Cards on the Table (1936) by Agatha Christie

“Supposing that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening, the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four, while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?”--Poirot, The ABC Murders

Agatha Christie is known for many things. One is her ability to surprise and astonish the reader with someone they never suspected. You name a least-likely killer, they probably star in at least one of her books. What makes Cards on the Table so interesting is how Christie doesn’t do that. There are four, and only four, suspects. They all have equal motive. They all have equal opportunity. Any one of them might have done it. But which one?*

The book begins at a party attended by shady Mr. Shaitana, a collector. He sets his sights on Poirot and provokes and banters with him. Then he gets an idea: he’ll show Poirot his most prized collection…of murderers. Not just any two-bit murderers, but murderers who have gotten away with it. He invites Poirot to a dinner with these esteemed criminals. Poirot is too much of a gentleman to say that this is the stupidest idea he’s ever heard, but he implies it.

Poirot isn’t the only detective in attendance. He’s joined by Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, by Colonel Race of the Service, and by Ariadne Oliver, a famous mystery writer, making her first appearance in one of Christie’s novels. Matching them are the murderers: hearty Dr. Roberts, laconic Major Despard, classy Mrs. Lorrimer, and shy Anne Meredith. Shaitana relishes the conversation, dropping smug hints about his guests’ secret pasts, before proposing a game of bridge. Detectives at one table, murderers at another, while he sits and watches his collection of killers. All goes well until the detectives take their leave for the night. They go to tell Shaitana…and find that he’s been stabbed in the chest.

Initial interrogations don’t help much. All four suspects say that they barely know Shaitana. All of them had at least one moment when they got up from the table, and that’s just what was noticed. There are almost no clues. Christie says in her foreword that “The deduction must, therefore, be entirely psychological,” and she’s not kidding. Sure, there’s no hard evidence, but Poirot and Battle know that a killer tends to repeat themselves. Not in that they’ll use the same methods, but that they’ll commit the same type of murder. The four detectives each dig into the suspects’ past, trying to determine what murders they’ve committed to match them with Shaitana’s death. This is very promising, but in practice it’s mostly just Poirot and Battle. Race does all his work off-screen, says some racist stuff about how a white man won’t commit a murder, then skips out of the narrative to do hush-hush work. Mrs. Oliver is more successful, both practically—she manages to get one over Battle by getting information on one of the past murders—and in the meta sense. Christie is clearly having a blast whenever Mrs. Oliver speaks. Her normal laconic, to-the-point dialogue is replaced with paragraphs of her poking fun at the business of mystery writing. Sadly, she too fades out of the narrative about halfway through.

The suspects are also vivid characters. All of them seem like very nice, respectable people, but those are the people you need to watch out for in Christie. It seems impossible that any of them would have committed a crime, but Christie gives them all plausible murders, each distinct to the suspect. One character in particular is chilling in their lack of any hesitation when it comes to murder, and they’ll stick with me for a while. Again, you need to pay attention to the past murders to be able to solve the present one. This mostly works out. On the one hand, the psychological similarity between the deaths is clever. It’s not obvious, but when Poirot spelled it out, I realized that yeah, it makes sense. But I can see a more skeptical reader picking at it or being annoyed at how Christie somewhat backs off on her promise that all four suspects are equally guilty near the end of the book. I will say you do not need to know bridge to solve this; a couple of five-minute tutorials on YouTube are all you need, and I think the main point is made clear enough through context.

Christie expertly paces the book. While reading I thought to myself, “I should really be bored with this,” because Christie is all dialogue, and like I said, it’s often very to-the-point. But man could she control a narrative, expertly dolling out information at just the right pace to keep you hooked. It would have been very easy to let this spiral out of control with four detectives and four suspects, and it’s a testament to Christie’s skill that it doesn’t. But I'm not happy with how Poirot catches the killer. I didn't mind it in the moment, and I feel that you can argue it's thematically fitting, but it is a weakness in the book.

