The Burning Court (1937) by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937), published during the Goldilocks years of the Golden Age, enjoys the status of a fan favorite and hailed by its champions as "a standalone tour-de-force" for its unconventional conclusion – ending with a gutsy, genre-defying twist. Carr reportedly claimed (Douglas G. Greene's The Man Who Explained Miracles, 1995) he wrote The Burning Court in response to "a critic who said that no really terrifying supernatural story could have an American setting" and delivered one of the strangest mystery novels of the decade. A strange mystery novel that, as said, has become something of a fan favorite, but the book also has its fair share of critics.

The critic comes down to that final, genre-defying twist. A twist not like other twists of the period that gets applauded by some for its daring brazenness, while others think it ruined a perfectly good detective novel. For example, Nick Fuller noted in his 2003 review how that twist filled "a highly logical and convincing solution" with "all manner of logical holes."

I didn't get to complain about the twisted epilogue, because The Burning Court as a whole failed to impress. Notably the atmosphere. However, I read a Dutch translation at the time, Het lijk in de crypte (The Corpse in the Crypt), and over the years began to suspect something might have been lost in translation – considering its popularity among fans. So decided to get a copy in English and give The Burning Court a retrial.

If memory is not betraying me, I'll say right off the bat the translation was definitely the problem when it comes to the brooding, creepy atmosphere. Just the opening chapter alone is a case in point why Carr himself is a fan favorite as he was the only one who consistently wrote detective yarns that have very little to do with ordinary, everyday life, but crafted highly imaginative and fantastic tales of mystery, wonder and horror presented as fair play detective stories. I suppose you can describe Carr's best and most imaginative works like The Three Coffins (1935), The Arabian Nights Murder (1936), The Crooked Hinge (1938) and The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) as grounded precursors to the The Twilight Zone (mostly) without the supernatural or extraterrestrial elements. Well, mostly without those elements. And often start out with a fantastic events or outlandish incidents mysterious enough that could sustain a detective story without anyone getting impossibly killed or disappeared. The Burning Court is a perfect example of Carr spinning a very unlikely, but intriguing, yarn and stringing the reader along on one of the most outre detective novels of the 1930s.

The Burning Court, set in 1929, takes place in the fictitious Pennsylvanian town of Crispen where Edward Stevens, of the publishing house Herald & Sons, has a cottage and headed that way to meet his wife, Marie. Stevens has brought along the manuscript of the new Gaudan Cross book. Cross is a hermit writer devoted to retelling the histories of famous murder cases or "unearthing picturesque crimes" with "a narrative vividness which was like that of an eye-witness." And his latest manuscript is dedicated to women poisoners ("...strong stuff") throughout history. So, on his way to the cottage, Stevens looks through the manuscript and is shocked to find an old photograph of his wife accompanying the sensationally-titled chapter "The Affair of the Non-dead Mistress" – photograph is captioned, "Marie D'Aubray: Guillotined for Murder, 1861." Marie D'Aubray is not only the spitting image of Marie Stevens, but she had an identical mole on her jaw and an identical-looking, antique bracelet on her left wrist "he had seen Marie wear a hundred times." Even her expression is uncannily like Marie Stevens.

Was the Marie who was guillotined over seventy years ago a relative of the present-day Marie? Maybe something weirder and unsettling? Stevens is not given much time to consider this extraordinary problem as their next door neighbor, Mark Despard, comes knocking with another problem and an even stranger request.

Old Miles Despard, "that stately reprobate," died two weeks ago from gastro-enteritis, "after reducing the lining of his stomach to a pulp with nearly forty years' high living," but there are some suspicious features to his not entirely unexpected passing. Firstly, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning resemble those of gastro-enteritis. Secondly, the cook, Mrs. Henderson, swears she saw a woman in "queer old-fashioned clothes" standing in Miles' bedroom on the day he died. Mrs. Henderson witnessed the woman handing Miles a cup, turning around and exited through "a door which does not exist." A door bricked up and paneled over for over two hundred years! That's not all. On that night, Mark and his wife, Lucy, went to a masquerade ball at St. Davids. Lucy was dressed as Madame de Montespan in a period clothing.

As noted above, Carr knew how to lay the groundwork for a detective story and this has been merely the prelude. Mark wants to secretly break open the crypt under cover of night and test the body of his uncle for arsenic poison, which is why he brought along a disgraced physician, Mr. Partington. Mark asks Stevens to help them open the crypt together with Mr. Henderson. A four-men job that took two hours and "making a racket fit to wake the dead," but, when they finally can enter the underground crypt, they discover the body of Miles Despard has somehow disappeared from what was supposed to be his final resting place.

What follows has to be one of the most intimate, tightly drawn mysteries Carr has written. Not because of the small pool of potential suspects or their movement being largely limited to a single location, but because the problems they're trying to untangle makes it feel like they're marooned from the rest of the world – like they piece of space-time broke-off from reality. After all, this is a detective story involving dead poisoners decapitated or burnt decades or even centuries ago on order of the Burning Court ("...established to deal with poisoning cases"), talks of the un-dead, witchcraft and satanism. A woman in period dressing making her exit through a phantom door and a dead man inexplicably vanishing from a burial vault closed with a stone slab, soil, gravel and a concrete-sealed pavement ("...which one witness is willing to swear has not been disturbed"). The disappearance, and reappearance, of a bottle of morphine tablets and several pieces of knotted string are fairly normal complications by comparison. But does it all hold up?

First of all, The Burning Court is unquestionably better than I remembered and the problem probably was the translation. However, I don't think The Burning Court is the best (locked room) mystery Carr wrote during this period. The detective portion of the story comes with one hell of a premise and a solid enough plot complimented by a very well done "physical explanation" ("...a thing of sizes and dimensions and stone walls..."). But the locked room trickery is not even the best part. Carr had already put together better, more original locked room mysteries at this point. What makes The Burning Court particularly enjoyable is Carr's often overlooked, maybe even misunderstood, talent to grab the utterly fantastic or otherworldly and whittle it back down to human proportions. Carr exaggerated in order to clarify and find it a very attractive approach to crafting a detective novel or locked room mystery. Like creating a canal system for wild, imaginative ideas to flow freely without swamping half the land/story. Just compare Carr's The Unicorn Murders (1935; as by "Carter Dickson") with John Rhode's Invisible Weapons (1938), which center on similar kind of impossible crimes regarding unseen murder weapons and murderers. Rhode delivered a solid locked room mystery, but I think everyone agrees The Unicorn Murders is the most attractive and memorable of the two.

