It Walks By Night (1930/2020) by John Dickson Carr

Cover image taken from In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.

It Walks by Night was the novel debut of John Dickson Carr. Carr had been published beforehand—in fact, this book was an extended version of his novella “Grand Guignol”—but those were stories for his college’s literary magazine. This was his major step into the big boys’ club.

It Walks by Night hits the ground running when narrator Jeff Marle gets a wire from juge d’instruction Henri Bencolin “saying merely that there was danger ahead, and was I interested?” Bencolin is endeavoring to protect the great sportsman “Raoul Jourdain, sixth Duc de Saligny.” The Duc’s new wife, Louise, was married to the mad scholar Alexandre Laurent. Was married, since trying to slash your wife up with a razor out of a cold and senseless bloodlust puts a damper on your relationship. Laurent was institutionalized, but has escaped, and paid a visit to a renowned plastic surgeon. That surgeon is dead now. “They found Rothswold’s head looking out from one of his own jars of alcohol on a shelf.” Bencolin fears that Laurent is posing as someone close to de Saligny, and the great man himself is terrified of Laurent’s wrath.

The incident happens on the Duc’s wedding night, while he and others are celebrating at a shady nightclub. The Duc is seen entering a card room; one door is watched by Bencolin while the other is watched by a loyal police officer. de Saligny is heard to ring for drinks, but the waiter is in for a grotesque shock when he arrives: “The head itself stood in the centre of the red carpet, upright on its neck; it showed white eyeballs, and gaped at us with open mouth in the low red light.” Multiple questions present themselves: Why was the victim kneeling on the floor? Who left a copy of Alice in Wonderland in the nightclub outside? And, most important of all, how did the killer leave a watched room? Laurent’s statement, “I have ways of getting into houses, Herr Doktor, that no one knows but myself,” weighs heavily on the problem.

This is a book that leans heavily on its atmosphere. Carr is writing more in the tradition of the Gothic than a conventional mystery novel and buying into it is vital for enjoying the book. Sadly, I did not read this in the best of conditions, and the already-quite-florid language bounced off me. But there were times when it clicked, and Carr got me to believe in this dark, surreal Paris where the educated man’s idea of a good time is discussing famous murderers, and where you can almost believe that a bloodthirsty werewolf is lurking in the moonlit garden. And the end of chapter 3 is perfect pitch-black comedy.

This is not quite your conventional mystery novel. Oh, there are clues, and plenty of them. I even noticed some but failed to piece together what they meant. But Bencolin is in full omniscient detective mode, a step ahead of everyone, including the reader. The British Library edition is sadly lacking a map that makes the solution quite clear when everything is explained.* The solution a bit of a letdown after all the darkness you have to move through to get to it, but it is a simple and ingenious solution, layered well into the narrative and the other plot twists. The best is one dropped on the reader in the build-up to the finale. It’s very improbable and I don’t quite buy it, but again, Carr clues and justifies it well, and the moment of revelation is a perfect, Poe-style shocker.

The characters aren’t much to write home about. Douglas Greene rather dryly calls them “vengeful or mad,” and yeah, pretty much. I did like Bencolin’s father-son relationship with Jeff, which a dynamic you don’t often see in Holmes-Watson pairings. It humanized him while still letting him be the malevolent chess player, the pieces being human lives. And he gets some funny lines too: “Is this room ever used for any purpose other than assassinating guests?” But Sharon Grey shows Carr has absolutely no idea how men and women talk to each other.

But like I said, this is a book that demands you be invested in the exact mood it’s trying to build. If you’re not, it’ll be a slog full of melodramatic ninnies. If you are, well, they’re all still melodramatic, but they’ll have your attention. While I would not make this your first Carr, it is Recommended, especially if you can read it in the dim light, while wind rattles the windowpanes.

The British Library edition also comes with a bonus short story, “The Shadow of the Goat,” Bencolin’s debut. The story revolves around a bet between dashing young Billy Garrick and the sinister Cyril Merton, an actor with “a medieval soul.” Merton claims he’s read of sorcery that allows a man to vanish from a sealed room and Garrick bets him a thousand pounds that he can’t. The party escorts Merton upstairs where he is left behind in a room with a barred window, and the guests gather outside a door bolted on the outside to see if can escape. Then a loud bang is heard, and when they rush upstairs, they find that Merton has, indeed, vanished.

It seems that becoming invisible has caused Merton to go mad, as he follows up by killing a man in his burglarproof home and then assaulting Garrick before vanishing into thin air. Bencolin quickly wraps the whole case up, exposing Merton’s location and explaining all of crimes. The explanations aren’t Carr’s most brilliant (and indeed, one can question the feasibility of the first disappearance), but this is a young man’s mystery, and is quite well constructed, with a solid ending. (ROT13: Gurer ner nyfb fbzr cnenyyryf jvgu gur fbyhgvba gb gur obbx, juvpu znxrf vg vagrerfgvat gb pbzcner gur gjb.) This is a nice addition that almost makes up for the lack of a map.

*There are conflicting reports about this; as far as I can tell, some copies have the map, some don’t. My e-book copy did not have one. 

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, CrossExaminingCrime, The Green Capsule, Mrs. K Investigates, A Crime is Afoot, Tangled Yarns, Playing Detective, James Scott Byrnside, The Grandest Game in the World (contains labeled spoilers), Ah, Sweet Mystery! (contains vague spoilers), Mysteries Ahoy!, Dead Yesterday, The Reader is Warned (contains vague spoilers), and Bad Player's Good Reviews.

"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.