I Don’t Want to Go Out on Sunday Evenings, starring the nosy but brilliant Nekomaru. Since then, Kurachi’s been a busy writer, mostly turning out stand-alone novels in addition to the Nekomaru series. His books sounded great, so I was excited to see that Mitsuda Konno had put out a translation of his Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars, which got Kurachi nominated for “the Long Story category in the 50th annual Mystery Writers Association of Japan Awards.” Like Konno’s earlier Kitayama work, this is human-edited MTL, and we’re going to focus on the “human-edited” part.

Our star for this book is Kazuo Sugishita, an employee at an advertising company who’s facing discipline for assaulting an assistant manager who was harassing a subordinate. Fortunately, he’s not being fired but “reassigned” as a “manager-in-training” in the Culture and Creative Department, a fancy name for the“entertainment division.” Unfortunately, this means he’s essentially a lap-dog and the personal minder of the network’s newest rising star, Shiro Hoshinozo. Hoshinozo is a TV personality specializing in programs about the stars, horoscopes, etc. He’s also the star of the romantic fantasies of half the women in Japan. At first, Kazuo dismisses him as “a con artist. He was a textbook narcissist, empty on the inside and only concerned with getting famous.” But beneath that shiny exterior is a sharp mind, and Kazuo is going to rely on it in the days ahead.

Kazuo is dragged out to an isolated camping spot, composed only of an administrative building and some lodges. The new owner, Iwagishi, wants to turn it into a tourist destination with a focus on the stars. Hence, Hoshizono. But the ambitious manager also wants to appeal to another group of star lovers: UFO enthusiasts. Hence, UFO researcher Sagashima. Also joining the group are Iwagish’s own subordinate, Zaino, romance novelist Akane, her own assistant Asako (who Kazuo falls for immodestly), and college students Yume and Mikiko, who quickly orbit around Hoshizono. Other than Kazuo’s firm establishment on the bottom of the totem pole, the first night goes well. But when the peaceful starry night ends, a body is discovered.

One of the group has been beaten and strangled to death in their cabin. Bizarrely, there seems to be a UFO crop circle outside the cabin, to Sagashima’s delight. Making matters worse, a mini avalanche has stranded them on the mountain, and the weather isn’t getting any better. The group almost convinces themselves that an outsider is responsible, but Hoshizono knows better. He and Kazuo team up to investigate the death. But of course, the title is Murders in the Mountain Lodges…

Mountain Lodges is an interesting book. Unlike some of the shin-honkaku translations, official and unofficial, we’ve gotten over the past few years, this is pretty straightforward. No locked rooms, no perfect alibis, no impossible crimes. Even the crop circle found near the scene is treated more as a weird side part of the mystery than a serious problem that needs to be explained. No, we have a straightforward, closed-circle mystery. Kurachi does a good job at spreading suspicion around what is really a very small group of suspects. The killer has done a good job at covering their tracks, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to grasp onto. But of course, there is. This is Ellery Queen-style deduction. In theory, the book is perfectly fair. Just examine the murders, see what the killer did and did not do, what they did and did not know, and from there, form a picture of the killer. Easier said than done. Even with the author helping!

Yes, this book does have one hook to set itself apart. Rather than normal chapter titles, Kurachi’s titles are “helpful” summaries of their contents. “The following day. A dead body is discovered. The method of murder is exactly as it looks. No abnormal tricks are used.” Kurachi eagerly signposts important bits for the reader, assuring them that X overhearing a conversation was an unplanned coincidence, or that they don’t need to worry about who has what lodge, or that a chapter contains some important clues. Now, any mystery reader worth their salt will have alarm bells going off at such unprovoked generosity. Most of the chapter titles are very straightforward. But you know that Kurachi will slip some curveballs in there. What I like is that the game with the chapter titles isn’t all the book hinges on. Even if they were just “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” etc., the mystery would still be tricky to unravel.

And it is a tricky one. Hoshinozo’s“deduction show” at the end reveals just how carefully Kurachi constructed the book. Some of the clues pointing to the killer are things mentioned once off handily, but there are plenty of “big” clues throughout the book, some of which I kicked myself for missing. The explanation is wordy, but in the end, the logic chain is deducible and the mystery as a whole fair-play. My only issues are 1. I wish that we could have deduced the motive as well, but that only gets revealed at the end (though the chapter titles are upfront about this). And 2. I wish that the UFO stuff had been more integrated. The explanation for the crop circle is actually really good, but the rest of it felt more like scene-setting than anything else. Sagashima’s lectures show that Kurachi did his research, and I wish that had played more of a role in the book.

But all of my complaints are very minor. This is an excellent mystery that is absolutely worth the time of any mystery lover, shin-honkaku fan or no. A perfect read for a starry evening. Highly Recommended

The book can be found here. 