So with that out of the way, I come to the controversial epilogue kicking open the door to another genre. The short and simple answer is that I didn't care for the twist, but not because I resent Carr trying to mix genres. Something he would go on to do with much more success in his historical time travel mysteries like The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957). You only have to look under the "Hybrid Mysteries" toe-tag to see my growing interest in this rare bird. My problem is that the shocking, genre-defying twist here is just that. A shocking twist for the sake of having a shocking twist, which is never good and Carr is no exception. Fortunately, Carr saved it for the epilogue. So you can take it or leave it. But it's a regrettably missed opportunity. If the supernatural element had been better integrated into the plot, the epilogue could created a very pleasing effect of seamlessly turning a perfectly rational detective story into waking nightmare. A reversal of what he normally does or a prose version of the old woman/young woman optical illusion. Is it a G.K. Chesterton-style detective story or M.R. James-like ghost yarn?

I didn't care about the twist-ending and opt to ignore it, because the rational detective novel preceding the epilogue with its fantastic premise, two impossibilities, bizarre clues and solution presents Carr at the top of his game. If not exactly a legitimate, Golden Age classic, The Burning Court is at least a deserved fan favorite.

A note for the curious: speaking of fan favorites... Hake Talbot style of detective fiction inextricably-linking him to Carr and often referenced Talbot's third, unpublished and lost novel on this blog. Having now reread The Burning Court, I wonder if The Affair of the Half-Witness was Talbot's take on the impossible exit of the woman in period dress witnessed by Mrs. Henderson. The book title could be a nod to the chapter titles ("each was called The Affair of the—Something") from Gaudan Cross' manuscript. Just a bit of fan speculation.

Locked and Loaded, Part 5: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

Every now and then, I do one of these "Locked and Loaded" posts to read and review mostly obscure, often uncollected short locked room mysteries and impossible crime stories covering nearly a century of miraculous crime fiction – stretching from Charles G. Booth's "One Shot" (1925) to James Scott Byrnside's "The Silent Steps of Murder" (2023). I discuss those two short stories, and everything in between, in Part 1, 2, 3 and 4. This fifth installment adds three more obscure, rarely reviewed short locked room mysteries and one magnificent impostor. So without further ado...

Christopher Anvil's "The Drop of a Pin," originally published in the April, 1974, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, is part of a short-lived, now forgotten series about a somewhat unusual detective. Richard Verner is not a detective, technically speaking, but a heuristician. It translated to someone specialized in solving problems or a troubleshooter.

Verner is called to "Grove's Lake Cabins" by the local sheriff to assist him on an apparently open-and-shut case that simply doesn't sit well with him ("...I don't believe the evidence"). The owner of the cabin park, Grove, was found with a knife sticking out of his chest behind the triple locked door of the cabin he shared with his niece, Ellen Grove. A large, spacious cabin has a large room and bath at each end separated by an insulated wall with no door in it, which divides the living quarters of niece and uncle. So when her uncle failed to emerge from his part of the cabin, Ellen grabbed an electric saw and cut a doorway into the insulated dividing wall as it would have been easier than to smash the door or one of the windows. Unfortunately, cutting a doorway into the dividing wall immediately elevated Ellen to the status of prime suspect as the only door on her uncle's side was locked, bolted and securely chained – similar to the door on her side of the cabin. So nobody could have sneaked out that way, once Ellen had cut through the wall and ventured inside to discover the body. And, of course, the windows were all securely locked as well.

A phenomenal locked room setup! One that today's crop of locked room specialists would probably get a lot of mileage out of and had the solution been more than an elaborate take on a familiar locked room-trick, it would have been a little more than merely a solid locked room howdunit. Nevertheless, I enjoyed "The Drop of a Pin," especially the whole setup, enough to keep an eye out for the other stories. Christopher Anvil and Richard Verner might be of interest to Crippen & Landru as there appear to be enough material for a short story collection.

Robert C. Schweik's "Imagine a Murder," originally published in the June, 1978, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is another story from an even shorter-lived, now forgotten series of detective stories. This series of three short stories stars an amateur detective of the old school, Professor Paul Engel, whose method is simply to analyze a problem, speculate on it and apply a dab of rich imagination – "just imagine what possibilities there are." So when his friend and bookseller, Harry, overhears the murder of his roommate over the telephone, Professor Engel is on his way to put his analytical mind and imagination to work. The victim, Markham, was an accountant working on a report that would place someone behind bars and called Harry to ask him to post a letter, which is when he got shot. Inexplicably, the place was locked and bolted from top to bottom ("...the entire apartment was buttoned down"). So how could the murderer and gun vanish from a thoroughly locked room with a crowd gathered in the hallway outside the locked door shortly after the gunshot rang out?

This story shares some outward similarities with Anvil's "The Drop of a Pin." Schweik created a pleasingly tight and baffling locked room scenario with the revelation of the murderer's identity adding a second, quasi-impossibility in the form of a cast-iron alibi. One hinging on the other. Just like the previous story, "Imagine a Murder" is an elaborate, pleasing and, in this case, fairly clued reworking of a classic locked room-technique/trick. So not a blistering original, cutting edge locked room mystery, but a solid, competently plotted impossible crime story. And not a bad one to help fill a future impossible crime themed anthology.

Jack Ritchie's "Cardula and the Locked Rooms," originally published in the March, 1982, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and collected in The Year's Best Mystery and Suspense Stories (1983), sailed pass me under a false flag and not a locked room mystery – nor any other kind of impossible crime. Nevertheless, I was pleased to have stumbled to it right after my previous read. "Cardula and the Locked Rooms" is eighth of nine comic private eye short stories about Cardula (Dracula) who "has been forced to leave his home country of Romania after being thrown out of his castle by communists" and moved to America to become a slick, nighttime private detective ("I am simply a night person"). Mike Grost praised the series for its many pleasant touches of "logical fantasy." Cardula is hired by a man named Thompson ("blood type B, I guessed") who bought a stolen Van Gogh years ago. The painting was his private pleasure for five years, but now it has been stolen from a private room. A simple case of breaking and entering, but who knew Thompson possessed a stolen Van Gogh?

Cardula is paid a handsome fee to locate and retrieve the painting, which is simple enough, but the theft of the painting and how it was stolen comes with a neat, well-done little twist worthy of Edward D. Hoch's best Nick Velvet stories. Of course, the fun and main draw of the story, and obviously the series as a whole, is Cardula's double role as detective and vampire. So another series of stories that needs further attention and looking into at some future date.

