"The Slasher" (1990/2025) by Rintarou Norizuki

Many years ago, I read Rintarou Norizuki’s “The Lure of the Green Door,” an excellent locked room mystery. Norizuki is one of the big names in shin-honkaku, a well-known author who writes mysteries with Ellery Queenian complex logic chains. He’s also written mysteries that explore a pointed criticism of that Queen-school of writing, the “Late Queen Problem.” (Associated with Norizuki even though the originator of the term was likely Kiyoshi Kasai.) However, aside from one other short story, “An Urban Legend Puzzle,” he has remained officially untranslated. “Officially” is the key word there, since another one of his short stories has been translated by a friend of mine who was kind enough to share his translation of Norizuki’s “The Slasher,” originally published in the April 1990 issue of Kotton* and later collected in The Adventures of Norizuki Rintarou. Since Norizuki follows in the well-known Queen tradition of using the same name for author and detective, I’ll use “Norizuki” to refer to the author and “Rintaro” to the character.

In spite of the name, “The Slasher” doesn’t involve Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers on a rampage. No, this slasher does much worse than slaughter teenagers for the sake of a entertained audience. This slasher violates the sanctity and purity of library books, specifically mystery novels, cutting out the pages “up to the table of contents.” The slasher “cut very close to the spine, so only the barest traces of the page remained.” Our detective, Rintarou, has no intention of getting involved, but his attraction to the librarian (and her taunting him) moves him to action.

“The Slasher” is a solid short story. The act of tracking the slasher down doesn’t involve any great reasoning on Rintaro’s part, just some digging through the library’s records to pick up on patterns. But the motive is honestly brilliant. It’s a motive that any mystery reader can sympathize with. And the reason the slasher chose to do it this way is excellent, fairly clued and leading up to a final revelation. I’d say it’s fairer than “Green Door.” I myself came close to figuring it out, if only I’d thought a bit more about the implications of the culprit’s actions.

I must also give full credit to the translation. It reads very well and captures the humor of the original text.

I apologize for such a short review this week. Like Rintarou, I’m a procrastinator at heart. I will have something more substantial, or more unique, for next week.

*The translator wasn’t 100% sure on the title.

The Meiji Guillotine Murders (1979/2023) by Futaro Yamada (translated by Brian Karetnyk)

Back in 2013, Ho-Ling Wong published a review of Futaro Yamada’s (a penname of Seiya Yamada) Meiji Guillotine. “Wow, this slaps!” I thought to myself.* But the years went on with this amazing book lost in its original language. However, at some point, Ho-Ling told the good people at Pushkin Vertigo, “Guys, this slaps!”** And someone must have agreed, because 2023 saw the release of The Meiji Guillotine Murders, translated by Brian Karetnyk. And dear reader, let me say, this book slaps.***

The Meiji Guillotine Murders is set in the early years of the Meiji Restoration. Author Yamada, who is also known for his ninja stories that formed the bedrock of modern shonen, draws a vivid picture of a nation in the throes of change. The same government that cried “Revere the Emperor! Expel the Barbarians!” is now devouring Western ideals with a grin, the mighty bureaucracy is growing by leaps and bounds, and new modern housing and technology sits alongside rickshaws. Some things remain the same. The new government is filled with incompetence, graft, and corruption. Radical assassins target government officials. Corrupt rasotsu, the police, bully and exploit the common man for what little he has. Into this comes Keishiro Kazuki and Toshiyoshi Kawaji, chief inspectors who are part of the newly formed Imperial Prosecuting Office. Kawaji is a strict, law-abiding man, while Kazuki makes everything sound like “an incantation” and has “something uncanny about him. His subordinates feared him, and even his peers were known to feel uneasy in his presence.” Together, they intend to see justice done. But there are two other characters we have to meet.

One is Esmeralda Sanson, a beautiful young woman who lives with Kazuki, who happens to be “the ninth generation of Parisian executioners.” She’s also a miko who can communicate with the dead, an ability which will be vital in resolving the various mysteries. And then there’s the guillotine itself. “A grim specter,” “the most painless kind of death known to men.” Yamada’s introduction of the guillotine is powerful and chilling, and it loom over the narrative, casting a bloody shadow on the various stories.

Meiji Guillotine is a rarity in the mystery genre: the interlinked short story collection. The plots of the stories are mostly disconnected from each other, but the stories themselves are more like long chapters in a novel, with characters recurring from story to story. It’s a bit tricky for me to discuss them in detail since the actual mysteries are introduced late. The first two stories, “The Chief Inspectorate of the Imperial Prosecuting Office” and “Esmeralda the Miko” are just dedicated to introducing the setting and characters. Even when we get to the actual mysteries, there’s a lot of build-up, then almost no page time between the discovery of the murder and the explanation.

I found the stories to be engaging, but Yamada fairly bludgeons the reader with names and events that might not mean much. Here I feel that my lack of knowledge of the Meiji era worked against me; I couldn’t tell how many of these characters were actual historical figures and who was made up for the book. It’s like if a murder mystery set during the first Washington administration was translated into Japanese; most of the audience isn’t going to know what’s historical and what’s fictional. It didn’t ruin the book or anything, but I think it’s worth noting.

The mysteries are all quite good. I won’t go into detail about the plots, but I’ll mention the hooks. “A Strange Incident at the Tsukiji Hotel” has a man sliced in half at the titular hotel. The image of the murder is funny but also very ingenious. “From America With Love” will likely be the highlight for impossible crime fans, as a ghostly rickshaw dumps a body in the river…and while the rickshaw itself leaves tracks, there are no footprints of the person who had to have carried it. Once again, the solution is funny to picture but it’s also a picture that snaps right into place when Esmeralda explains it. “The Hanged Man at the Eitai Bridge” is an alibi problem: Two men had very good reason to hang the victim from the titular bridge, but neither of them had the opportunity to do so and then make it to where they were found. Yamada’s explanation takes advantage of the time period and is grotesque to boot.