Other Reviews: Beneath the Stains of Time, The Case Files of Ho-Ling. 

The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947) by Stuart Palmer

Last year, I read the Edward D. Hoch collection The Spy and the Thief. I mentioned that it was the second attempt by Ellery Queen to collect short stories that might have otherwise been lost in old magazine issues. The series, First Edition Mysteries, got its start collecting the short fiction of Dashiell Hammett. Today’s review comes from that series, as the Queen cousins (or at least Frederic Dannay) moved to another popular author: Stuart Palmer. I’ve read a few of his novels starring schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers, but The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers will be my first experience with his short stories.

“The Riddle of the Lady of Dubuque” opens with Elise Pender, receptionist to Dr. Paul Severance, stealing a .32 caliber. She’s determined to stop him from marrying Corinne Lapham. Miss Withers is brought in to pose as Corinne’s aunt, under the logic that she might be better at talking the girl down than a policeman. But the police do show up and take Dr. Severance in for questioning; Elise was found shot to death in his office. The police think she threatened him and he killed her by accident, but Miss Withers suspects otherwise. Not a bad story, but modern-day readers won’t pick up on the subtle clue that Miss Withers does.

“The Riddle of the Yellow Canary” is a highlight of the collection. Arthur Reese is a Tin Pan Alley man looking for the next hit. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of sleeping with the underage Margie Thorens and is now being blackmailed. But her newest song is very good. The first part of the story has Reese killing two birds with one stone: he poisons Margie, tricks her into writing her own suicide note under the guise of a song, and finally leaves her body behind a locked door. It’s almost the perfect crime.

And he might have gotten away with it if Inspector Piper hadn’t brought Miss Withers to the scene to give her an example of how the police determine suicide. An unbent pencil raises her suspicions, but it’s not until she goes to Margie’s apartment and meets her canary that she’s sure it’s murder. The reader isn’t granted the details needed to figure out the unbent pencil clue, but this is a good story with a satisfying murderer takedown.

Next up is “The Riddle of the Blue Fingerprint.” The opening is similar to Queen’s The French Powder Mystery. An antique wardrobe is the latest item up for auction. But when it’s opened, a body, that of Dr. Carl Brotherly, comes tumbling out. Miss Withers is in attendance; she was hired to find the dead man, and the necklace of pearls he made off with. The pearls aren’t on him, but what is on him a photograph of a fingerprint. However, this is one of the weaker stories in the collection. The truth behind the fingerprint is an interesting historical fact, but the mystery is quite weak, with it very unclear what actually happened, and Miss Withers deducing the killer through omniscience rather than evidence.

“The Riddle of the Doctor’s Double” has a chaotic opening. Withers and Palmer are returning from a concert when they’re alerted by a cry for help from a nearby brownstone. It’s the home of Johan Wurtz. Thankfully, the man of the house survives his heart attack, but his doctor warns the two detectives that he believes that someone is trying to kill the man. His niece or nephew, who will inherit money when the old grouch dies? The next-door neighbor, whose father died from the stress of a legal dispute with Wurtz? A few days later, a man posing as the doctor infiltrates the house and strangles him in his bed. Miss Withers goes to work. Her solution doesn’t hinge on any clever clues, but on what she discovers immediately after the crime, which is a bit of shame. This is merely okay.

“The Riddle of the Twelve Amethysts” is Palmer’s take on Sherlock Holmes. The grand dame speaks like him and even goes in an unnecessary disguise. The mystery kicks off when one of her former students, now a solider, comes to her for help. An old flame of his, Deidre, needs help. Her husband is subject to an unusual form of blackmail; someone has been sending him amethysts, one a month, and he withdraws money every time he gets one. The wife suspects it has something to do with a maid they fired a year ago, who might have been bought off with the necklace. Miss Withers playing Holmes is great fun, but sadly this story ends with a dull thud. The premise is so intriguing, but we get a cop-out solution. It reminds me of one of those Denis Smith Holmes pastiches I reviewed a while back.

“The Riddle of the Black Museum” is my personal favorite, with an excellent set-up. The museum in question is New York’s take on Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, a collection of famous murder weapons and evidence. Three men arrive for a tour when the receptionist leaves to take a phone call. When he returns, one of the men has been strangled to death, and each of the other two accuse the other. Both suspects are prominent men, so Inspector Piper is forced to take a more subtle approach, hence him calling in Miss Withers. But which of the two is the killer? And why would either murder a harmless, soon-to-retired hotel headwaiter neither of them had met? Well, the motive is a bit of lucky guess on Miss Withers’s part, but her deduction pointing to the killer is better. I suspect that more skilled mystery readers will suspect the truth sooner, but even then, the image of the murder is delightfully macabre.