The last two short stories were nominated in the first round of voting for the "New Locked Room Library" and come from the same author, "Miŏgacu." Just like the previous review, I was gives copies of the short stories and told not to be smart ass who asks too many questions. So no background on the author nor stories except that "Miŏgacu" is a huge mystery fan who wrote the following two short stories as a homage to the Grandest Game in the World with the hope of having them properly published one day.

"Eggnog and the Cylinder" (2023) can be categorized as an impossible crime caper in the style of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and Gosho Aoyama's Kaito KID. A French millionaire by the name of M. Aristide Benguet bought "the largest purple sapphire in the world on a whim" and decided to keep The Feline of Somerset in a locked room at his country home, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, to be displayed at a fancy Christmas party – which caught the attention of a renaissance criminal. Phantom Thief Lenoir, "dashing and masked," has become the scourge of the rich and famous of Europe as a modern-day Robin Hood. M. Benguet is taking extreme measures to protect the sapphire by engaging four different detectives/security agents from across the world to guard the sapphire in the locked room during the party. There's a rotating system to allow the detectives to take a break ("...stretch your legs, empty your bladder, grab some champagne"), but three detectives will stay with the sapphire in the locked room at all time.

A fail proof security measure, however, when their assignment comes to an end, they discover the sapphire has been replaced with a fake! Somehow, someway, Phantom Thief Lenoir switcharoo'd The Feline of Somerset under the nose of four detectives inside a securely locked room.

This story comes with a short "Author's Postface" in which "Miŏgacu" explains the inspiration for "Eggnog and the Cylinder" came from reading a description of the locked room puzzle in Marcel Lanteaume's untranslated, frustratingly out-of-reach Trompe l'oeil (1946) – realized "there is a very simple solution." That very simple solution is actually the cleverest, wildly imaginative and most original locked room-trick of the stories discussed so far. A trick certainly in the spirit of Lanteaume "in which imagination leaps confidently over probability" and perhaps a trick that would be hard to swallow in a regular locked room mystery, but perfectly suited for "a Japanese-y phantom thief story." It's unexpected gems like this making the future of the traditional Western (locked room) mysteries look very bright indeed. Not to mention a story with the potential to age like fine wine, if it ever turns out "Miŏgacu" constructed to correct solution from a short description of Lanteaume's Trompe l'oeil locked room puzzle. And makes me want to overlook (ROT13) gur znffvir onyyf vg gbbx gb abzvangr uvf bja jbex sbe pbafvqrengvba.

The second story, "The First Meeting" (2017/23), is a homage to the Japanese shin honkaku mysteries (and a pastiche, of sorts) and particular to the teenage detectives of series such as Case Closed, The Kindaichi Case Files and Q.E.D. Niimoto Tadashi is the son of a typical, storybook detective, Tsukiko, who had to solve the Yellow Mask Mystery on her wedding day. Tadashi was never shielded from his mother's investigation, but "never knew corpses raining down upon him" like some other child detectives. So a relatively normal childhood, but, on his sixteenth birthday, Tadashi "made his first step to detectivehood." Tadashi got his own Watson, Zhenya, who's the son of a Russian scientist staying as a guest at the Niimoto home. Tadashi and Zhenya throw themselves at a local locked room murder.

On the morning January 18, 2005, the esteemed neurosurgeon, Furuta Fujio, was found stabbed to death in his stuffy, everyday working study with door locked from the inside and the key sticking out of the keyhole – windows either didn't open or looked over an obstacle. Such as a roaring river or locked garden gate. So the scene of the crime resembles "an impenetrable capsule," but trick is not nearly as good or even half as inspired as the brilliant solution to the previous story. An enormous step down, judged purely as an impossible crime story. On the other hand, simply as a homage to those meddling kid detectives of the manga/anime corner of the shin honkaku mysteries, "The First Meeting" is first class.

Not a bad harvest for a handful of, more or less, randomly selected short stories. Anvil's "The Drop of a Pin" and Schweik's "Imagine a Murder" didn't bring anything new or really innovative to the table, but showed some ingenuity in presentation and a solid hand in their solutions. Despite the misleading title, Ritchie's "Cardula and the Locked Rooms" is an unexpected treasure and it goes without saying "Eggnog and the Cylinder" is the standout with "The First Meeting" having charm and qualities outside of its locked room puzzle. I told you I would pick something good eventually. :)

And Then There Were Nyan (2024) by A.Z. Ruin

So for the past three, four months, I've been reading, rating and reviewing impossible crime novels and short stories that were nominated in the first round of voting for the "New Locked Room Library" – organized by Alexander of The Detection Collection. Since I was already familiar with the majority of nominated titles, I decided to focus on the obscurer, lesser-known "exotic" picks that came out of the first round.

Some truly surprising, unexpected picks which, for some reason or another, flew under my radar. Several can now be counted among my personal favorites starting with Aosaki Yugo's short story "Knockin' On Locked Door" (2014) and Mitsuda Madoy's superb fanlations of Kie Houjou's modern classics Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019) and Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022). Not to be overlooked K.O. Enigma's fun, off-beat self-published genre parody Bunraku Noir (2023) or nominations previously reviewed on this blog (e.g. H.M. Faust's Gospel of V, 2023). And not every nomination observes the rule of having to be "reasonably available." The subject of today's is a shining example of ignoring that rule.

I know nothing about the author nor book, except it's a write-in and was given a copy with the instruction not to be a smart ass who asks impertinent questions.

So there's nothing I can say about A.Z. Ruin and gather And Then There Were Nyan is an as of yet unpublished manuscript floating around certain circles, which explains why not a mention of it can be found online and still got nominated. So, knowing next to nothing about the author or book, I pieced together from the comments And And Then There Were Nyan is a hybrid mystery trying to bridge the gap between the grounded, fair play detective story and pure fantasy – presented as a courtroom drama. Apparently, wrote it as a homage to the Ace Attorney series. So this is more or less going to be a gamble rather than picking something good, because I'm notoriously skeptical when it comes to hybrids of pure fantasy and mystery. I prefer the horror and science-fiction concoctions of the mystery hybrid. A skepticism that can be partially blamed on Randall Garrett's godawful Too Many Magicians (1966), but promised someone to give them another shot when a reasonably promising-sounding fantasy/mystery hybrid turned up. So is Ruin's And Then There Were Nyan going to change my opinion on fantasy/mystery hybrids or cement it firmly in place? Let's find out!