“Eyes and Legs” opens with the characters witnessing a bizarre gathering from a newfangled invention, the binoculars. Later, a geisha is kidnapped and her severed leg turns up in a rickshaw. The explanation for what’s going on is a bit obvious, but this is still a well-constructed story. “The Corpse That Cradled Its Own Head” has a decapitated corpse covered in human waste. This one is simpler, but still good, although one part—the most clever part—isn’t explained until the last story…but ah. I will leave that final story for the interested reader. All I will say is that it wraps the book up very well, with a revelation that almost left me laughing in glee.

I admit, I would not necessarily recommend The Meiji Guillotine Murders as a murder mystery per se. I like the mysteries, and the solutions are great, but there’s little in the way of careful, logical detection. There are clues, but they rarely feature in the explanation. This is more interesting as a historical mystery novel, immersing the reader in a very unfamiliar time and place. In that sense, I really liked it. Of course, the ingenious crimes are a great selling point as well, but I wouldn’t want the reader to get the wrong idea.

For those of you who have bounced off other honkaku/shin-honkaku works, this might be different enough to get your attention. Highly Recommended. 

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

*I did not think this, since “this slaps” was not slang at the time.

**He did not do this, since Ho-Ling is a professional.

***This time I am saying it, as the review shows. 

The Leviathan's Resting Place (2019) by DWaM

Some years back, when I was lurking in the Ace Attorney fancase scene, one of the most famous

authors was “DWaM,” who was well known for cases that A. featured locked room murders and B. were very dark. (In retrospect, this was exaggerated.) For the latter reason (and because most AA cases wouldn’t run well on Internet Explorer and I didn’t know what Chrome and Firefox were), I stayed away from his work. Maybe I’d get to him another time. So imagine my shock when I saw JJ reviewing a self-published novella called The Leviathan’s Resting Place by…DWaM.

However, after thinking about it, I decided that this made sense. After all, the thing that kept me away from his work earlier (beyond my ignorance of browsers), was the alleged dark tone of his work applied to some of my favorite fictional characters. Now that he was writing original fiction, I could freely enjoy his plotting without feeling any pain in my gut.

Now, look at the date of JJ’s post. Now look at the date of my post. You’ll notice that it took me a while to follow through. Now, I have read some of his fiction before now, but this is the first time I’m reviewing any.

Our soon-to-be victim (?) is Otto Reylands, a successful CEO who’s getting ready for an advantageous merger. But there’s a fly in the ointment. Multiple flies, actually, in the form of death threats. The threats aren’t the problem, the problem is the disturbing pictures of a woman in red, "she was most certainly dead" that come with them. Otto’s behavior is getting increasingly erratic, including buying a trenchcoat he brings with him on a flight to Los Angeles to complete the merger. "Y'know, Philip Marlowe era." Joining him are his assistant (and our narrator) Navy Morre, his son Alan, his Chief Legal Advisor Ulysses Bell, and a lawyer from the other company, Celeste Styles. At first, things seem to be going well: The first class cabin Otto and his entourage have is the height of luxury, with individual sections for each of them. But there’s tension in the air; Otto accuses Navy before the flight of leaking information about the photographs, in spite of her denials. And then, while she’s trying to figure out what Otto wants her to admit to, the impossible happens.

After takeoff, Alan and Navy are talking when a man in a trenchcoat walks out of Otto’s cabin. He strolls past them to one of the cabin’s bathrooms…and never comes out. When Alan investigates, the man is gone, leaving a snake token of sorts behind. At first it seems like a bizarre joke, but soon it becomes clear that Otto’s not in first class. Or on the plane. And then his suitcases go missing. It’s like someone is trying to erase him completely…

I’ve read enough of DWaM’s work to know that he likes to machine-gun impossibilities at the reader, so I’ll leave it there, except to say things don’t get any smoother when the group arrives in L.A. By the end of the story, there’s been another impossible disappearance from a hotel room, a more mundane disappearance with another snake token left behind, and a body, shot through the head in an abandoned cabin.

The only real issues I have with the story are on a writing level; there are a few typos, and some of the characters sound very samey, especially when they’re discussing the various mysteries. But the key word is “discussing.” This is very much a mystery fan’s mystery story, with mysterious events and theories flying thick and fast. I was making more of an effort to solve this than I normally do with mysteries, and there were multiple times when I thought of a theory, or speculated where the story was about to go, and each time, DWaM either shot down my idea or took the story in just that direction, no fumbling about denying the obvious theory that would occur to most experienced readers.

The impossible crimes are good. I was more impressed with the past one; very simple yet ingenious. But the modern-day one is great too. At first I thought it was too convoluted, but after rereading I see how it’s really based around one grand deception, with the rest of the culprit’s actions being just minor parts of it. I do think that some of the clues could have been more detailed--I’m thinking here of what tips Navy off to what really happened--but on the whole, I was satisfied.

This was a really solid and fun read. We have a good, twisty mystery that dunks the reader into surreality before pulling up and showing them how everything, even the seemingly irrelevant, actually pointed towards a rational if convoluted solution. What more can you ask from a locked room mystery? Recommended.

And you know what’s even better? It’s free! (Unless you want to donate to the author.) You can download it right now! And then maybe more of his works. I know I will. DWaM's blog (and story archive) is here.