“The Riddle of the Green Ice” is also pretty good. A jewelry store smash-and-grab leaves a police officer dead and Inspector Piper under political pressure to bring him to justice. The titular item is an emerald ring that the inexperienced crook accidentally left behind. Piper plans to use it as bait to snag him in a dragnet. There’s some contrived drama between him and Miss Withers, as he’s convinced that she leaked details of the dragnet to the press. I don’t mind some conflict between our investigators, but it felt very unlikely that he would actually consider this, as opposed to just not being able to shake the suspicion. Anyway, the thief and killer is cleverer than Piper expects, and the method he uses to evade the dragnet is a good one. Of course, Miss Withers gets the last laugh by producing the jewel. Not a bad story.

One comment: Were painters going crazy from lead poisoning really that common?

“The Riddle of the Snafu Murder,” sees Miss Withers receiving a visit from the FBI. It seems that a woman suspected of being a spy gave her name after two of her lovers got into a bar fight. Miss Withers suspects that the girl might be a former student but can’t place her. She tracks down a possible suspect just in time to get sucked into a murder investigation, a solider strangled in an apartment building. I admit I didn’t care for this story at first. Miss Withers makes a sudden jump regarding a name at one point that I didn’t follow. But her logic regarding the killer is great and redeems the story.

I admit, I didn’t enjoy this collection when I read it the first time. I found the plotting chaotic and slapdash, the mysteries rushed, the cluing poor. Re-reading for this review, I see that they’re a little better constructed than I thought. But I still find this collection hard to recommend. “Yellow Canary” and “Black Museum” are worth reading, but someone who’s not already a fan of Palmer, or at least of this screwball style of mysteries, probably won’t get much out of it. If you’re a Palmer and Withers lover, give this a try. But if not, this is Not Recommended, with Caveats. (I had issues with it, but you might like it.)

The Viaduct Murder (1925) by Ronald A. Knox

Among mystery fans, Ronald A. Knox is best known for A. his Ten Commandments of detective fiction or B. the visual novel Umineko no naku koro ni, where his daughter attacks people with those commandments. But his actual mystery fiction has fallen by the wayside. I’ve read a handful of his short stuff and mostly enjoyed it (“Solved by Inspection” being the highlight), but I was interested in checking out his novels. And so, I turned to his first book, The Viaduct Murder.

The book is set in a small village, a lovely, picturesque town known for it’s golf scene, specifically the distinguished club of Paston Oatvile. We open with four friends currently engaged in such a game: Alexander Gordon, an undistinguished and quite conventional Britishman. Marryatt, a clergyman. Carmichal, a long-winded don. And Mordaunt Reeves, a former member of British Intelligence who had been engaged in hush-hush work during the war (he ineffectually reported minor acts of protest). Reeves’s ball goes wide during a game, and during the hunt for it, he and Gordon stumble across a body lying near one of the pillars of the viaduct (a train bridge with columns). The face has been battered almost beyond recognition, but some evidence on the body indicates that it’s Brotherhood, a club member who’s just gone bankrupt and is infamous for his lectures on atheism on the lawn.

It looks like a suicide, but some evidence—two watches, one an hour faster than the other, a cipher, the photograph of an unknown woman, and a golf ball on the bridge—points the foursome in a more serious direction: Murder. And so the four of them—some with more enthusiasm than the others—set out to investigate.

This book is hilarious. Just about every line has some form of witty aside from Knox. See the beginning of the book, where he extols the beauty and history of Paston Oatvile and the surrounding village, only to admit that all of this is seen by the club members through the lens of golf games. It’s very breezy and not at all mean-spirited. The ending of chapter 22 and the revelations in chapter 23 are the highlights. This book is very much in the “Murder, what fun!” school. The mystery aspect is good too. Knox doesn’t give us a super complex mystery, but a seemingly straightforward scenario that he gradually adds more wrinkles too. It keeps the novel moving at a pretty good pace, as there’s always some minor complication or mystery to solve. Befitting the author, there are a couple of false solutions that could easily have been the basis for an actual mystery. They are both fairly clued and have problems that the reader can see before they’re spelled out.

Knox actually takes a few pokes at overly complex mystery novels along the way. Our group is fun to follow, but it’s clear that most of them are a bit too full of themselves to make good detectives. This all builds up to an ending that could have been a massive anti-climax if Knox didn’t handle it so smoothly. The penultimate chapter where Knox spells out the theme of the novel made me feel that I’d been tricked into reading a Chesterton novel, but I think Knox earned it. The book does suffer from the same problem that a lot of these “You know, this amateur detective stuff sure is silly, innt?” stories have where the false solution is more interesting and alluring than the rather mundane truth. I know, that’s the point.