And Then There Were Nyan follows a woman, simply referred to as the Hunter, who's traveling with her rifle and caravan to New York, but gets stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere. For some reason, she has been locked out of both the caravan and car. So the Hunter has to move on foot, unless she wants to be torn apart by the nighttime wildlife. It doesn't take long for her to arrive at a small town resembling "the remains of some long-abandoned Civil War outpost" with badly-worn sign reading, "In this town, no man may kill a cat." The town appears to be abandoned, but nearly every house is locked and every door has a cat flap. And in the only unlocked house, the Hunter finds the bloody remains of a dead cat with a bullet wound. But being made of sterner stuff, the Hunter thinks nothing of it, cleared the floor and went to sleep. Only to be awakened by a crowd of talking, upright walking cats who take a dim view of finding her next to the body of their fellow feline, Pluto.

The Hunter happened to stumble into the town of Ulthar, "any cat in Ulthar is granted the protection and blessings of the goddess Baast," which is why they can walk upright like humans and speak their languages. Ulthar appeared abandoned because the entire townfolks were away "celebrating the first night of Kattenstoet" (love that name!) and upon return found the Hunter in a situation demanding an explanation. So she's apprehended (not without a fight), thrown in a jail cell and placed on trial. A trial presided over by a giant female sphinx. Well, that escalated quickly!

This trial covers roughly the first-half of And Then There Were Nyan and cleverly exploited to do a bit of world-building throughout the courtroom proceedings. The Sphinx tells the Hunter that innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply in Ulthar. So the prosecution doesn't have to conclusively prove her guilt, but she has to demonstrate her innocence by questioning logically, "expose contradictions in arguments and otherwise convince the judge," the Sphinx – which she has to do in a situation entirely alien to her. Not only the town with its inhabitants and laws are strange and unknown, but the murder of Pluto itself seems to have been impossible to pull off for a feline murderer. While the door itself was unlocked, the doorknob can't be turned by kitty paws and the cat flap was sealed from the inside with magic talismans. Pluto was shot and that's another mark against the Hunter as "no cat could have shot the victim" ("...cats don't have opposable thumbs"). Finally, the house/hut had been abandoned for years and the floor was thick with dust, but the only tracks in the dust were "the pawprints of the victim and a single set of boot-prints" belonging to the Hunter.

So the Hunter has to be quick witted in order to parry the prosecutor's constant attacks and has to find alternative explanations on spot, not merely pointing out she had no motive to kill Pluto, but constantly disadvantaged by her lack of knowledge about the place and its feline inhabitants. Something Chat Botté, town prosecutor, viciously exploits especially during the first trial. Botté became one of my favorite characters. A delightfully slimy, elegantly dressed character who has a habit of dabbing his forehead with a lace handkerchief ("...cats only sweat from their paws") and the perfect (I refuse to use the pun purr-fect) antagonist for the Hunter during her many trials of the story. I also took a liking to the cat characters of Schrödinger, Dinah and her brother, the Cheshire Cat.

But what about the giant, magical elephant in the locked room at the heart of this feline mystery, you ask? Well...

I groaned audibly when it was revealed the cats of Ulthar can not only talk and walk like humans, but "every cat is granted a unique and singular blessing." Imagine the X-Men with tails, cat ears and they all shed on the couch. Not just Beast. Naturally, these individual abilities are gradually, and conveniently, revealed as the story progresses – right up to the very end. Not that it makes it less fun seeing the Hunter draw up reasonably logical cases and arguments, only to be torn down again. Just not as impressive when the tearing down is done by magical powers. It can come across as just making things up as you go along. Another problem with fantasy/mystery hybrids leaning heavily on the magical aspect of the story is that those magical elements eventually have to be constrained to drown out the detective element.

For example, the Sphinx presiding over the trials is omniscient, "she knows absolutely everything," but that would be a spoil sport in a detective story. So her omniscience is nerfed with a personal code allowing the Sphinx "to ignore her own omniscience and only make judgements based on what she sees before her eyes." I don't celestial boredom is good enough reason. Why make her omniscient in the first place? Why not simply make her a judge who acts as a storyguide, of sorts, who tells the characters/reader whether or not the evidence and testimonies presented to her were truthful. Like telling a witness told the truth or told what they believe to be truth. That was kind of set up with the Sphinx's only ironclad rule forbidding any falsified or tampered evidence being brought into her courtroom ("the courtroom is the sole domain of logical and oratorical prowess"), but never really put to good use. I hated how this potentially great character exited the story.

I could have put all of that aside as a personal prejudice against an over abundance of magical nonsense in a detective story. After all, I promised to be fair and seriously went to work on the impossible murder of Pluto. When you think about it, the murder only constitutes half an impossibility for an ordinary cat and combined with the ability of a certain cat it opened up a way in and out of the hut. So assumed (ROT13) Purfuver jnf gur zheqrere, nsgre nyy, jub hfrq gur sebt-naq-gur-fpbecvba ehfr gb trg Cyhgb gb pneel uvz vagb gur uhg, xvyyvat uvz bapr gurl jrer vafvqr naq gur gnyvfznaf nccyvrq gb gur png sync. Bapr gur png jub nccyvrq gur gnyvfzna qvrf, gur gnyvfzna fgbcf jbexvat (“...orpbzrf nf jrnx naq syvzfl”), ohg erznva haoebxra npebff gur png syng. Juvpu vf gur cbvag. Fb bapr gur zheqre jnf qbar (zber ba gung va n zvahgr), nyy penml Purfuver unq gb qb jnf jnvgvat gb or sbhaq. Bapr gur qbbe, be png sync, jnf bcrarq Purfuver fvzcyl gheaf vaivfvoyr naq nibvqf yrnivat uvf uhtr cnj cevagf va gur qhfg ol genirefvat n aneebj yrqtr ehaavat nebhaq gur jnyy gbjneqf gur qbbe. Nsgre gung, vg fvzcyl vf n pnfr bs whzcvat bhg bs gur bcra qbbe sebz nobir be penjy qbja gur qbbecbfg naq bhg bs gur png sync. Ol gung gvzr, gurer jrer nyernql bgure cnj cevagf va gur qhfg. Erzrzore pngf ner vaperqvoyl ntvyr navznyf jub pna rkcybvg gur fznyyrfg bs sbbgubyqf.

