Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle: The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User (2002/2017) by NisiOisiN (translated by Greg Moore)

What is a “genius”?

It’s easy to say that “A genius is a very smart person,” or “a genius is someone who excels in their field.” But then you have to ask how we’re judging “smart” or “excel.” There are a lot of people who know a lot about an arcane topic, but who can’t apply to their everyday life at all. There are a lot of people who are pretty ignorant, but who carry out their day-to-day affairs with undeniable wisdom. So who decides who counts as a “genius”? The geniuses themselves? Non-geniuses?

If I met him in real life, I’d call NisiOisiN a “genius.” After all, most of us couldn’t produce a novel like Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle: The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User (originally published as Zaregoto, Book 1: The Kubikiri Cycle, adapted into the anime Kubikiri Cycle: Aoiro Savant to Zaregoto Tsukai from 2016-2017) at the age of twenty, much less go on to write over one hundred books since then. Maybe he’d agree or laugh it off. Maybe he’d be a bit frustrated. After all, most people know him through the SHAFT adaptation of his urban fantasy Monogatari series, and probably haven’t read a single word he’s written. Or maybe he’d be annoyed, because he sees all the flaws in his first book, the characters he’d define better, the themes he’d make sharper. Or maybe he’d be angry that I’m implicitly dismissing all the thought, time, and effort he put into plotting and then writing this book with, “I’m sure it all came naturally to you.” Which is what I’m saying. He’d probably snap back with, “I just work harder than you.” Which is pretty undeniable.

But that’s just nonsense. In the end, Nisio has no right at all to call himself a genius. That’s something that I think only a critic can say. So I’m labeling him as a “genius” whether he likes it or not. But it’s clear in Zaregoto (literally, “nonsense”) that he’s been thinking about what makes a “genius.” 

The mystery is set on Wet Crow’s Feather Island, home of Iria Akagami, heir to the Akagami Foundation before being suddenly and mysteriously disowned. She amuses herself by gathering geniuses to live at her island mansion. There’s a genius cook, Yayoi Sashirono. But really, she just has naturally strong senses of taste and smell. She just became a cook because she thought that was the best use of her gift; her “genius” is just hard work. There’s Akane Sonoyama, who’s an all-around genius. Well, unless you count her irrational (though she would say otherwise) hatred of artists, including crippled genius painter Kanami Ibuki. And then there’s genius fortune teller Maki Himena. But she’s not really a “genius,” since she “just” has extraordinary ESP abilities that let her tell the future and read minds. So, since it’s all based on a unique skill that most people don’t have and that you can’t practice, can you really call her a “genius”?

I’m sorry, that’s rude of me.

There’s also Tomo Kunagisa, a genius techie who used to perform acts of borderline cyberterrorism as part of “Team.” Now she’s on the island, accompanied by the narrator, Il-chan. He’s certainly not a genius. No, he’s not a genius at all. He was part of the intellectual ER3 System but dropped out. He’s the detective of our tale, though how effective he is is an exercise for the reader. There’s also the island’s staff, including twin maids. That’s quite a cast, and to be honest, I wish Nisio had highlighted them more. They all have illustrations from artist “take” at the beginning of each chapter, but I had trouble telling them apart, especially the staff. Il-chan isn’t always the best at describing people, you see, preferring to talk up, down, and all around in most of his conversations, bulldozed by his conversation partner, who says what they like about him with almost no pushback.

But the murders are distinctive enough. They’re all impossible crimes, but Nisio gives them all a twist beyond the conventional locked door. A decapitated body in an atelier blocked by a river of paint. A decapitated body found in a locked room where the window is ten feet off the ground. Both heads “cut off from the very base of the neck.” A brutal act of sabotage performed when everyone has an alibi. Unconventional mysteries for an unconventional cast. The solutions to the crimes don’t always awe, but they impress. Nisio is smart enough to resolve the “how” of the first murder early on, making the explanation for the rest all the more impactful.

And the solution is really good. I would never come up with it. That’s why I say that the author is a genius, where he would say I just don’t think about things enough. Which is pretty undeniable. After all, I came close to solving the crimes, I just missed some key points. There’s one clever clue that I wish Nisio had described earlier, but he still gives the reader time to chew over the implications. The final explanation is logical and makes “sense.” Well, it makes sense to a genius.

This book is all about being a genius. What it means to be one. What geniuses do. How they act. How they exploit the fact that they’re “a genius.” How they can be kinda pitiable. I’m thinking of Maki here. A terrible person, but the reason she’s terrible makes total sense. I’d act terrible to people if that were true. You get the sense that Nisio really does care about this island of lunatics, even when they perform the unforgivable.

But I don’t like to talk nonsense. I like to get to the point, and I mean everything I say. So let me start by giving my full kudos to the translation. The words flow and feel very natural. And I say this book is Recommended, especially if you’re looking for something familiar yet different in your mystery diet. 

Other Reviews: Beneath the Stains of Time, The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Bad Player's Good Reviews.

Note: This book was originally translated in 2008 by published by Del Ray. I read the 2017 translation by published by Vertical (same translator though), hence the dates in the title. 

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, Criminal Musings (contains spoilers).

*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.