All in all, I liked this one. I’ve been looking forward to it, and there's a degree where I know I'm responding to the book that I imagined it would be and not the book it is. But I still enjoyed it. I want to read it again to see how I react to it, which I wouldn't want to do if the book was truly bad. I wouldn’t recommend it to Christie neophytes, but for someone who has a few Christie's under their belt and wants to see her try something a little different, this is Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Ah, Sweet Mystery (contains spoilers for the TV version at the end), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, (review one and review two), The Green Capsule, Mysteries Ahoy, Countdown John's Christie Journal, Crossexaminingcrime (spoiler analysis), FictionFan's Book Reviews.

*Also, this was her third Poirot book that year!

Blood From a Stone (2013) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

Blood from a Stone is the seventh in Dolores Gordon-Smith’s Jack Haldean series. So far, I’ve been really enjoying these books. This is one of her more complex mysteries. We start in the small village of Topfordham, where local lady Mrs. Paxton has received an unexpected guest: her nephew, Terence Napier. Napier’s superior attitude has rubbed the village the wrong way, but Mrs. Paxton is very accepting, since he claims to be able to lead her to her long-lost son, Sandy. Sandy went missing on the battlefield, but there are rumors that he deserted and is lying low in Paris. But Mrs. Paxton and Napier return from there empty-handed. Then, shortly after, Mrs. Paxton is found dead in her bedroom from an overdose of sleeping draught. It looks like a clear suicide, but the local doctor believes it’s murder, and finds proof, including a forged will that leaves her money to Napier. Needless to say, he makes himself scarce.

Two months later, Isabelle Stanton, cousin to Jack Haldean, is traveling by train when she has an encounter with an unpleasant man in a blue bowler hat. She finds the experience unsettling but doesn’t think more of it, until she finds a would-be reporter looking nauseous outside one of the compartments, telling her not to go in and rambling about jewels. The man is inside. Someone stabbed him before shoving his head out the window as the train was passing a bridge, making him almost impossible to identify. And there’s a beautiful sapphire necklace under the seat, one that was just reported stolen. Evidence on the man indicates that he might have been the Vicar, a notorious criminal thought dead, but there’s more to come. Someone tries to kill both Isabelle and the reporter. The various characters gather at Breagan Grange, an estate built next to an anxiety temple with disturbing imagery and a history of human sacrifice. There’s a shady private eye, séances, near-death experiences, and yes, it’s all connected to the murder of Mrs. Paxton.

Blood is another one of Gordon-Smith’s dense and complex mysteries. I admit, she partly lost me this time. This might have been due to my mood while I was reading, but I had a hard time following some of the character relations. I think this could be because Gordon-Smith doesn’t really give the reader much to latch onto. Like in her previous book, the mystery hinges on the dead man’s identity. But we get a lot of discussion about it and not much progress. Is he Sandy Paxton? Some of the items on him could have belonged to Sandy, and they weren’t forged. But were they planted? Is he the still-missing Terence Napier? Is he the Vicar? An accomplice? Gordon-Smith’s other novels feature dense plots with lots of possible avenues, but here it feels like we spend a lot of time talking about the theoretical identities of people we haven’t met. It’s not concrete. Even when we get a quite brutal attempted murder later in the book, we never really sit down and think about who could have done this, why would they do it, etc. The only investigation is based an overheard statement that, while the character would plausibly come to a certain conclusion, the reader is likely to see other explanations.

This is frustrating, because the book is really good otherwise. It’s a book in motion, things are happening and, in spite of my griping, they don’t feel thrown in for the sake of exciting the reader with fluff. Haldean does some good detective work here, digging deeper into the crimes. For example, after Mrs. Paxton was killed, all three of her servants skipped town. Haldean can believe that one, maybe two, would, but why would all three skip town without leaving any information? I like these sorts of mini-mysteries that give the reader something to think about.

Gordon-Smith also toys with the impossible crime here, albeit without committing to it. Mrs. Paxton dies behind the locked door of her bedroom, but her poisoning isn’t treated as a locked room. Later, at Breagan Grange, during a séance, one character has blood suddenly appear on their hands, and they’re later attacked in a cave with a locked door. But again, they aren’t treated as impossible crimes (although the blood trick is pretty neat).