Note: DWaM also wrote the novel Gospel of V under the name H.M Faust, so I put that in the tags to make finding him easier. 

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event.

The Sentence is Death (2019) by Anthony Horowitz

It’s been too long since I read Anthony Horowitz’s The Word is Murder, so I was looking forward to the sequel, The Sentence is Death. Anthony “Tony” Horowitz (“Tony” for the narrator, “Horowitz” for the author) is still stuck in his three-book contract about the cases of consultant Daniel Hawthorne, who reminds Tony just why he find the man frustrating: Interrupting a tricky shoot of Tony’s show Foyle’s War to announce that there’s a new case.

Richard Pryce is a divorce attorney known as the “Blunt Razor” for his uncompromising honesty in divorce cases, an attitude that’s made him quite a few high-profile enemies. His most prominent one is pretentious poet Akria Anno, as he was representing her now-ex-husband, Adrian Lockwood. She dumped a glass of wine over his head in a restaurant and wished she could have hit him with a bottle. So it doesn’t look good that Pryce was bludgeoned and stabbed to death with an expensive wine bottle. Tony thinks it all sounds too obvious (and besides, the victim was a lawyer. A divorce lawyer), but there are a couple of anomalies at the scene. Such as the fact that Pryce didn’t drink, his last words "What are you doing here? It’s a bit late," and the giant green 182 painted on his wall. And this is only the first mysterious death.

Sentence is a delight. The narrative effortlessly moves from one point to another, constantly giving the reader new information to chew on. The back-and-forth between Tony and Hawthorne is great too. I felt that Horowitz did a good job of making Hawthorne frustrating here, whereas I felt that he was mostly a bit lonely. We get more bits of how irritating (and potentially dangerous) he can be scattered throughout the book instead of a couple of shock moments. Not that there aren’t a few of them, furthering the mystery of just what this guy’s deal is. The suspects are all well-differentiated. I’ve noticed that Horowitz usually doesn’t have a group of suspects who stay in the limelight, but they drift in and out as the story requires, so it’s to his credit that even the suspects who have very little page time are distinctive, with their own secrets. Horowitz also throws in a new compilation: DI Cara Grunshaw, a cop who’s simmering fury and aggression makes Tony wish for the insensitive and manipulative Hawthorne.

The mystery is very well done. It’s stronger than Word. There are more clues this time around, and the key information is given to you earlier than in Word. There are even false solutions this time! There are three layers: the killer for people who are just reading the book for fun and who don’t really care about solving it, the killer for those who think they’re smarter than Anthony Horowitz, and the actual killer. Dear readers, I fell hard and fast for the red herrings and felt very proud of myself. But the actual clues are all there. I’ve read some reviews noting that the final explanation for the number is a bit of a let-down, and I’ll admit that you have to jump through one-to-many logic hoops to figure it out. But I thought it was funny, especially when I realized how boldly Horowitz clued it. There was one bit about a phone call where I was like, "Okay, I guess..." at the explanation, but other than that, I had no issues with the plot.

When I read Word, I thought Horowitz was going to do more with the meta elements. But now that I see he’s mostly being clever (and justly proud of himself!), I could enjoy them more. He’s a great writer, and I’d love to read a behind-the-scenes book about Foyle’s War and his other TV work. Honestly, I’d think the biggest issue is keeping his own timeline straight. This book was written in 2019 but set in 2012, and I wonder if Horowitz struggles to keep his technology and pop culture references straight. It would be easy to slip into writing about modern-day trends and forget that they didn’t exist yet. But he does a good job here. It’s amusing to see Tony mention how he changed names, or reference the previous chapters, or how those chapters provide clues for Hawthorne, or foreshadow his later work. I really like this close-but-not-quite-our-timeline that he's made.

Obviously, I had a blast with the book. I was only going to give this a Recommended, since at the end it doesn’t re-shape the genre and there are better books out there, but I enjoyed this so much that I’m going to bump it up to Highly Recommended. This would honestly be a good entry point to the series, if you happened to see it at your bookstore or library.

Other Reviews: Ah, Sweet Mystery! In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, CrossExaminingCrime, The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Stephen M. Pierce.

The Penguin Pool Murder (1931) by Stuart Palmer

After reading many positive reviews of his work, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and read Stuart Palmer’s debut novel, The Penguin Pool Murder. Palmer was an active man: "variously employed as an ice man, apple picker, taxi driver, newspaper reporter, teacher, editor, and treasure hunter" (I want to know more about that last one.) He would later go on to be a screenwriter.

His first book introduced the world to Hildegard Withers, "spinster, born Boston, age thirty-nine, occupation school teacher," who debuts in style. Her first appearance has her tripping up a pickpocket during a class trip to the New York Aquarium, insisting that she’s entitled to the reward money for his capture, but still having enough morality and common sense to demand he get medical attention. But a pickpocket proves not to be the most dangerous person in the aquarium, for the squwaking of penguins alerts her to a body floating in their tank.

Inspector Piper of the New York Police Department at first thinks that it’s a case of drowning, but bruises on the dead man’s body and the blood in the water--not to mention the cry of shock from the man’s wife, "What have we done?"--alerts him to a carefully planned murder. But who stabbed the man in the ear with a hatpin before dumping him in the tank? Thankfully, Miss Withers is a believer in "an old-fashioned ideal of justice…blindfolded, uncompromising justice" and has always wanted to be a detective…

The book’s main appeal is Miss Withers herself. I was worried I would find her obnoxious, but she’s actually a very good protagonist. Tough and takes no nonsense, but is also capable of being flummoxed and even a bit of a romantic, which Palmer plays with at the end. Her byplay with Inspector Piper is great too. The mystery keeps a steady pace, with plenty of incident, although some of it reads as Hollywood cliches. (This book was turned into a movie in 1932.) There are even two minor impossible crimes thrown into the mix! First, a key piece of evidence disappears from a room. All of the possible suspects are searched, but the evidence isn’t on them. Later, a key witness is found hanging in his locked cell. Neither of these are major parts of the plot (the locked cell is explained almost immediately after it’s discovered, and I don’t know if the first one would have fooled the police), but they were still nice to see (even if they were too minor to label the post accordingly).

