A Eulogy for Reason (2019) by DWaM

A delivery girl brings a package to a shady apartment. A woman goes on a date with a man she met online…and plans to rob him. A desperate man tries to make money for his daughter with a pyramid scheme (“T-triangle”). And the police investigate a brutal locked room mystery. And there’s even more going on in the city besides. It all sounds overwhelming. But just relax. The Inspector is coming.

And remember that the date is always April 17th, 2028.

Such is the set-up of DWaM’s A Eulogy for Reason. I admit, I was tentative going into this, unsure if I’d vibe with it, but there was nothing to worry about. Beneath the slightly unusual narrative structure is a very good, if nightmarish, mystery story. There’s a bombing, a cult that wears animal masks, and a book, The Inspector’s Arrival, that seems to predict the future and definitely mirrors the major crime. We get multiple perspectives on this fateful day (and following morning). There’s a fair bit of dark humor here (one of the narrators mocks conspiracy theorists online but proves to be more paranoid than any of them, one viewpoint character is a detective who gives a Lenny Briscoe-style one-liner and keeps apologizing for it for the rest of his chapter). Even if it's not clear how at first, most of the narrators fill in some piece of what happened on that fateful April 17th, 2028.

Oh, and one of the narrators dreams that a giant hand is coming out of the sky. There’s that too.

But what about the locked room? I hear you cry. Fear not, for there are two here. Kinda. One is fictional, contained within The Inspector’s Arrival. Both have a woman set on fire in her bedroom, which is not only locked from the inside, but taped. The solutions are pretty good. I liked the in-universe one a little better. It relies on some unusual behavior but is the right amount of twisted for me. The main locked room is still good though, not so much for the how but for the why, which connects the murder to a lot of the other weirdness going on throughout the novella.

Because, in the end, this is a pretty well thought out mystery. The multiple perspectives might seem confusing, but most of the connections are made pretty clear early on. I was impressed by how smoothly everything linked together. I’d hesitate a bit to call Eulogy a fully fair mystery. I would be shocked if anyone solved this 100%, since some of the smaller details are mentioned in passing and you really aren’t given the context to recognize their relevance. But those who pay attention and take careful notes can make it 85-90% of the way there. Come the explanation, we see that every key point was at least mentioned earlier, so the ending still feels satisfying. It may not be perfectly clued, but it is well-foreshadowed.

All in all, this was another great mystery from DWaM, and probably my favorite of his stuff that I’ve read so far. This may not be a traditional mystery, but it is a real one. Fans of Kitayama’s The “Lapis Lazul Castle” Murders who are craving something with that same sense of a mystery that takes place on the edge of reality might want to check this out. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event.

The Phantom Ragdoll (2019) by DWaM

This is the third book in a row I’ve reviewed that mixes “murder in transportation” with an impossible crime. I didn’t plan it that way, but that’s how it ended up.

DWaM’s The Phantom Ragdoll is his second original novella. I enjoyed his first novella and was looking forward to this one. And just like Leviathan, a surreal and bizarre impossible crime takes center stage.

The narrator is Noel, a frustrated man whose marriage—an open one—is on the rocks. He’s sent by his company to a distant town to do some insurance work, and he’s looking forward to trying really hard not to think about the man his wife is sleeping with. But when the old-fashioned train goes through a tunnel, Noel finds himself with plenty of distractions. After the train emerges, there’s a scream from the corridor. He emerges to find two college students outside of their compartment. The woman thinks that there’s a dead body on the floor, and claims that it just “appeared.” When Noel goes to investigate, he finds that it’s actually a ragdoll. Still no answer for how it just appeared in the few seconds they were in the dark, but that doesn’t matter. Noel barely gets back to his compartment when the woman screams again. The ragdoll is gone…and in its place is a corpse. Of a man no one recognizes. Who couldn’t have got on the train.

Noel and the other passengers are semi-detained in a nearby town where Noel meets K, a real, actual detective who’s here to investigate the murder and wants Noel to be his assistant. Not that Noel wants to be. K is the other man, you see.

It’s the dynamic between these two men that gives Ragdoll some flair. We see their relationship go from one-sided loathing on Noel’s side to more tense to mutual contempt to…certainly not respect, not even understanding, but to some sort of connection between the two men that gives the ending a little more heft. K is a fun detective character to follow anyway, with the right level of snide superiority mixed with playfulness (well, not so much from Noel’s point of view). K drops plenty of teasing hints while never explaining what exactly his thought process is, while Noel tries to deflate him in his narration. He’s very insistent that K is lying about something but seeing as what he insists are lies are really just uncomfortable facts about Noel’s marriage, it’s hard to gauge how much of this is K and how much is Noel.

But as I said, the two men do have some kind of connection at the end, to the point that I feel that the end of chapter 6 feels like a more natural endpoint and conclusion, with chapter 7 more wrapping up the mystery as a postscript. I enjoyed said mystery a little more than I did Leviathan, but it’s nothing objective. The solution hinges on multiple moving parts and coincidence, but I was able to instantly grasp what was happening, whereas with the previous DWaM I was checking back at the map to make sure I got it. I think there could have been more clues—one of them gets one mention—but in the end, if a reader really makes an effort to think about what’s actually going on, and follows K’s philosophy of never making assumptions, they can at least grasp the outline of what happened.

This was another great work by DWaM. And, like most of his stuff, you can pay what you like. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Genmajou (number 12 on the list), The Invisible Event.

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.