For all my gripes, once everything is wrapped up and Haldean explains everything, this is probably the best-constructed mystery I’ve read from Gordon-Smith. There are more clues, the clues that are there are more plentiful, there’s foreshadowing and set-up for the twists, etc. Some of the clues are only clues because this is a mystery novel and so you know that X is going to be a clue, but this is a minor problem. Once I got over my initial annoyance at the identity games and thought about the solution, I saw that it was pretty solid. I’m noticing certain motifs that the author returns to, so a savvier reader might see the solution coming, but I was fooled and happy to be so.

So, in the end, this is another solid work from one of my favorite modern authors. Again, this is the best mystery I’ve read by her, even if the construction could have been improved. Recommended; this is well worth your time if you like classically-styled mysteries.

The Case of the Gilded Fly (1945) by Edmund Crispin

Robert Bruce Montgomery was a schoolteacher and composer who’d read Carr’s novel The Crooked Hinge while a student at Oxford. The experience was life-changing, inspiring him to write mystery novels himself under the name of Edmund Crispin.* I’ve read a small bit of his short fiction. I didn’t care for his most well-known short, “Beware of the Trains,” but I enjoyed “The Name on the Window” and really enjoyed “Who Killed Baker?” So, spurred on by some positive comments I saw on Ho-Ling's Honkaku Discord server, I decided to give his novels a try.

The Case of the Gilded Fly opens on a train journey to Oxford, where Crispin gives us some quick windows into the key players. There’s Robert Warner, who’s putting on the satirical play Metromania, as well as his mistress, Rachel West. Two of the actresses are Yseut and Helen Haskell. The half-sisters are night-and-day in personality, with Helen being the studious and skilled one, Yseut the sexual one. She had an affair with Robert and is determined to get him back. There’s also Nicholas Barclay, a smug jerk, palling around with Jean Whitelegge, who’s in love with organist Donald Fellows. Fellows, for his part, is carrying a torch for Yseut, to the frustration of both Jean and Nicholas. Another producer, Sheila McGaw, is also on her way to Oxford. Also on board is Nigel Blake, a journalist who’s returning to Oxford to see his former instructor, Gervase Fen, as well as to hit on Helen. Fen is currently arguing with Sir Richard Freeman, Chief Constable of Oxford, about the value of detective novels, Sir Freeman being an amateur English critic the same way Fen is an amateur detective. Fen’s looking to solve a crime.“A really splendidly complicated crime!”

“Within the week that followed three of these eleven died by violence.”

It should surprise no one when Yseut is found shot in Donald’s apartment. It looks like suicide at first glance, but Fen notes some odd details that it make it clear she was murdered. But no one was in the apartment, and witnesses outside swear no one went in after her. So how was it done? There are plenty of motives flying around beyond the love affairs that she was the center of. Helen comes into a lot of money now that her sister is dead. And even Sheila, who’s otherwise unconnected to the group, has a motive: *she was supposed to produce Metromania until Yseut stepped in to get her removed. And what of the titular gilded fly, a garish ring that the killer shoved onto Yseut’s finger?

It’s clear that Carr was a massive influence on Crispin. Gervase Fen is a thinner Gideon Fell (even referencing him!) with an actual teaching job. Nigel plays the role of the typical Carr hero, following the detective around, never saying anything smart, and falling in love with the heroine. There’s even a bit where a minor character tells an M.R. Jamesian ghost story, something that I’m sure Carr would have loved. There’s a very meta undertone to the whole book, mostly from Fen, who technically respects the fourth wall but loves to throw a volley over it now and then. And of course, there’s the impossible crime.

But I don’t think all of this quite clicks together. Part of it is the tone. It’s all very arch and witty and Oxfordy. Apparently, I was not in the mood for that. The tone was a discordant note for me. Fen is also frustrating as a detective. He’s not really likeable, just constantly insulting people and bowling over them. There’s a bit about two-thirds through where Nigel reflects on the type of man Fen is—curious, interested in people even when he knows that what they do better than them—and I wish we’d gotten more of *that detective.