One of the best things about this book is how it captures the times. It was published in 1931 so the Great Depression is still very fresh. There’s references to the recent stock market crash. My favorite bit is when Palmer mentions that people are selling "a perfect reproduction of a check bearing the name and insignia of the ill-fated Bank of the United States, printed on an oblong of thin rubber!" But this isn’t just set-dressing. The fact that the victim was a broker who handled a lot of now-lost money provides a motive for a few of the suspects.

Speaking of the suspects and the cluing, this book was pretty good about cluing the killer. The decisive clue is only dropped at the very end, but there are actually quite a few clues throughout the book. I think that most experienced readers will turn a critical eye to the killer, although actually figuring out all the details of what they were doing and the exact evidence proving that this person is the killer will require close reading. I do wish the final clue was handled better, but I can chalk that up to the author not having the best grasp of how to finish his first book.

Overall, I quite enjoyed The Penguin Pool Murder. It was a really solid and witty mystery, and makes a very strong showing for its author. Recommended.

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Golden Age of Detective Fiction (review contains spoilers), Classic Mysteries, The Book Decoder, Mrs. K Investigates.

Lord Edgware Dies (1933) by Agatha Christie

"Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a bookstall."

Lord Edgware Dies opens with Poirot and Hastings watching Carlotta Adams’s matinee, where she shows her skill at impersonation while mocking some of the biggest names in London. One of these is Jane Wilkinson, the current Lady Edgware. Wilkinson is one of Christie’s greatest monsters, a woman who’s completely self-absorbed. She doesn't care one bit about others unless it impacts her. "I don’t mean she’s exactly immoral--she isn't…Just sees one thing only in life--what Jane wants." Poirot gets a first-hand view of this when she tell him, "M. Poirot, somehow or other I’ve just got to get rid of my husband!"

Thankfully, she tells Poirot that she just wants him to help her get a divorce from her husband. Intrigued, and interested to study Lord Edgware, Poirot agrees…only to learn that Lord Edgware already agreed to a divorce! Six months ago! Poirot speculates that one of the two is lying, or a third party has suppressed the letter where he agreed. But this mystery is complicated by a more serious one: Lord Edgware is stabbed to death in his library, and the servants report that he was visited by Lady Edgware. An open-and-shut case, were it not for a crucial detail: Jane Wikinson was at a dinner at the time of death…

And before you get any clever ideas about Carlotts Adams, she too is dead. An overdose of veronal did her in. It’s quickly determined that she visited Lord Edgware on the night he died, but who hired her to frame Jane Wilkinson? Bryan Adams is the first to talk about Jane’s amorality whenever possible. There’s also the dead man’s daughter, a victim of Edgware’s cruelty. And what about Lord Edgware’s dissolute nephew, Ronald Marsh, who benefits handsomely from his uncle’s death? There’s even a shady butler who goes missing after the murder to complicate things.

Edgware is a novel set among high-society; Poirot hob-nobs with lords and ladies and actors and intellectuals. And yet, the key clues are things like a pair of eyeglasses, a torn letter. The mystery is very well-constructed. Some Christie novels suffer from too many unrelated criminal schemes at the last second, here she does a better job about folding in the plots of the different suspects to the main murder. Said main murder is quite well done. I’d been spoiled on it, and read some criticism of the solution going in. However, I think Christie does an excellent job, as she always does, at misdirecting the reader and getting them to ask the wrong questions and follow their own assumptions, rather than the evidence. Sure, you could argue that it’s unlikely that Poirot would struggle, but the average reader will. And even if you do know the solution, there’s always the joy that comes from seeing how carefully Christie clues her mystery.

Poirot and Hastings also have some good banter here. I will never understand why Hastings is always so keen to ship Poirot off to the old folks’ home every other time he speaks, but when he’s snarking with Poirot, he’s at his best. I do have a couple of issues with the book: there’s one bit that gets hyped up as a minor mystery that’s handwaved at the end (ROT13: gur zrqvpny xabjyrqtr arrqrq gb xvyy gur ivpgvz) and, on a more serious note, whenever Christie starts talking about Jews I wince. My issues, even the anti-Semitism, were ultimately minor issues in a pretty solid book, however.

Lord Edgware Dies is a little underrated. You don’t see people naming it as their favorite Christie, at least. I think this is because it was written when Christie was putting out classic after classic; the Poirot before this was Peril at End House, and the following book was…Murder on the Orient Express. So this can easily fall under the radar. The idea that the solution is weak I also think contributes to this. That’s a shame, because this is a solid Christie novel. It's not my personal best either, frankly, but it is very much worth your time. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Ah, Sweet Mystery, Dead Yesterday, Tangled Yarns, The Grandest Game in the World, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Classic Mysteries, Countdown John's Christie Journal (contains spoilers later in the post), Beneath the Stains of Time, Mysteries Ahoy!

Off the Record (2011) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

Image taken from the Puzzle Doctor's review, linked below.

For some years now, the Puzzle Doctor has been a passionate advocate for Dolores Gordon-Smith as a writer following in the tradition of the Golden Age of Detection. It’s taken me longer than it should have, but I’ve finally gotten around to reading the fifth in her main series, set in the 1920s and starring Army major and mystery writer Jack Haldean.