Only thing that had me stumped (ROT13) vf ubj Purfuver znantrq gb znxr vg nccrne nf vs Cyhgb jnf fubg. V fhccbfrq Cyhgb pbhyq unir orra fgnoorq nf vg jnf cbvagrq bhg rneyvre va gur fgbel Purfuver unf ybat, hagevzzrq pynjf. Naq fhccbfr n fcrag ohyyrg pbhyq unir orra ergevrirq sebz gur arneol uhzna frggyrzrag gung jnf chfurq qbja gur fgno jbhaq, ohg abg ubj ur pbhyq unir snxrq gur fpbepu znexf. It goes without saying my solution (actually solutions) missed the marked completely, but did put aside my skepticism, threw myself wholeheartedly at the game and this is the best I could do with what was given – what did I get in return? Let me tell you, (SPOILER/ROT13) gur bevtvany Cyhgb unq qvrq lrnef ntb naq jnf vzcrefbangrq, juvyr gur obql jnf chyyrq vagb n ibvq, n fcnpr orgjrra fcnprf, ol fbzr ryqevgpu nobzvangvba naq chfurq onpx lrnef yngre be fbzrguvat. Gung xvaq bs fuvg pna shpx bss evtug onpx gb gur Gjvyvtug Mbar.

Good luck trying to arrive at that conclusion yourself. Another thing that irked me (SPOILER/ROT13) vf gur pninyel ebyyvat va ng gur raq, juvpu jnf bayl znqr cbffvoyr ol n gryrcnguvp jneavat sebz Xvat Gvyqehz'f Fgenl Png pybarf. Abg bapr unf gryrcngul orra zragvbarq rira nf n oyrffvat sbe bar bs gur pngf. Vg nqzvggrqyl erfhygrq va arng fprar va juvpu nabgure png hfrq ure oyrffvat gb chccrgrre gur qrnq. Gur chccrgrrevat bs gur qrnq vf nabgure oyrffvat abg zragvbarq hagvy irel yngr vagb gur obbx naq arire pbafvqrerq ubj gung gevpx pbhyq or hfrq gb perngr n ybpxrq ebbz fpranevb. N qrnq Cyhgb unir orra “znevbarggrq” gb jnyx onpxjneqf va uvf bja cnj cevagf, cynpr aba-jbexvat gnyvfznaf ba gur png syng (gb znxr vg nccrne nf vs gurl fgbccrq jbexvat nsgre ur jnf xvyyrq va n ybpxrq ebbz) naq erghea gb gur cynpr jurer ur qvrq – ergenpvat uvf fgrcf cresrpgyl jvgu gur uryc bs zntvp naq zhfpyr zrzbel. You get the idea by now.

So, plot-wise, And Then There Were Nyan is very reminiscent of Natsuhiko Kyogoku's Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume, 1994) with its fantastical premise, lengthy storytelling and a conceptually original locked room scenario, but both missed the mark in their execution. Kyogoku's The Summer of the Ubume ended up being more horror than an actual detective novel and Ruin's And Then There Were Nyan is in the end more fantasy than a proper locked room mystery.

You get the idea by now. Plot-wise, And Then There Were Nyan strongly reminded me of Natsuhiko Kyogoku's Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume, 1994) with their fantastical premise, lengthy storytelling and a conceptually original locked room scenario, but both missed the mark in their execution. Kyogoku's The Summer of the Ubume ended up being more horror than mystery or detective story and Ruin's And Then There Were Nyan turned out to be more fantasy than a proper locked room mystery. I think I prefer my fantasy/mystery hybrids when the magic and fantasy is kept small and manageable. Takekuni Kitayama's Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002) might be the best way to do it.

So, if your taste is even remotely similar to mine, And Then There Were Nyan is going to disappoint as a locked room and hybrid mystery, but, as a courtroom drama/mystery, it now ranks alongside Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938) and Anthony Gilbert's The Clock in the Hat Box (1939) as a personal favorite – even with the plot not being up to scratch. The cat-and-mouse games and courtroom shenanigans are just too damn fun and engrossing to sink the whole ship. Just a shame the detective elements took a backseat to all the fantasy hokum. Otherwise it would added another, surprisingly modern, masterpiece the growing list of hybrid (locked room) mysteries.

Delicious Death for Detectives (2022) by Kie Houjou

I previously reviewed the first, of currently three, genre-bending detective novels in Kie Houjou's "Ryuuzen Clan" series that successfully added new dimensions to the classically-styled, traditionally-plotted shin honkaku mysteries – weaving together the logical with the fantastical. Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019) is a superb time travel mystery and Ho-Ling Wong's review of Katou no raihousha (Visitors on the Isolated Island, 2020) makes it sounds like a prototype of what the detective story might look like a hundred years from now. When the detective, horror and science-fiction genres blend together to create a new entity. The third entry in the series keeps the plot a bit more grounded without time travel or otherworldly entities in order to create an insanely tangled, multi-level detective novel that might very well end up fulfilling the role of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) of this century's iconic detective novel.

Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022) is one of Houjou's two novels nominated for the new, updated "Locked Room Library" translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmiicnana." So, with that out of the way...

Kamo Touma from The Time Traveler's Hourglass returns to take on the double role of protagonist and antagonist. Kamo is a magazine writer with a column in the monthly magazine Unsolved Mysteries, "The Pursuit of Truth," in which he presents "alternative explanations" to old, presumably settled cases. His analyses revealed quite a few miscarriages of justice resulting in several wrongful convictions getting overturned. That gave him a reputation of being something of an "amateur detective" and landed him a very special invitation.

Kurata Chikage is a game producer at MegalodonSoft who produces open-world RPG games and the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns caused a boom in game sales. MegalodonSoft into Virtual Reality and created the hit sensation Mystery Maker. A VR game in which "players take on the role of one of the world's top amateur detectives" and "participate in the solving of various difficult incidents" or battle Dr. D, the King of Crime, in Story Mode – even creating original scenarios. Sixty million sold copies later, Kurata and MegalodonSoft expect to release Mystery Maker 2 in February, 2025. By the way, Delicious Death for Detectives takes place in the far-away future of November, 2024. Kurata is organizing an internal event as a special demo, or, to be more precise, "a closed circle event." She asks Kamo to create/design a challenging scenario and play the role of murderer in the play test demo of the VR version of Mystery Maker 2.

The group of people she invited to go head-to-head are "the top real world amateur detectives" who are "to act as detectives and murderers" in an intense battle of wits and cat-and-mouse. Well, Kurata restricted her picks to the amateur detectives of Japan. The first of these amateur detective is the cousin of Kamo's wife, Ryuuzen Yuki, who's a struggling mystery writer under the name "Ryuuzen Yuki." Roppongi Shido is a retired investigator, critic and reputedly an off-the-book consultant to the police ("...often assisted with investigating cases in secret"). Fuwa Shinichiro is the director of the Shinjuku-based Fuwa Detective Agency with a reputation to match. Michi Chiaki describes herself as a job hopping, jack-of-all-trades "who mostly solves or prevents scams for clients." Azuma Yuzuha is an administrator for a hospital, but her brother was a famous detective who died in the line of duty and she carries on his work with her sister-in-law. Hajime Kindaichi Sou Touma Kyu Renjo Kenzan Ryohei is the obligatory, teenage high school detective who solved the cipher murder case at his cram school and several other incidents at his regular high school. Munakata Nozomi is simply known as the drifting detective whose only companion and Watson is a husky, Retsu. Kamo makes eight.