Fen is constantly wondering if he shouldn’t just let Yseut’s killer off—really, he’s begging for an excuse to do this. But as the character’s note, Yseut might have been personally very annoying but she really wasn’t that bad. No ruined careers, broken marriages, lovelorn suicides, or anything else to really justify how happy the characters are to forget the whole thing. Again, very Carrian, wanting to let the killer off, but usually Carr makes his killers a little more sympathetic, his victims a little more monstrous. Combine this with an eyebrow-raising comment about the killer’s motive and I don’t feel very charitable towards Crispin.

This is annoying, because the impossible crime itself is quite good. Not a shining example of the genre—I really don’t know if the murder was as possible as Fen implies—but solid enough, and I kicked myself when I looked back and saw how obvious the method was. Fen brags that he knew who the killer was three minutes after arriving on the scene…and okay, fair; you can solve this if you actually think about what the crime scene actually means. But I think this whole, “I solved the crime in a nanosecond” stuff doesn’t work as well as some authors think it does. Sure, the detective looks smart for saying it, but if you carry through on that promise that the crime is that solvable, you run the risk of someone flipping back and solving the crime with half the book left to go. There’s also not really that much in the way of cluing or deduction. Fen freely admits that he’s an intuitive detective, and once you figure out how the crime was done, you have your killer. And the titular fly means nothing, the reasoning boiling down to spiteful symbolism.

So, this book wasn’t a pure winner for me. I liked it, in the end. The impossible crime is good and some of my complaints are stylistic. If I’d been in a better mood I might have liked it more, and if you have a higher tolerance for literary flights of fancy it might be up your alley. It's a young man's work, and I'm sure that he improved. I’m giving this a Recommended, with Caveats. 

*Douglas G. Greene’s The Man Who Explained Miracles, 177, 306.

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, Only Detect, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?, The Invisible Event, FictionFan's Book Reviews.

Drishyam (2013) written by Jeethu Joseph

I really didn’t know what to expect from Drishyam (Visual). I knew it was ostensibly based off a Japanese novel, but that didn’t tell me much.* The film, written and directed by Jeethu Joseph, came out in 2013 and proved to be a hit in the Malayalam-speaking part of India; it’s one of the top 10 highest grossing Malayalam films of all time. Not only has it produced two sequels, but it’s been remade in different languages (the Hindi version seems to be the most well-known) and for other countries. There’s a Chinese remake out, and Korean and American ones in the works.

The film stars Georgekutty (Mohanlal), a kind of lazy cable TV serviceman who lives a simple, humble life with his wife Rani (Meena) and two daughters, Anju (Ansiba Hassan) and Anu (Esther Anil). Georgekutty dropped out of school at a young age, and so is a bit skeptical of his oldest daughter’s schooling, but ultimately it looks like he’s coming around. He has a good relationship with his in-laws. The only real conflict he has is with a power-tripping local cop. Yes, life is pretty good for Georgekutty.

That is until Anju goes to a nature camp, where she meets Varun Prabhakar, the only son of an Inspector General of Police who’s just as spoiled and entitled as that implies. He takes a video of Anju showering and tries to blackmail her into sex. Rani walks in on the whole thing, there’s a struggle…and Varun dies. When Georgekutty gets home that night, he instantly realizes how bad this is for them. There’s no way his family will get a fair shake considering the prominence of the victim, so their only hope is to cover up the death. The full might of the police will be on them, but Georgekutty has one major advantage:

He’s watched a lot of crime shows.

Drishyam takes a while to get going. The first hour or so of the movie is just setting up the family dynamics. I don’t in-theory object to this, but it goes on for quite a while. Not helping is that Georgekutty is kind of a sexist jerk. It’s valid characterization and probably fitting for a man like him, but it made me slightly uncomfortable. It’s thematic, since the movie is about a family patriarch doing what he needs to do to protect his family, but I can see it being a little off-putting. Once the murder happens, a lot of this stuff from the first part falls by the wayside a bit. Thinking back on it, it felt like the movie was divided into two distinct halves with wildly different tones. It makes sense; murder would put a damper on happy times with your family, but it was noticeable.