In the end, I really liked this book, much more than I expected to. I thought I was in for a dull slog, but instead got a lively, entertaining romp that both celebrates and pokes fun at the classic detective story. I’m genuinely excited to read more of Knox. After all, you can’t pull the rug out from the genre like this without loving it on some level. And his false solutions show that he knows how to construct a good mystery. Recommended.

This book is out of copyright can be found on Standard Ebooks here.

 Other reviews: Mysteries Ahoy, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, 

The Murder of Kuroido (2018) written by Kouki Mitani

I still haven’t read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

The Murder of Kuroido is a 2018 adaptation of Christie’s classic. The writer is Kouki Mitani, a prolific film writer. This is actually his second Christie adaptation; he’d written an adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express three years before. And of course, he’s the creator of the Colombo-inspired Furuhata Ninzaburou. Christie’s classic hasn’t been well-served by previous adaptations, so how would Mitani’s hold up?

The film is set in 1952 Japan, in the small village of Tonosato. The town is abuzz with news of the recent suicide of Sanako Karatsu. Her abusive husband died the previous year, and the more gossip-minded members of the village believe that she killed him. All of this is dismissed as nonsense by the village doctor, Dr. Shiba (although his sister Kana is one of the gossip-minded). One night, Shiba is invited to the home of Mitsuru Kuroido, who had been pursuing Karatsu’s hand in marriage. He tells Shiba that she was being blackmailed by someone who knew she’d killed her husband, and he’s determined to destroy them. His chance comes when he receives a letter from the dead woman. He shoos Shiba out so he can read it in peace.

It should come as no surprise when Shiba gets a call a couple of hours later, saying that Kuroido has been murdered! Shiba rushes to the house to find it oddly calm; the butler denies making any such call. But Kuroido is indeed sitting at his desk, a dagger buried in his back. Suspicion at once falls on his estranged son Haruo, who’s been in the village but now can’t be located. His fiancée, Hanako, insists this can’t be the case. But who did it? The shady housekeeper? The secretary? The writer staying on the premises who has a thing for Hanako?

Luckily for her, the Shibas’ next-door neighbor is the great superb detective Takeru Sugero.

The Murder of Kuroido is mostly flashback; the bulk of the film is recounting Shiba’s written record of events. He’s a fun Watson-figure, put on by his sister but caring deeply about her, observant enough of his fellow villagers but often blindsided by Sugero’s insight. His exasperation with Sugero’s seemingly random actions is amusing, and like any good Watson he voices his belief that Sugero is just messing around, letting us, the audience, feel intelligent for knowing that Sugero is up to something. Not that I knew what he was doing, but I knew he was doing…whatever it was.

The mystery plot is pretty good. The clues really are all there, whether you’re a book fan or have never heard of it. Some clues take advantage of the format, and you have to be paying attention to the background or what characters who aren’t the focus of the shot are doing. The timing element isn’t as smooth as I suspect the book is, but again, that’s an issue of the medium. There’s one part that feels very, very clunky. Like, as soon as this is mentioned, you know it’s going to be involved in the crime, but I think that was a problem with the original too. But these are minor gripes. *Roger Ackroyd is really a solid village mystery, even outside of its reputation, and that carries over here.

For the most part, the movie sticks pretty close to the original book. There are a couple of changes, like the great white hunter Major Blunt getting turned into a successful writer. The killer is also a more sympathetic figure than in the novel. I read that some of the events were shuffled around as well, but I can’t speak about that in detail. The biggest draw is Sugero himself. His actor, Nomura Mansai, plays him very broadly. He constantly has a smile plastered on his face and has a very odd way of talking. He’s always speaking like thiiiiiiiiis~ And he does this through the whole mooooooooovie~ At first it made him seem more creepy than eccentric, but once I got used to it, I thought it worked pretty well. And it makes the end of the film, when the jovial mask drops completely, much more impactful.

Of course, there’s the main element of the book that everyone who’s read it is breathlessly waiting to read about. I’d say the movie handles that part very well. It’s pulled off a little differently than in the book, but the movie preserves the emotional and dramatic impact of that element.

So all in all, The Murder of Kuroido is really good. Die-hard fans of the book will be impressed at how it preserves some of the most essential parts of the original, while those who’ve never read it will get a really cleverly worked out murder mystery. Honestly, I’m tempted to watch some more of Mitani’s work based on this. Excellent stuff. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Criminal Musings (contains spoilers), The Case Files of Ho-Ling. 

Death in High Heels (1941) by Christianna Brand

Under the penname of “Christianna Brand,” Mary Christianna Lewis wrote the Nurse Matilda novels, which were later turned into the Nanny McPhee movies. This is probably the series for which she was most known for. But among mystery fans, her name is spoken of with awe. She’s produced some of the best novels in the genre, like Green for Danger. She’s also written some of the hardest to get hold of. For many years, any review of her books, no matter how favorable, came with the caveat of “If you can find a cheap copy.”