Off the Record doesn’t refer to reporting, but to recording. Specifically, to advances in sound recording. According to the author’s note, after fifty years of dominance, gramophones were challenged by radio, which easily surpassed them in sound quality. The only hope for them was to embrace electrical recording. Such is the issue facing Charles Otterborne, president of New Century Works. His salvation is in the form of Professor Carrington, who has invented a new method of electrical recording. Unfortunately, on the day he arrives to negotiate, things go horribly wrong. Otterborne is shot to death and Carrington is on the spot. His belligerence and history of mental problems do not serve him well, and he kills himself in his cell. The only salve for his reputation is that Otterborne’s death is ruled a suicide, as he was on the verge of being exposed for embezzling from his own company. That’s the end of it, as far as the police are concerned, but the "Stoke Horan suicides" cast a shadow over events to come.

A few weeks later, Hector Fergeson comes to Haldean with some concerns. His stepfather is Stephen Dunbar, the owner of the company that would have produced Professor Carrington’s machine. Oddly, even though his scientist and potential business partner are both dead, Dunbar is cheery, acting like he has an ace up his sleeve. Fergeson knows his stepfather is a ruthless man and asks Haldean to see what he can dig up. Haldean doesn’t get very far before someone shoots Dunbar in his hotel room.

The best suspect is Gerry Carrington, Professor Carrington’s son. He has a temper to match his old man’s and met with Dunbar minutes before his death. Half of the other suspects seem to think he’s guilty as well, but they dance around it out of sympathy. What about Dunbar’s wife, an actress and daughter of a murderer? She’s quick to challenge all suspicions against her in a dramatic monologue that’s one of the funniest scenes of the book. And then there’s Steven Lewis, Otterborne’s son-in-law, and his wife, Molly. And what does a violent assault on Lewis’s uncle have to do with this? Honestly, this is quite a violent book. There are six deaths by the end of it!

Gordon-Smith does a good job with a complex mystery. She has a firm grasp on pacing and doling out suspicion. Multiple times when reading I thought to myself, "You know, X hasn’t been mentioned in a while, I wonder if…" and lo and behold, every time, by the end of that chapter or the next, X had shown up and had plausible suspicion attached to them. Her characters are sympathetic enough that you can’t quite pin down who would be the best suspect. I know that some mystery fans will be on their guard as soon as the phrase “recording device” is mentioned, and while Gordon-Smith doesn’t do anything innovative with the idea, it’s still woven well into the plot.

The story isn’t perfect mind you. I had an issue with how Gordon-Smith uses a certain something. (ROT13: V qba’g guvax fvyrapref jbex gung jryy.) Also, while I thought that the plot was genuinely clever and that the main clue pointing to the big reveal was very good, it also felt to me like that was the only major clue. Once you realize X the mystery falls into place, but it didn't feel like there was as much pointing to X as there could have been.

My griping aside, I enjoyed this book. Gordon-Smith does an excellent job of writing a Golden Age-style novel that will challenge and entertain the reader. After I read it, I immediately wanted to pick up another one, and in light of that, I can safely Recommend this book.

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel and The Invisible Event.

Lending the Key to the Locked Room (2002/2020) by Tokuya Higashigawa (translated by Ho-Ling Wong)

For some time now, I’ve been interested in the works of Tokuya Higashigawa. Ho-Ling has done a great job of selling him as someone who combines humor with well-plotted mysteries. In a world where most of the Japanese authors I know of tend to either write on the spectrum of "genre-defining masterpiece," or "historically important work," or "unconventional twist on the mystery genre," Higashigawa seems to lean towards solid if conventional mystery stories. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Lending the Key to the Locked Room, his debut novel, focuses on Ryuhei Tomura, a wannabe director. However, when the book opens, he’s realized the limits of his skill and is content to do work for a local film company in Ikagawa City. He even (kinda) has a job lined up thanks to an old college senior, Kosaku Moro. Sadly, his girlfriend, Yuki Konno, finds this too unambitious and publicly and dramatically breaks up with him. Ryuhei tells himself he’s getting over it, but soon goes on a drunken bender where he tries to fight someone (and loses badly) while yelling that he’s going to kill Yuki.

To help him get over the break-up, Moro invites Ryuhei to a movie night in Moro’s apartment, which he’s partly converted into a home theater. Ryuhei brings the B-film Massacre Manor to watch, and the two men enjoy some snacks and drinks afterwards. Moro goes to take a shower, but when he fails to return, Ryuhei goes to investigate and finds Moro lying on the bathroom floor, stabbed to death. Ryuhei faints and awakens the next day. When he checks the apartment, he finds that the door is chain locked. Then he learns that Yuki was killed the previous night, and his only alibi witness is…Moro. Needless to say, he bolts: "It was the worst thing he could have possibly done."

Desperate, Ryuhei turns to his ex-brother-in-law, Morio Ukai. Ukai is a private detective who’s agency has the motto WELCOME TROUBLE, and Ryuhei will get him into a lot of it before the book is done.

Lending leans heavily towards comedy. The book drips with funny asides and sharp dialogue. However, while I was amused and entertained, nothing really crossed the line into full-on funny for me. I don’t know how much of this was Higashigawa’s actual writing or the translation being a little dry. It was lighthearted and I found it pleasant, but rarely on the level of laughing out loud. To the book’s credit, the character’s actions rarely cross the line into cringe. Most of their actions are silly or ridiculous, but they make sense. Ukai and Ryuhei impersonating cops to interrogate witnesses is ridiculous, but it keeps the plot moving forward; there’s never a moment where the book spins its wheels while trying to be funny.