But the second half is where this movie gets really interesting for blog readers. Georgekutty and his family pretend to go on a religious retreat as an alibi for the murder. Indeed, they’re able to present plenty of evidence showing they were nowhere near the crime scene…but we as watchers know that the retreat was already over. So how was the alibi faked? Like Sleuth, this isn’t a fair-play mystery; most of the details, including some last-minute complications, are arranged off-screen. But man is it a good alibi. The movie’s tagline is “Visuals can be deceiving,” and the alibi is a masterclass in manipulation, with carefully worded questions and seemingly unimpeachable evidence combining to make a nearly unbreakable alibi. The scene where Varun’s mother explains how it was done is excellent. Freeman Wills Crofts’s Inspector French would have been honored to break this alibi.

And the ending is magnificent. If I’d watched it in a theater, I would have hooted and hollered in my seat.

All in all, I really liked this movie. Again, the first half drags very slightly, but it’s not a huge issue. Those of you who like inverted mysteries or good alibi busters will like this one. If you can find a good subtitled version—the Hindi language version on YouTube looks good, though me and my friends watched the original Malayalam—I’d check it out. Highly Recommended.

*I’m not naming the book because the similarities are very thin and the writer said that he didn’t use the book as inspiration, so I feel like it would mislead the reader like it did me.

The Mill House Murders (1988/2023) by Yukito Ayatsuji (translated by Ho-Ling Wong)

1987 saw the release of The Decagon House Murders, the debut novel of Yukito Ayatsuji. Breaking from the dominate mystery that focused on social realism, Ayatsuji’s book was a fantasy. The protagonists were college students, mystery fanatics who could reference the classics of the genre, and you knew they’d actually done the reading. The set-up of an isolated island where a vengeful killer stalked, a brilliant and eccentric detective, macabre twists…this stuff just doesn’t happen. But you really don’t care. But what elevated the book was its self-awareness. Ayatsuji wasn’t just copying the past to be contrary or to set himself apart in a crowded field, he wrote like someone who loved the mysteries of old and who knew them inside and out, and that knowledge meant he could both play with the format and turn a sharp gaze on the cliches. This was literally a genre-defining book, inaugurating the genre of shin-honkaku.

Its sequel, The Mill House Murders, had a lot to live up to.

The book takes place in the titular house, a construct by architect Seiji Nakamura. The house is situated in the middle of a valley, a place where time almost seems to have stopped. The only motion are the three waterwheels of the house that power it. Its master is Kiichi Fujinuma, who retreated to the house after being crippled and disfigured in a car accident. Besides him, there’s his much younger wife Yurie, who barely knows life outside of the house, and two servants. And the artwork. For you see, Kiichi’s father Issei was a brilliant painter, whose works could delight and move. Kiichi has bought all of them and keeps them in the house, only allowing a scant few people to view them once a year. And he doesn’t even show them his father’s rarest work, The Phantom Cluster, a painting that terrified its maker.

This September 1986, the normal guests have arrived: Mori, an art professor who discovered and encouraged Issei. Oishi, a greedy and unscrupulous art dealer who nonetheless handled Issei’s work. Mitamura, the surgeon who inherited the hospital where Kiichi’s life was saved. The three are here to gawk at the artwork and maybe haggle The Phantom Cluster out of Kiichi. But there’s an unexpected guest this year, a party crasher named Kiyoshi Shimada. He’s here because of the Nakamura connection; fascinated by the bloody history that seems to cling to his houses. And because, last year, there were two other guests. Shingo Masaki, a former disciple of Issei who was staying at the house for unknown reasons. His limbs were dumped into the furnace. And there was Tsunehito Furukawa, a Buddhist priest at the Fujinuma family’s temple. He vanished from the house one year ago and is the only suspect in Masaki’s murder. But he’s also an old friend of Shimada, who just can’t believe that he would do something like that…

Similar to Decagon, Mill House uses a dual-narrative structure. Half of the story is set on the fateful night in 1985, detailing the multiple deaths and art theft that happened under the blanket of a storm. The other half is narrated by the master of the house in 1986, as Shimada waltzes into this frozen-in-time house to poke and prod at the past. When I read the book, I felt like there wasn’t much meat on its bones, but I got more into it as it went on. Ayatsuji keeps the pace going on what could easily have been a very slow and draggy narrative, especially in the present one. Kiichi is being harassed by someone who wants him out of the house, which gives us something to chew on in the present. Shimada himself is pretty subdued. He gets a good bit early on where he uses one bit of evidence to decisively prove that a thought-accidental death was actually murder, but again, he doesn’t do much until the ending. The other characters aren’t super distinct either. You get your impression the moment they appear on the page, and they don’t waver from that. Oishi doesn’t show a hidden heart of gold, Mori doesn’t suddenly find a spine, etc. We get a little more going with our narrator, but that’s it.