That all changed in 2013, when Open Road Media released most of her work as ebooks, bringing her fiction into the hands of fanatics and casuals alike. I truly believe that the advent of ebooks play an important role in what TomCat has dubbed the “Renaissance Era” of mystery fiction. Nowadays, the British Library has reissued quiet a few of her books as well, forever ending that bleak era when no one could really read Brand. I’ve been meaning to really sit down with her work for some time but haven’t really done so outside of some of her short fiction. I read the Crippen and Landru collection The Spotted Cat yeaaaaaaars ago, but frankly I didn’t get on with it. I wasn’t looking for inverted mysteries, which most of those are, and I didn’t click with her writing style. But now, the time has come for me to really engage with her work. And so, we come to her first novel, Death in High Heels. 

The book is set at Christophe et Cie, a high-end dress shop. Life at the shop is bustling. There’s always clothing to sell, to make, to model. Not to mention some internal politicking over who will be chosen by the boss to go to another branch. On one particular day, Rachel, one of the employees, comes in with a dirty hat. A couple of the girls go across the street to the chemist to get some oxalic acid to clean it, which apparently you could just get without having to sign for it. Ah, the good old days. Anyway, the crystals get spilled on the shop floor, but they’re to be cleaned up and no one thinks anymore on it.

One of the store’s employees dies that night of oxalic acid poisoning. It was slipped into her lunch.

The death is investigated by Inspector Charlesworth. At first, he’s nervous about this whole assignment (he's frightened of all the women) and believes that it’s a waste of time, but his sergeant insists that this isn’t an accident or a suicide, but a murder. He’s soon proven right, as there’s plenty of poison unaccounted for, as well as no way that the victim could have gotten a hold of it. Can Inspector Charlesworth overcome his inner romantic and get to the truth?

Death in High Heels is a solid book all around. The mystery is pretty engaging, with plenty of employees running around. Charlesworth and his sergeant even whip up a handy chart of motive and opportunity. When could someone have gotten the poison? Charlesworth notes that it’s impossible for the death to be premeditated, since buying the poison wasn’t planned at all, but that doesn’t get him far. There are plenty of motives flying about too. There are workplace rivalries and petty grudges against the victim to sort through. The boss is a notorious womanizer who might have wanted to bump off a pesky lover. Even the charlady isn’t above suspicion: the victim once accused her of stealing a brooch.

The characters are well done, a monstrous regiment of women. There’s real life in them, and they’re quite vivid. Possibly this is because they might have been pulled from life; Brand wrote the book to vent about an disliked coworker. This isn’t in the same as “distinguishable” though. Almost all of them are dress shop employees, and while they certainly have different personalities, they’re all kind of sameish in the moment. Even very late in the book I had trouble telling them apart. This is, I will admit, mostly on me. I saw some reviewers say that Inspector Charlesworth is bland, and kinda, but I admit I liked him. His barely concealed romanticism is quite charming. Brand has him mooning over a married woman with a perfectly pleasant husband for most of the book, and it’s a testament to her writing skill that he doesn’t come off as a skeevy weirdo for it. Really, Brand has a lot of nuance to her characters. Even the murderer gets some compassion at the end.

Which makes her waspishness all the more jarring. This is best on display with the main designer at Christophe et Cie, Mr. Cecil. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see an openly gay character in a book from this time period. On the other, words like “Oedipus complex” and “Freud” get thrown around about him. He’s treated as a melodramatic sad sack by the other characters. And his nickname is “Cissie.” So, you know, there are layers here.

Similar to Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, it’s fascinating to see the recurring fascinations and motifs Brand would return to throughout her career. The closed circle of suspects. The obsessive focus on the exact actions of the suspects, down to when someone picked up a cup. The parade of false solutions. The really, really weird nicknames. Brand isn’t as refined as she will be—one of those false solutions, for example, is dismissed with, “Well, she had a sister who was barely hinted at,”—but the groundwork is there. The nicknames never get better though.

The solution is quite good. The central clue that tips Charlesworth off is delivered very late, but Brand establishes that you could have known the solution sooner. Some of Charlesworth’s logic hinges on the exact layout of the store though, and I admit I couldn’t picture it. Again, this might have been on me. I read this as an ebook on my laptop, and I’m thinking that Brand demands a little more focus than that.

But overall, I liked this book. There’s a lot of energy and fun to it, and it’s neat to see Brand before she really mastered her craft. While I suspect that her later books are better if all you want are the highlights of her career, you’d be missing out if you skipped this one, either as a Brand fan or as a lover of golden age mysteries. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: crossexaminingcrime, Clothes in Books, Mystery*File (Curt Evans), The Invisible Event, Beneath the Stains of Time, Ah, Sweet Mystery, The Grandest Game in the World, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Complete Disregard for Spoilers (contains spoilers).