MegalodonSoft honors the time-honored traditions of the detective story and holds the three-day event at Megalodon Manor (floor plan included) on the island of Inunojima in the Seto Inland Sea ("the building certainly resembles the sort of mansion you'd see in a mystery novel"). A VR version of Megalodon Manor was created, called Puppet Hall (floor plan included), where the demo takes place and can be accessed through a full body VR control device – named RHAPSODY. But before the games can even begin, Kurata goes rogue and informs the detectives that there has been a serious change of plan. The game is still going ahead as scheduled, but, this time, being a fallible detective comes with consequences. Kurata states, "normally, the ones who suffer for your mistakes are others, but in this game, you'll be asked to bet your own lives." If the Detectives or Murderer (Kamo) fail to fulfill any of their victory conditions, they'll be killed on the spot. Everyone was given a MegalodonSoft smartwatches that has "death trap" device with a remote controlled poisoned needle. And, to absolutely ensure their cooperation, she gifted similar smartwatches to their loved ones.

You have heard of puzzling brain teasers? Delicious Death for Detectives is a puzzling brain thriller!

I should point out here that all of this is an overly simplified, stripped down summary of the story's setup as it not only has to introduce the characters, laying the groundwork of the plot and explaining the rules of the game, but also has to do a bit of world-building regarding the VR setting of Puppet Hall. An entirely new, specialized setting, "a space set up specifically for a game of deduction," that comes with its own sets of possibilities and limitations. For example, the VR gear is ID-locked with an iris scan bio-authentication and players who get killed in the game, but not IRL, can be resurrected as ghosts with a halo hovering above their virtual avatar to give evidence. So the in-game murderer (Kamo) has to be careful not to be identified when carrying out the murderer. That's why the character of the murderer has the ability to extinguish the lights in the building during "Crime Time" and has night vision function.

So, roughly, the first quarter of Delicious Death for Detectives gives the reader a lot to digest and can be counted as its sole shortcoming as Kurata, in her role as Gamemaster, keeps adding new details and bits of information when the game has already started – giving the impression the story's not playing entirely fair. That's not the case, of course, but simply spacing everything out in order to not give the reader an even info dump to digest. I think it would have been both helpful, not to mention very fitting, if the book had opened with a short game guide explaining the rules, mechanics, maps and list of the in-game inventory and players. It would have smoothed out the opening stages of the story, but, once you get pass that, you get a detective novel like few others. Even by the standards of hybrid mysteries!

I already noted Kamo has to play a double role of detective and in-game murderer. Only the reader, up to a certain point, knows Kamo is the murderer in Mystery Maker 2, but not how he engineered the (locked room) murders. So the murders in Puppet Hall can be taken as semi-inverted mysteries in which the reader knows whodunit, but, frustratingly, not howdunit. Getting caught, having his tricks exposed or successfully defending himself by demolishing a wrong theory, it has deadly consequences either way. If Kamo gets exposed, or one of his tricks, he and his family dies. But if he successfully defends himself, the detective whose theory got demolished is marked for death. The person charged with carrying out the real-world executions is simply called the Executioner and someone hidden among the other players.

I'm going to reveal too many of the details about the impossible crimes themselves, but they deserve to discussed as they're all gems, especially those staged in Puppet Hall.

Firstly, there's the murder Kamo staged in a storeroom barricaded from the inside, which appeared to be the central locked room puzzle of the story as it received a considerable amount of attention and scrutiny – two detectives tacking a crack at it complete with diagrams. A pleasure for everyone who enjoys Ellery Queen-style chains-of-deductions, building false-solutions before tearing them down again centered around the fallibility of the detectives. All the solutions, correct or not, to this locked room puzzle are ingenious and original, but surprisingly conventional compared to the other impossible murder in the VR space. Secondly, around the same time, someone else is poisoned in a locked room and it didn't appear it would develop in anything particular noteworthy, but it ended up giving the book its claim to at least the status of a locked room/hybrid mystery classic. The brilliant solution completely took me by surprise and left me speechless. Revealing a string of pretty unique clues and its brazen originality functioning as a red herring. Is this one of the most pleasing locked room-tricks to mentally visualize? Well, what more can I say? It's a masterclass in how to integrate an invented world or fantastical elements into a fair play (locked room) mystery. And how such a setting can unlock new possibilities to plot and tell a detective story.

If Delicious Death for Detective had been a smaller-scale detective novel restricting itself to experimenting with a locked room murder inside a VR game, it would have still been a first-rate, highly original and fresh treatment of the classical manor house mysteries. Delicious Death for Detectives is a big picture mystery and story continues to twist and turn right up till the epilogue as more people die. But as false-solutions get demolished, the Executioner begins to kill detectives in Megalodon Manor under seemingly impossible, or mysterious, circumstances. I've still barely scratched the surface of this insanely intricate, densely-plotted detective novel climaxing on the third day during the final round of "Answer Time" when Kamo has to reason for everyone's life. Like I said, the story never settles down until the epilogue. All done according to the fair play rules of the grandest game in the world.

I can go on lavishing praise on the story and plot, but you get the idea by now. It's a superb detective novel. A prototype of the detective story of the future and likely going to be a modern classic. What deserves to be pointed out is how it reads like the past, present and future of the genre coming together Megalodon Manor/Puppet Hall, but mostly done very subtly and without referencing famous detective stories or locked room lectures. Those not overly familiar with Japanese mysteries, in all its guises, will no doubt see shades of Christie's And Then There Were None, Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Leo Bruce's Case of Three Detectives (1936) and Ellery Queen, but was particular pleased to spot all the nods to everyone favorite manga mystery series. Some were more obvious ("...the black shadow figure from a certain mystery manga") than others (VR setting and smartwatch hostages), but enjoyed. I really believe what was done with the specialized setting and plot is a glimpse of the detective story of the future.