Still, we read a book like this for the mystery. And it’s a good one! Most of the mystery is centered on the past narrative, and the two deaths that occurred a year ago. There’s also an impossible crime to contend with, as Furukawa vanished from an upstairs annex with two witnesses playing chess downstairs. The windows don’t open enough to leave through, and there are no other hiding places up there. The explanation is well-done; technically a small part of the narrative, but Ayatsuji ties it back into the main mystery very well. The ultimate solution to the book is great. The general consensus from other reviews I’ve read is that the solution is pretty obvious. And well, kinda. I knew what was going on because I’d seen some spoilers, but even with that knowledge, I couldn’t quite make it fit into the mystery, which speaks well of the complexity. There’s a lot going on here! I will say that I think Ayatsuji tips his hand near the end, but I see that as a final big clue, freely given to those who are still lost and confused.

I don’t know how many actual clues there are. There are some bits you look back on and go, “Oh,” but they tend to be one-off statements that are easily missed in the moment. Clues seem a little thin on the ground. Even when Shimada spells out how he solved everything, it’s less through evidence and more through actually thinking through what happened that fateful night a year ago. But I don’t mind it, and I doubt you will either. The shock moment is great, the climax of a well-thought-out mystery.

So, not the same trailblazer that Decagon was, but that’s unfair to Ayatsuji. Any author would be proud of this book, and he has better to come. Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Bad Player's Good Reviews, Puzzles, Riddles, and Murders, Ah, Sweet Mystery, CrossExaminingCrime, The Invisible Event, Beneath the Stains of Time, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Stephen M. Pierce, Criminal Musings, Abstracts and Chronicles.

Sleuth (1972) written by Anthony Shaffer

Among us mystery fans, the name Anthony Shaffer bring to mind fascinating-sounding-probably-good-but-we-don’t-really-know-for-sure-because-his-books-are-all-out-of-print mysteries: How Doth the Little Crocodile? or Withered Murder, co-written with his brother, Peter Schaffer.* But truthfully, Shaffer was a playwright and movie guy first and foremost. Most people know him through his adaptation of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. But for us mystery fans, he’s known for his play Sleuth. Debuting in 1970, Sleuth was a hit, winning the Tony Award for Best Play. In 1972, it was turned into a movie, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. It was this film that me and my Discord friends watched.

Sleuth takes place at the home of Andrew Wyke (Lawrence Oliver), an author of classic detective fiction. He’s invited Milo Tindle (Michael Caine) over to discuss business. Namely, the business of Milo’s affair with his wife. Luckily, Wyke isn’t too bothered by it. He knows how demanding Marguerite is and has sought comfort in another woman himself. But he knows that she’s going to bleed Milo dry and so proposes a plan that should solve all their issues: They’ll stage a robbery of some valuable jewels. End result: Wyke gets the insurance money and Milo gets the resources to keep Marguerite out of Wyke’s life.

So the two go about setting up the crime, though the practical, working-class Milo is frustrated by how Wyke treats the whole thing like something out of one of his mystery novels (which in fairness, it kinda is), but he begins to get into the spirit of it. The first half of the movie is a light-hearted romp where Wyke and Milo make fools of themselves in an overcomplicated farce. The viewer knows this is going to blow up in their faces at some point. I’ll leave the details up to the interested watcher. But suffice to say that the first half of the movie ends in a shocking and visceral act of violence.