The Old Man in the Corner (1908) by Baroness Emma Orczy

One advantage to this “review a week” schedule I’ve been keeping is that it’s forced me to track down authors I’m interested in but wouldn’t take the time to read. Baroness Emma Orczy is one such writer. Although she’s most famous for her series about the Scarlet Pimpernel—a dashing hero who saves aristocrats during the French Revolution—us mystery fans know her through her mystery fiction. There’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. Or lawyer Skin o’ My Tooth. Or the subject of today’s review, The Old Man in the Corner.

The Old Man in the Corner has a slightly confusing publication history. Orczy wrote a series of stories in The Royal Magazine, that are collected in The Old Man in the Corner. And yet this collection was actually the second collection of stories, the first being The Case of Miss Elliot. So technically, I'm reading these stories in the wrong order! And, just to further frustrate, the first set of stories were originally in first person before being rewritten into third person…but the second collection (which came first mind you) kept the first-person narrator. How all of this came about, I do not know. So set all of that aside, take a seat at the A.B.C Teashop, and listen to an old man tell his stories.

The titular man is a wheezing, giggling weirdo who’s constantly messing with a piece of string. He’s also a fan of crime and a regular presence at inquests for the latest shocking murder or theft. Of course, the old man is a fair bit sharper than all in attendance and is able to deduce the truth simply through newspapers and inquests. So, we have what might be the first instance of the armchair detective character, who doesn’t stoop so low as to investigate, but instead merely sits and listens to the facts. Well, he does do some investigation, but that’s usually to confirm things he’s already deduced. His other interesting quality is what he does with his deductions: Zilch, bupkis, not a single finger lifted.

You see, the old man is possessed of a cheerful amorality. It’s not that he isn’t moved by the plight of victims or their families, nor does he have any real stake in criminals getting off. He’s just off the opinion that if a criminal is smart enough to outwit the police, then more power to them. “Crime interests me only when it resembles a clever game of chess, with many intricate moves which all tend to one solution, the checkmating of the antagonist⁠—the detective force of the country.” It’s this aspect that elevates this collection into something more interesting.

For the most part, the stories are pretty simple and formulaic. The first chapter has the description of the crime, the second the inquest of an innocent person, the third the Old Man’s explanation. Polly Burton, our viewpoint character, barely does anything. In the first few stories she really doesn’t do anything, and even when she does talk in the later ones, she’s pretty quickly bulldozed by the Old Man. But even so, these stories are pretty solid overall, and the Old Man is a fascinating character to watch in action, as it were. There’s also some loose continuity, with a couple of recurring characters and some references to past cases.

We begin with “The Fenchurch Street Mystery.” The mystery is the disappearance and later murder of Willam Kershaw. He was attempting a blackmail scheme on Smethurst, the millionaire, over a murder that the latter committed twenty years ago. When Kershaw’s body is found in an alley, the millionaire himself is called to the dock. It’s a clever little mystery, even if today’s readers might see through it sooner than readers of the time (and I have to wonder if it would all go as smoothly as the killer planned).

The Old Man returns in “The Robbery at Phillimore Terrace.” A suspicious tramp is tailed into the titular terrace when he is suddenly fallen upon by the servant of the house of Knopf, the diamond merchant. The house has just been robbed, but there’s no trace of the jewels on the tramp. Complicating matters is that it turns out that Knopf’s neighbor has also been robbed of his jewels. The police are force to release the tramp, but they tail him back to the terrace…where he vanishes into thin air! Yes, we have a (minor) impossible crime here! The central idea is pretty good. I didn’t appreciate it at first, but I enjoyed it more after thinking about it. But I wouldn’t read this story solely for the impossible crime.

“The York Mystery” sees the Old Man recounting the murder of bookie Charles Lavender, a bookmaker who had Lord Arthur Skelmerton over a barrel with horse racing debts. So when he’s found stabbed on the grounds of Lord Skelmerton’s house with Lord Skelmerton’s knife, after threatening to come collect that night, it’s no surprise who finds himself facing the threat of the noose. But if he’s not responsible, then who is? Well, once you eliminate him, there’s only one suspect left. But the cluing pointing to this person is pretty good.

“The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway” is only a two-chapter affair. “Will you be good enough,” he said suddenly, “to give me a description of the man who sat next to you just now, while you were having your cup of coffee and scone,” the Old Man taunts Polly. Obviously, she cannot, and this failure to tell one London man from another forms the basis for the shocking poisoning murder of a young woman on the Underground, allegedly at the hands of a possible lover. While the means of poisoning the victim is a cliché, the rest of the story is pretty good, with a good clue pointing at the culprit.