Still, it does mean the characters are a bit thin. They’re entertaining, but I never really felt any connection to them or concern for Ryuhei’s situation. I found the characters in Mead’s Death and the Conjuror to be a little more distinctive. I also wish that the comedy had been better woven into the mystery plot. There’s one part where the consequence of a comedy sequence does play a role in the mystery, but it’s a minor one. The whole thing felt a little over-explained. There was a simpler explanation than what we got that didn’t need the comedy aspect to be satisfying.

The mystery side of the book is pretty good. However, I do think that most hardcore mystery fans can figure out the broad strokes of the solution. There aren’t too many alternative options to latch on to, which the rapid pace of the book disguises. But it’s well-done and the solution fits the tone of the book well. Sadly, the best part of the solution is a giant spoiler to even mention. Rest assured that I found it very clever and almost consider it worth the price of admission.

All in all, I enjoyed this book. It’s a fun little mystery comedy; a little lightweight but still worth your time to read. I can’t say that I’m a die-hard Higashigawa fan yet, but I’m open to becoming one. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Mysteries Ahoy! (comments contain spoilers, in ROT13 mind you, for this book and The Red Right Hand), Beneath the Stains of Time, Ah Sweet Mystery, James Scott Byrnside, The Invisible Event, Stephen M. Pierce, and The Case Files of Ho-Ling.

Death and the Conjuror (2022) by Tom Mead

A review of this book almost feels pointless. Surely anyone reading this blog has already heard of and has made up their mind on Tom Mead and his debut novel. But I am determined to review as much as I can, and maybe there’s someone out there who passed this book up when it first came out.

Death and the Conjuror takes place in a fantasy England, one where locked room murders have "rolled over the city like a fog." Indeed, no less than three impossible crimes will afflict London’s finest. The first is the murder of psychologist Dr. Anselm Rees, his throat slashed in his locked office mere minutes after a mysterious, unknown visitor that appeared out of the rainy night left. The door was locked, the hallway under observation, and the locked French windows opened into a muddy yard with no footprints…at least, none near the window. This is the main impossibility of the book.

The second comes quickly: the theft of El Nacimiento, a lost painting by the insane artist Mantolio Espina. The painting was kept in a locked chest with the only key around the neck of its owner. Even if someone could have stolen the painting, the window was too small to push it through and the maids saw no one leave with it or anything that could have held it. The final impossibility comes later in the book, where a victim turns up strangled in an elevator…even though the police were just in it and it was under observation from when they left until the discovery of the body.

As mentioned, Rees’s death is the core of the book. The likeliest suspects are his three patients. There’s Floyd Stenhouse, a musician with the Philharmonic…who’s tormented by bizarre nightmares. The second murder takes place in his apartment building. There’s Della Cookson, an actress and star of the play Miss Death...and a kleptomaniac who was also the only person who know of El Nacimiento. Finally, there’s Claude Weaver, a famous author…who slips into fugue states where he’s unaware of what he’s doing, and who’s being stalked by a mysterious man…

And how is this all connected, if it’s connected at all, to Dr. Rees’s one failure, the suicide of the patient Der Schlangenmann, “The Snakeman”?

That’s the “death.” The “conjuror” is Joseph Spector, a magician who’s age could be "anywhere from fifty to eighty" and who "looks like he could get away with any crime." Spector is an appealing protagonist, someone who has the understanding both of mechanical trickery and human nature to unravel the crimes. And the crimes are good. The theft of the painting is a bit of a let-down, and the elevator murder is a tad too complex (this is one that would benefit from the television adaptation), but the murder of Dr. Rees is really good. In practice it’s simple, but there’s a very clever deception at the heart of it, and Mead does a good job of making the fiddly mechanical bits feel clever. I think the best way of summing up my thoughts on the impossible crimes is satisfied. That’s not a negative. I’ve just read enough locked rooms to not be as easily wowed. It’s satisfying to see the locked rooms, the two murders especially, explained and pieced together. There are even clues! Footnoted! (Although for some I thought, “Come on Mead, no one would notice that!”) Yes, I was pleased here.

Of course, there’s the whodunit to consider as well. There’s an irony here. We’re told that the locked room mysteries at the center of the plot are "hard to let oneself become emotionally invested in" and that "you must retain a sense of intellectual distance from them." And indeed, on a mechanical level, access to the physical tools necessary to commit the crimes is important to Spector’s logic. But in practice, solving the crime requires Spector to understand “insanity.” There’s a bit close the end of the book where Spector discusses Théodore Géricault’s Portraits of the Insane and it is clear that he wishes to understand what drives the different suspects. Some are genuinely tormented by a morbid psychology that they wish to alleviate, others have far more venal motives for their actions. While I wish that we had spent more time with the suspects to get to know them, the whodunit isn't just a throwaway aspect of the book.

I quite enjoyed this. While I have some issues with it, they are ultimately minor blemishes on a very good book. Death and the Conjuror got a lot of attention among intense and casual mystery fans alike for being a locked room mystery released in the modern day. I’m sure that Tom Mead has done better since his debut, but this is still very much worth your time. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Beneath the Stains of Time, The Invisible Event, James Scott Byrnside, Tangled Yarns, Mystery*File, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, AhSweetMystery, CrossExaminingCrime, Tangled Yarns, Solving the Mystery of Murder, and Stephen M. Pierce.