From here, the movie throws out twist after twist, so I’ll merely say that Act 2 involves a character showing up to piece together the fallout from the first half, and it becomes clear that what we saw happen and what we’re told happened don’t seem to match up…

This was a good movie. The movie spends a lot of time in Wyke’s house, and I love the design, with its creepy animatronics populating the living room. The cast is pretty limited, but they all do a good job. The dialogue is all sharp and witty until it shifts into dead seriousness. You’re never quite sure how sincere the characters are no matter what they say, tying into the theme at the center of the movie: games. The set-up just seems so silly, but it keeps going and going, with plays and counterplays. It’s almost a relief when someone finally tries to poke a hole in Wyke’s pompousness, but we’re very aware that this too, is a game, even if the characters haven’t figured it out yet. Some people might read Sleuth as a jab at GAD fiction, but I don’t think so. I think the movie criticizes snobbery and elitism and detective fiction is just the lens Shaffer uses.

This isn’t really a fair-play mystery. There aren’t any real “clues,” or even foreshadowing. Which is fine, honestly. I will give Sleuth credit for taking a common mystery plot device that we usually think of as unrealistic and showing that it does totally work if you know what you’re doing.

All in all, Sleuth is a great psychological thriller. It’s intelligent and keeps you guessing from start to finish. And the final line is a killer. Recommended

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event.

*EDIT: I originally said that Anthony wrote The Woman in the Wardrobe. That was actually written by Peter (with some help from Anthony). I apologize for the error.

"Knockin' On Locked Door" (2014/2020) by Yuugo Aosaki

Image taken from Beneath the Stains of Time.

Yuugo Aosaki is a Japanese mystery writer. He debuted in 2012 with The Gymnasium Murder, which won the 22nd Tetsuya Ayukawa Award and earned him the title “the Ellery Queen of the Heisei Era.” As implied, his work takes its cue from Queen, featuring elaborate logical deductions from minor evidence. However, his only work that’s made it to the west is the anime adaptation of his Undead Girl Murder Farce novels.

However, thanks to Alex of The Detection Collection, I’ve been able to read one of his short stories: “Knockin’ on Locked Door,” original published in Dokuraku magazine in 2014, then published in the collection of the same name in 2016. Does it live up to the hype I’ve seen?

“Knockin’ on Locked Door” is the first entry in the Knockin’ On Locked Door series, staring the Knockin’ on Locked Door Detective Agency. The agency is comprised of Tori Gotenba, who specializes in impossible crimes, and narrator Hisami Katanashi, who specializes in “why” problems. The central idea of the series is that each story is a competition between the two men to see who will solve the case first. But the case they have here will require both their skills.

The victim is Hideo Kasumiga, a well-known painter. He was found stabbed to death in his studio one morning by his son and by one of his admirers. The door was firmly locked on the inside by a rusty lock; it can be opened from the outside, but not locked. This seems like a perfect fit for Tori, but there are some odd questions that need to be answered. First, why did the culprit vandalize one of Hideo’s works of art by painting it fully red? And why did the killer even create a locked room in the first place? There was no effort to disguise it as a suicide or accident, and the dead man wasn’t even in the habit of locking his door anyway. Hisami remains in the background for much of the story before coming in at the eleventh hour to snatch the last word from Tori.

This is a really solid story. The banter between our heroes as well as the police officer on scene, a former classmate, is amusing. And the locked room is no slouch either. There are only three suspects and none of them have much page time, so the locked room is the main focus. And it’s well-clued! A careful reader can notice the key clue that puts Tori onto the murderer, and by thinking more about what that clue implies, the reader can make a genuine attempt at seeing how the crime was done. And it’s a really creative solution. It’s not wild or improbable, just unconventional. But what elevates the story is the “why” part. I doubt that anyone would figure this out without some knowledge of a historical fact (or at least an educated guess), but it’s a really good motive and does an excellent job of justifying why there’s a locked room in the first place.

I first read this story for Alex’s New Locked Room Library. I’d binged a lot of locked rooms for that project, and when I got to this one, I was getting burned out. I’d read a lot, seen a lot of locked rooms, and was getting tired of the whole thing. There was no creativity, just the same basic solutions repackaged. And while you can argue that this is more of the same, there’s enough creativity on display in method and motive to elevate it. It’s fair to say that this story reminded me why I love locked rooms.

Obviously, this story comes Highly Recommended, and I hope to see more Aosaki in translation.

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling (review of entire collection), Bad Player's Good Reviews (ditto), Beneath the Stains of Time.