 Delicious Death for Detectives is not the first hybrid mystery discussed on this blog proving not everything under the sun has been done before, but Kie Houjou delivered a particular effective, convincing and basically a textbook example of the hybrid mystery done to near perfection. And produced a classic locked room mystery in the process. Hopefully, I get an opportunity to read the second, utterly bizarre sounding, Visitors on the Isolated Island one of these days, but, in the mean time, Delicious Death for Detectives comes highly recommended!

Hold on a minute: I have one, very minor, thing to nitpick about. I don't like the title Delicious Death for Detectives or, to use the apparently correct title, "Delicious Death" for Detectives. Just Deserts for "Great Detectives" would be a better fit for an English title, but even that one sounds too cozy-like and this is a story that would actually benefit from a simple, straightforward title. Something like Death and the Great Detectives or Deleting the Great Detectives.

The Time Traveler's Hourglass (2019) by Kie Houjou

Kie Houjou is a Japanese mystery writer who bagged the Tetsuya Ayukawa Award for her debut novel, Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019), which belongs to the emerging, third wave of the shin honkaku movement – currently in the process of evolving the traditional detective story. The first two waves of Soji Shimada, Yukito Ayatsuji and MORI Hiroshi revived, refreshed and rebuild the traditional, fair play detective to great success. After twenty years of dominance, there came a yearning for the kind of impetus that Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) and Hiroshi's Subete ga F ni naru (Everything Turns to F: The Perfect Insider, 1996) brought to the table. The stick to scratch this itch proved to be hybrid mysteries. Not merely as a gimmick!

The idea is to take your normal, everyday shin honkaku mystery and incorporate elements from other, seemingly incompatible, genres like fantasy, horror and science-fiction. And the trick, of course, is to harmonize the two and make it work as a fairly plotted detective story. A tricky, slippery tight-rope to traverse, but Masahiro Imamura pulled it off with Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) and Magan no hako no satsujin (Death Within the Evil Eye, 2019). Shimada called Death Among the Undead a possible revolutionary change for the genre, but should note here that the idea of hybrid mysteries itself is not revolutionary one. Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) preceded Death Among the Undead by nearly thirty years and Takekuni Kitayama combed impossible decapitations across time with a reincarnation plot in Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002). Even over here there's a history of genre blending, especially science-fiction mysteries, but rarely produced a classic or actually went anywhere (except for the historical mystery that became a genre of its own). Now it feels like they have started in Japan to explore the potential and possibilities of blending and merging genres in earnest.

If there's one thing The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders and Death Among the Undead have demonstrated, it's that the inclusion of normally destructive (to the detective story) elements like zombies, reincarnation and time hopping can unlock doors to new possibilities previously unthinkable. All it needs is a good mystery writer who understands what makes a plot tick.

I've read about Kie Houjou, The Time Traveler's Hourglass and the Ryuuzen Clan series, but didn't expect to see two of her novel emerge from the first round of nominations for the new, updated "Locked Room Library" – translations provided by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmiicnana." You know their story from previous reviews. The Time Traveler's Hourglass is basically a literary descendant of John Dickson Carr's experiments with historical time travel mysteries, namely The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957), taking the concept of time travel mysteries to its next logical stage. Houjou followed the example of Death Among the Undead by creating a fairly typical, recognizable shin honkaku premise and overlaid it with a time travel plot with sublime results. This year's best-of list is going to look weird!

The Time Traveler's Hourglass is the first novel in the Ryuuzen Clan series and introduces the Ryuuzens as a family living, and dying, under a curse. For nearly sixty years, everyone who "inherited the blood of the Ryuuzen clan began to rapidly pass away" from accidents, murder, suicides and natural causes. A string of untimely passings starting with the "Deadly Tragedy of Shino" back in 1960. At the time, the Ryuuzens gathered at their remote villa in Shino to celebrate the birthday of the head of the family, but they got wiped out in a landslide. When the victims were recovered, the "majority of the bodies found were proven to have been murdered" ("however, with so little evidence, there was little to do"). Kamo Rena is one of the last living descendants of the Ryuuzen clan, living in 2018, but she's rapidly deteriorating from acute interstitial pneumonia which leaves her husband in despair.

Kamo Touma is a magazine writer who used to write for a paranormal rag and met Rena following a flare up of the curse of the Ryuuzen clan, but they started dating and eventually married. She only developed a morbid fear for the family curse following the death of two cousins, which is the cause of her deteriorating health. Recently, Kamo has been working on an article about a new urban legend, "The Urban Legend That Brings Happiness: The Hourglass of Miracles." A trending topic on social media telling of an hourglass-shaped pendant granting a wish to whomever can get their hands on it. Kamo is contacted by someone calling himself Meister Hora ("...the name of a character from Michael Ende's Momo... the keeper of time...") offering him the hourglass and an opportunity to put the curse to rest by going back to 1960 in order to stop the murders. But when they arrive at the villa in 1960, the killing spree has already started.

Before returning to this gem of a detective story, I need to point out a couple of things about its presentation and translation. Firstly, Mitsuda Madoy opted to present all the names in the Japanese style of family name-given name order, which is something that never fails to confuse me. So the heads up from the translator is much appreciated. Secondly, this book has all those little extra detective fans love so much. A cast of characters, an elaborate family tree, two floor plans, a map of the surrounding area and an introduction by Meister Hora – ensuring the reader that they're reading a fair play mystery ("...I will tell no lies in the story, nor shall I lie to you, the readers"). And, of course, a challenge to the reader. Rarely has a challenge to the reader been as appropriate as in The Time Traveler's Hour Glass. The clueing, misdirection and general fair play on display here is of an incredibly high purity. More on that in a moment.

So when they arrive in 1960, the murderer is ahead of schedule in defiance of historical records and a bridge collapse ensured they're isolated from the outside world. The murderer also cut the phone lines to complete the picture of a classic shin honkaku mystery novel.

Kamo and his talking, hourglass-shaped pendant Meister Hora's arrival was seen by 13-year-old Ryuuzen Ayaka. Ayaka aids them by introducing Kamo to the family as a famous private detective she invited as a surprise for grandfather, because he's a veracious reader of detective fiction. Not something out-of-character as she previously invited a magician without telling anyone. So he can investigate the two murders that have just taken place with body parts found inside the house and near the river. One of the victims is Ayaka's father. Kamo's investigation pretty soon reveals why the family referred to the murders as an impossible crime. An impossible crime that boils down to the question how the head and torso were carried out of the house when the only exit was under constant observation. A very neatly done impossibility and the explanation delivers, which is not the last, slightly unusual impossible crime or locked room puzzle to come his way. I should note here the villa has an interesting feature as each of its twelve private rooms is named after one of the signs of the Chinese zodiac (Dragon Room, Monkey Room, Rabbit Room, etc). Kie Houjou went out of her way to keep things as clear and uncluttered as possible. Even suggesting "some mnemonics" to help remember who's staying in which room ("the Rat, the smallest animal of the zodiac, was the room belonging to the youngest person, Ayaka"). The care she gave to the plot is admirable.