The Labors of Hercules (1947) by Agatha Christie

I feel that The Labors of Hercules is an underrated Christie. I have no evidence of this, but I never see it

or the stories within mentioned very often among Christie aficionados. This makes sense. Christie was good but not exceptional at short fiction. There is, of course, her collection of Miss Marple stories, The Thirteen Problems, but outside of that, her one gem “The Witness for the Prosecution,” is a non-series. Furthermore, Labors is an unusual collection. It resembles her Harley Quin or Parker Pyne stories in plotting. There are only a few stories here that could be described as anything resembling “traditional” Christie. Most don’t feature murders. A few don’t have any crime at all.

And yet I find this a truly fascinating collection. Christie is being experimental here, and it works out in her favor. To be sure, these aren’t always her best mysteries; some of them can be light on cluing. But as works of fiction they are excellent, and I think that some of her most interesting work can be found here.

We begin with a foreword where Poirot brings up his impending retirement with Dr. Burton. The other man is rightly skeptical of the idea. The conversation turns to Poirot’s lack of knowledge of the classics, which provokes an idea from Poirot. While the Greek gods themselves are poor models ("These gods and goddesses--they seemed to have as many different aliases as a modern criminal. Indeed they seemed to definitely be criminal types. Drink, debauchery, incest, rape, loot, homicide and chicanery--enough to keep a juge d’Instruction constantly busy."), he decides that the Labors of Hercules themselves appeal, and that he will take twelve cases “no more, no less” in reference to them.

The first case is “The Nemean Lion,” and it does not bode well for Poirot’s glory. He is asked to look into the dognapping and ransom of a Pekinese dog. At first dismissive, he agrees to take the case because of how unimportant it is, and because he is being hired by the husband, not the wife. He soon learns that there’s a "racket" about kidnapping and ransoming the pet dogs of the rich. The clues are good, and the root of the plan is a Christie classic, though applied in a different context.

“The Lernean Hydra” is the most traditional story of the collection. Poirot is hired by a small-down doctor who’s hypochondriac wife has recently died. The “hydra” in this case is gossip; half the village is convinced that the wife was murdered. Interestingly, Poirot isn’t hired to solve a murder, but to instead bring an end to the rumors. Which he does, and it will shock no one to find that the wife was spirited to an early grave. The cluing feels a little weak (Poirot brings up evidence that I don’t believe was mentioned earlier), but the solution still feels like the logical resolution. It’s Poirot investigating a case meant for Miss Marple.

“The Arcadian Deer” is one of those crime-less stories I mentioned. Poirot is stranded in a small town due to car trouble, and gets acquainted with a local mechanic. ("one of the handsomest specimens of humanity he had ever seen, a simple young man with the outward semblance of a Greek god.") Ted Williamson has a problem for Poirot: last year, he had a charming encounter with a beautiful young woman, a ladies maid with golden hair. He wanted to meet her again, but found that the lady in question had a different maid, and he has had no luck in tracking down the woman he fell in love with. What seems like a simple inquiry sends Poirot around the world, even to "the world’s end," before he is able to find the Arcadian deer in question. This is almost a fairy tale.

After the previous story, Poirot decides to enjoy his time in Switzerland, only to be caught up in the case of “The Erymanthian Boar.” The boar in question is Marrascaud, a ruthless criminal on the run for murder. The police believe he is hiding in Rochers Neiges at an off-season hotel. But why would a criminal choose to hide on a mountainside hotel from which he cannot hope to escape? Obviously there are more guests than expected at the hotel, of varying degrees of suspicious. The funicular leading to the hotel is damaged. Poirot himself is nearly attacked in his bedroom and an undercover police officer is murdered. The solution hinges more on Poirot’s instinct than on evidence, but this is still a good story.

“The Augean Stables” sees some of the highest levels of government consulting Poirot on a scandal of government-destroying proportions. The tabloid rag the X-Ray News is threatening to publish an expose of the previous Prime Minister, John Hammond, revealing him as a fraudster and all-around scoundrel. Unfortunately, these allegations are all true, and are threatening his successor. Now, I would say to let them all hang, but Poirot believes strongly enough in the successor to intervene on his behalf. I will let the reader discover what his strategy is. It’s a different-than-normal story, and Christie stacks the deck by making the editor of the X-Ray News a slimy blackmailer and the successor an honest man, but I, both then and now, have little sympathy for corrupt governments.

However, the next story, “The Stymphalian Birds,” is one of my favorite Christies, no, one of my favorite mystery stories of all time. It’s an unconventional one, where our focus is on the young diplomat Harold Waring. He’s taking a holiday in Herzoslovakia (from Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys) and makes the acquaintance of Elsie Clayton and her mother. His attraction to the former is hampered by her abusive and jealous husband, who shows up breathing fire one night and is killed in the struggle. Bad enough for our young rising political star, but then two ugly old ladies, "birds of ill omen," begin to peck away with blackmail demands.

As I said, this is an unusual story. Poirot doesn’t show up until the last few pages, but he quickly extracts Harold from the mess he’s found himself in. Christie expertly plays with the audience and lampoons her own countrymen in this very good mystery.

“The Cretan Bull” continues to be unconventional. Poirot is approached by Diana Maberly who tells him that her fiance (another magnificent specimen of male beauty) has suddenly broken off their engagement; he’s convinced that he’s going insane. Indeed, there is insanity in his family, and he’s been suffering from hallucinations. And someone is killing farm animals in the dead of night. The blood he finds in his washbin in the morning is incriminating. Poirot exposes something just as disturbing in a tale that one can read as a Gothic, only with a young man as the target instead of a woman. The key evidence against the guilty party is slight but still convicting, and Christie will successfully deceive the reader again.