Next up is another short one: “The Liverpool Mystery.” There’s no murder here, merely the scamming of a clerk out of some banknotes for a purchase of jewelry.“A title⁠—a foreign title, I mean⁠—is always very useful for purposes of swindles and frauds,” muses the Old Man this time around. The solution is obvious, but scam stories almost always have a certain charm to them, and I suspect the Baroness was jabbing at some of the prejudices of her countrymen.

“The Edinburgh Mystery” (I’ll give you three guesses where this is set) involves the failed marriage of David Graham, a sweet but physically deformed young man. His godmother, determined to see him married, announces that she’s setting aside a deed of gift to her godson’s future wife. Within the week, he’s engaged to a doctor’s daughter. Sadly, this marriage is doomed to end in tragedy, as the fiancée finds herself in the dock on charges of robbery and murder of the godmother. Once again, the culprit stands out, but mystery itself is pretty solid, with a simple but clever dodge at the heart of it.

Like before, you get three guesses what “The Theft at the English Provident Bank” is about. Got it? Good. The bank is robbed in the night and the manager is found inconsolable (that old Victorian dodge, brain fever) in front of it in the morning. The night guard claims he saw the manager’s wife speak to the manager in the dark, but she flatly denies it. This one feels like a letdown, with a solution that probably should have occurred to the police.

However, we follow that up with “The Dublin Mystery,” my favorite of the collection. The mystery starts with the death of Millionaire Brooke (presumably not his actual name) of natural causes. What’s not natural is the death of his solicitor, who is strangled to death on his way home. Further excitement comes when Brooke Sr’s will leaves most of his estate to his wild younger son, while the dutiful older receives almost nothing. Allegations of fraud and murder follow. This one is fun because of the cluing. It’s the kind of subtle bit that you just brush over without really thinking about what it means that Christie and Carr would later use to good effect.

The titular unparalleled outrage of “An Unparalleled Outrage” is the robbery and kidnapping of Francis Morton, who is found in an apartment on the verge of death. Morton alleges that he was meant to deliver money to his wife’s first husband, who she assumed was dead. Instead, he was robbed and left to die. The renter, one Edward Skinner, stands accused in court…but Morton clears him. The Old Man points to the obvious solution, the main stand-out being just how completely the culprit gets away with everything.

“The Regent’s Park Murder” is another highlight. The inhabitants of Park Square West are awoken at three in the morning by cries of “Police” and “Murder,” followed by gunshots. The body of Aaron Cohen is found shortly thereafter, though he’s been strangled to death. The police suspect the killer killed the man then shot at him to make sure he was dead, missing in the process. They turn their attention to John Ashley, a minor noble who had a bad run at a gambling den against Cohen, and who owns the gun found at the scene. Obviously, a case this clear can’t help but collapse, but then who committed the crime? The Old Man’s solution is clever and surprising, making this one of the gems of the collection.

“The de Genneville Peerage” is another legal dispute over inheritance. Like in “The Dublin Mystery,” we have a dutiful older son dealing with a more careless younger. This young man is sweet-talked by a lawyer into arguing that he’s entitled to the inheritance on the basis of an old will centuries old. His case is derailed by the minor issue of his brutal murder in his hotel bedroom. Might his older brother have been so threatened by the lawsuit that he took a dramatic risk? The hotel porter seems convinced that he went to the hotel the night of the crime. And what about the lawyer who started all this mess, who disappeared the same night? I figured out the central idea but applied it the wrong way round. This is on par with the other stories in the collection.

We end with “The Mysterious Death in Percy Street.” The death is that of the caretaker for a series of studios, who is found dead in her bedroom, the windows wide open on a winter night. For some reason the story acts like there was any ambiguity about what happened, with some characters in story thinking that it’s possible it was suicide for some reason. No, of course not. An admirer is briefly suspected but cleared, leaving the Old Man to explain the simple truth behind the crime. But this time, it’s Polly who gets the last laugh on the Old Man, with one of the more surprising solutions from this time period. It’s a good reveal that casts some of the earlier stories in a more unsettling light.

All in all, The Old Man in the Corner is a good collection. It’s of great historical value to the genre, and is worth reading on that basis. But even if you’re just looking for good Victorian mysteries, you could do a lot worse than this. These aren’t as sophisticated as what would come later, but are good for what they are, and if you engage with them on their level, they may just surprise you. And the Old Man is a fascinating detective to spend time with. Recommended

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event.

The Labyrinth House Murders (1998/2024) by Yukito Ayatsuji (translated by Ho-Ling Wong)

The Labyrinth House Murders is the debut novel of Shishiya Kadomi. Rather ambitiously for a first book, Shishiya bases it off the actual brutal murders in the titular house. The Labyrinth House was home to Yotaro Miyagaki, a famous mystery writer who had effectively gone into retirement. For his sixtieth birthday, he invited his four “disciples,” as well as an editor and his wife, a critic, and a mystery fan to his home. Note that the name isn’t a metaphor: The house is an actual underground labyrinth with rooms named after characters from the myth of the Minotaur. Is this plausible? Could a mystery author really afford to build this thing? Who cares, it’s cool.