Next we have a tale of drug abuse. “The Horses of Diomedes” has Poirot called to a place he normally would never be seen at: The mews in the aftermath of a party where cocaine was passed around. The doctor who calls him is particularly concerned about a young woman, Sheila Grant, who might have been the one to bring the drugs. Poirot investigates her and her sisters and brings the crime home to the metaphorical flesh-eating horse behind it all. A minor work, honestly, but I again appreciate the game Christie plays with the audience here.

We have a more traditional work up next: “The Girdle of Hippolyta.” Poirot is asked to look into the theft of a valuable painting. He has no real joy in the task, and instead is far more interested in the disappearance of a schoolgirl. The young woman in question vanished from a train, and only her hat was found, fourteen miles from where the train stopped--and from where her classmates last saw her. I would say that the disappearance is an impossible crime, but Christie doesn’t dwell on it, and it’s not worth tagging the post as one. Obviously the theft and the disappearance--and reappearance--of the girl are tied together. The answer for the disappearance isn’t shocking, but the evidence for how and why it was done are good.

“The Flock of Geryon” sees the return of a culprit from a previous story. Having been let off by Poirot, she’s been struggling with boredom and wants to volunteer her services for the great man. A friend of hers has been drawn in by a religious group, the Flock of the Shepherd. The leader of the group, one Dr. Andersen, is an attractive man preaching a message of love and unity, so it’s unsurprising that his flock is filled with older, wealthy women…but a great concern that many of them have died. However, they all died of different illnesses, quite some time apart, attended to by different doctors, etc. Poirot’s client wants to go undercover to determine what is going on. Not really a “mystery,” but still a good story starring one of Christie’s most fun protagonists.

The next story, “The Apples of the Hesperides,” bears resemblance to “The Arcadian Deer,” in that the case doesn’t involve, or in this case, focus on, a crime. Emory Power is a ruthless businessman who many years ago purchased a valuable goblet, originally meant for Pope Alexander IV. The chalice was stolen before he could claim it, and he’s been hunting for it ever since, "Not for its beauty. Not for its value." but for his "pride." Like “Deer,” Poirot treks around the world before arriving at another desolate location at the "world’s end," where he finds the goblet. This one isn’t clued except in the broadest sense possible, but it’s more of a religious tale than a mystery, one where the solution involves the salvation of a man’s soul.

“The Capture of Cerberus” opens with Poirot suffering as he is pushed and shoved through the London Underground. Then someone calls out to him. It’s Countess Vera Rossakoff, a jewel thief he’s met before (and is attracted to, "It’s the misfortune of small precise men to hanker after large and flamboyant women."). They’re going on opposite escalators, him up and her down, and when he asks where they can meet, she cries back, "In Hell…"

“Hell” in this case refers to the Countess’s new nightclub, modeled after Hell. It comes with devils painted on the wall, steps with words like "Wipe the slate clean and start afresh…" and "I can give it up any time I like…", and the titular Cerberus, a large and vicious dog that the Countess controls completely. It is also, according to the police, a hub of drug trafficking. Poirot again outwits the culprit, but I admit to finding this one a little unsatisfying. The reveal of where the drugs were concealed was good, but I didn’t like the choice of culprit.

But wait, there’s more!

If you look up the original publication dates for these stories, you’ll see that the first eleven were published in The Strand from November 1939 to September 1940. So far so good. But “The Capture of Cerberus” wasn’t published until it was collected in the full collection in 1947. What happened? Well, Christie wrote a story called “The Capture of Cerberus,” but it was never published due to its political content. The one collected here was Christie’s second attempt at the story. Luckily for us, the original was included in John Curran’s Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks.

The original “Capture” once again features Countess Vera Rossakoff, albeit in a reduced role. She introduces Poirot to a friend, Dr. Keiserbach, and tells said friend, "He can even bring the dead back to life." This statement leads the other man to meet with Poirot that night about the death of the modern-day demagogue August Hertzlein. Herzilein is a dictator who has the whole of Europe under his spell, setting "huge crowds rocking with frenzied enthusiasm." Chillingly, this spell remains unbroken even after he was shot during a speech; in fact, it’s gotten even stronger: "For the dead man had become a symbol, a martyr, a Saint." Keiserbach’s son was accused of the shooting and torn about by the crowd, but his father knows he was a loyal follower of Hertlein and never would have shot him. No, there’s something more unsettling going on, which Keiserbach tasks Poirot with exposing.

In retrospect, Poirot doesn’t solve much. Keiserbach has more or less figured it out, Poirot just brings everything to a conclusion. But he does it well. The cluing is also pretty good in this one. As for the political content, I agree that it’s certainly more explicitly political than most of Christie’s work outside of earliest fiction. I find some of the ideas she expresses here interesting when looked at in the light of her play Akhnaton, which she’d written before this. It’s more optimistic than you might think, and it seems to me that she was wish-casting a bit. I’m not shocked it was never published considering the state of the world in 1940 (and one must remember that the Battle of Britain had just begun.)

At first, I thought that the first “Cerberus” was the better one. It’s certainly a grander finale, with Poirot’s actions affecting the entire world. I also feel that it’s a slightly better mystery than the current version. But after chewing on it, I have to give the nod to the current version of “Cerberus.” It’s not as dramatic, but it makes better use of Vera, the setting of Hell is inspired, and the titular “capture” is much better integrated. But don’t get me wrong, both are good finales.

Obviously, I love this collection. This is Christie at her most creative and interesting, putting Poirot into the type of mysteries you wouldn’t normally think of as “Poirot stories.” While they aren’t super-complex mysteries, they are still excellent stories that are must-reads for fans of Poirot or Christie in general. Highly Recommended.

Other Reviews: Ah Sweet Mystery, The Passing Tramp (in two parts, link to part 1 is on the page), and Countdown John's Christie Journal.