Anyway, the viewpoint character is editor Hideyuki Utayama, who’s hoping that Miyagaki is planning on writing another book soon. Instead, he and the others are treated to a shocking announcement from Miyagaki’s secretary: The great author has committed suicide. And he’s left a last will where he lays out his wishes. He plans on giving half of his fortune to a prize for mystery writers, but the other half will go to one of his disciples. They have five days to write a mystery story of their own, which will be judged by the other guests. The winner gets the prize. Each story must be set in the Labyrinth House. No one can leave until the contest is over (and yes, the doors are locked). And each author must make themselves the victim. It’s a borderline sick contest, but half of Miyagaki’s fortune is tempting. Very, very tempting.

During the first night, Utayama is woken by one of the other guests. One of the authors has been killed in the library. Not just strangled to death, but decapitated, with a bull’s head put on his stump. Horrifying enough, but when they go to search his room, they find a copy of his story, “The Minotaur’s Head.” It’s about a body with a bull’s head placed over his own…

And the phone lines have been cut. And no one can find the secretary, the only guy with the keys. And one of the authors is insistent that the competition go on. But what else do you expect to happen in a house built by eccentric archetic Seiji Nakamura? Luckily, the guests do have some hope, as the general mystery fan invited to the house is none other than Kiyoshi Shimada…

Because The Labyrinth House Murders is also the third novel by Yukito Ayatsuji and is not based on any real murders. If you thought The Decagon House Murders was meta, whew boy are you in for it here. We have an in-universe fictional text about authors who get killed according to their own in-universe fictional stories. And Ayatsuji pulls out all the stops. There’s a clever death trap. There’s a dying message. There’s a locked room murder. If you’re the kind of person to whom “Brutal series of murders in a house that no one would ever live in” is a hook, there’s something in here for you.

These ideas are all executed pretty well. Ayatsuji is also a horror author, and while he doesn’t really lean into that here, you can see him feeling out the potential of this literal maze of a house, with creepy masks lining the walls. I will say that the locked room is a pretty minor part of the story, with a really simple solution, but Ayatsuji/Kadomi makes up for that with a really good reason why the locked room came about. There’s also another fascinating meta-mystery: Kadomi mentions in the Afterword that they were actually in the house during the massacre, meaning the reader is not only trying to solve the mystery, but try and pick out who of the survivors will later write the events down…and why they’d do it in this way. “This is nothing more than a murder mystery, a piece of entertainment that allows the reader to escape the boredom of daily life,” they swear, and while that might be Ayatsuji’s intent with his book, Kadomi has something else in mind…

Of course, the book isn’t perfect. One of my issues is a structural one. The set-up is great, giving us time to dwell on how bizarre this whole situation is. The bit after the first murder is great, with Ayatsuji giving us a great motive to decapitate someone. But then the other murders come thick and fast, and we really don’t have time to let them breathe. Part of the appeal of these sorts of And Then There Were None-style stories is the downtime between the deaths as the survivors dwell on what’s happening. Seeing how big the house was, you could have had some great moments of panic as everyone know there could be someone slinking around the labyrinth. It felt like it needed about 25-30 more pages. I also felt at first that the motive was a bit weak, but some added context made it work for me.

The book’s main claim to fame is its final twist, where Shimada confronts Kadomi about the book. I admit, I was fooled. I was filled with rage. I hated the book (laudatory). It’s a neat reveal. “I don’t care how well-rounded a story feels or whether it will sell or not…What matters to me is the degree in which some excessive, over-the-top element in the work resonates with me,” says Utayama, and he’s obviously speaking for Ayatsuji there. But I admit this twist didn’t fully resonate with me. Although Shimada cites some clues about it, they’re pretty vague. It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but it’s a reveal you pick up on through vibes more than hard clues. It’s good, but I do think it leaves the book open to accusations that it’s more “clever” than “good,” and I can’t totally disagree. The in-universe reason for this is…weird. Surely there were more direct ways of doing X? In the end, I liked it, but I can see someone thinking otherwise.

But if all this book is is “clever,” then Ayatsuji at least hit a home run there. This is a really fun murder mystery. I also have to give full kudos to the translation by Ho-Ling. He has an article on his blog talking about the translation choices, and it’s really interesting (and amusing how the dying message gave him the most trouble). While I can’t give it my highest recommendation, I do think it’s very much worth your time. A low four-stars. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Criminal Musings, Beneath the Stains of Time, Bad Player's Good Reviews, Ah, Sweet Mystery, Countdown John's Christie Journal, The Invisible Event, Volt's Vault (spoiler analysis).