So, being familiar with the historical case notes and old diary entries, Kamo spends the next night hiding in a hall closet to catch the murderer red handed, but the night goes by and the supposed victim emerges the next morning unharmed – suggesting that the timeline has been altered. This is where the earlier established rules of the time traveling hourglass starts playing a role, because even with "the existence of technology for space-time travel, this is still an impossible crime." The steadily growing pile of corpses, severed body parts, inexplicable disappearances and the impending landslide is still only a fraction of the plot. For example, Kamo suspects the bodies were cut to pieces to imitate a painting, hanging in the villa, depicting the Nue of Japanese folklore ("the head of a monkey, the body of a tanuki, the tail of a snake, the limbs of a tiger, and a cry like a thrush"). The missing artist who made the painting is one of the many skeletons rattling around in the family closet. What about that strange night when the last two of prospective victims barricaded themselves inside the villa, while the rest waited out the night in a trailer with Kamo sitting with his back against the door. Only to be greeted by a horror show the following morning. A truly labyrinthine-shaped plot created out of space-time through which Houjou marched an "endless parade of horrors."

Ho-Ling Wong perhaps said it best in his 2020 review, "it's a very dense story, almost insanely so, but it holds together, somehow." And how! I mentioned in past review one risk of these kind of roller coaster-like hybrid mysteries brimming with impossible crimes, corpse-puzzles, contorted narratives and fantastical elements is running the risk of losing the reader along the way. The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders ran into that problem towards the end. There's always the risk of the story getting entangled in its own overly clever, elaborate plot designs, but neither proved to be an obstacle for The Time Traveler's Hourglass. Even though the story concludes with a lengthy, Ellery Queen-style elimination of the remaining suspects full with twists, turns, false-solution and actual, crystal clear and very satisfying answers to the main problems – which in turn highlights just how fairly everything was clued and foreshadowed. Not a small feat to pull off when time travel, time paradoxes and altered timelines get added to the mix.

Even without the time travel shenanigans, The Time Traveler's Hourglass has all the makings of a more traditionally-styled, first-rate shin honkaku mystery with its isolated setting, gory corpse-puzzles and impossible crimes. A plot that would not be out of place in The Kindaichi Case Files (especially those penned by Seimaru Amagi), but the well-handled, time traveling hourglass and the character of Meister Hora allowed Kie Houjou to get more out of the premise than had it been a standard locked room mystery without a science-fiction artifact. Just like Death Among the Undead, the skillful way in which the fantastic is balanced with the rationale and fair play principles of the detective story unlocked doors to entirely new, previously undreamed possibilities for the genre. That alone makes it something of a modern classic and without question one of the best debuts in the history of the detective story.

There is, however, something about the characters and story I liked even more than the rich, densely-plotted web covering them (SPOILER/ROT13): Wncnarfr jevgref qba'g ful njnl sebz pbhegvat gentrql, ovggre be gentvp raqvat, xvyyvat bss punenpgref be raqvatf qrznaqvat n fnpevsvpr. Guvf fgbel nccrnerq gb trne hc gb qrznaq fhpu n fnpevsvpr sebz Xnzb. Bar gung pbzrf ng n terng crefbany pbfg, ohg vf jvyyvat gb npprcg vg sbe Eran'f fnxr. Fb, abeznyyl, hfvat gvzr geniry gb cebivqr n unccl raqvat sbe gur punenpgref vf ng orfg anhfrbhfyl purrfl naq fgbel-ehvavat purnc ng jbefg. Gur ernfba jul vg jbexrq urer vf orpnhfr gur ubhetynff bayl znqr gur unccl raqvat n cbffvovyvgl, ohg gur crbcyr Xnzb yrsg oruvaq va gur fvkgvrf rafherq vg unccrarq. Vg'f qvfthfgvatyl fjrrg naq urnegjnezvat, ohg, bapr ntnva, vg fubjf ubj tbbq Xvr Ubhwbh vf ng onynapvat naq znantvat n fgbel. Nyfb abgr gur rkpryyrag sberfunqbjvat va gur jbeqf Eran fcrnxf sebz ure ubfcvgny orq, “V xarj guvf jnf tbvat gb unccra. V'ir xabja sbe n ybat, ybat gvzr.” Just amazing!

Somehow, Kie Houjou pulled all of this off on her first try. She apparently is only getting started as the next two novels in the series are reportedly even better, more ambitious and audacious than this masterpiece of the neo-classical detective novel.

So, as you probably deduced from the tone of the review, lavish praise and length I really enjoyed The Time Traveler's Hourglass. The best detective novel of the year and already one of my all-time favorite locked room mysteries with the author already on the way of becoming a personal favorite. I highly recommend keeping an eye out for Kie Houjou, because something tells me she's one of today's mystery writers who will still be read, dissected and discussed a hundred years from now. If this trend continues, I can see this blending of the detective story, science-fiction and horror becoming an off-shoot/subgenre of its own. Similar to how historical mysteries became their separate thing. The Time Traveler's Hourglass would be seen as one of the first steps in that direction. Look forward to returning to the series as the third novel, Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022), was also nominated and translated by Madoy. I'm the most curious about the second, so far untranslated novel Katou no raihousha (Visitors on the Remote Island, 2020) because it sounds out of this world.

You can expect a review of Delicious Death for Detectives to pop up, one of these days, but first back to the Golden Age!

The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders (2002) by Takekuni Kitayama

Takekuni Kitayama is a Japanese mystery writer best known for his work on Danganronpa kirigiri, a series of light novels, but started out writing hybrid-style, shin honkaku locked room mysteries – beginning with four novels collectively known as the Castle series. Kitayama is "known as a master of impossible situations with a physical trick behind them" earning him the nickname "Kitayama of Physics."

The first novel in the Castle series, "Clock jou" satsujin jiken (The "Clock Castle" Murder Case, 2002), won the 24th Mephisto Prize and the plot, "vividly depicting the demise of the world," sounds fascinating. Blending the traditional detective story format with fantastic elements appears Kitayama's specialty. Ho-Ling Wong noted in his review of "Guillotine jou" satusjin jiken ("Guillotine Castle" Murder Case, 2005) that Kitayama's novels "seem always to be set in a somewhat different world, a world that is very alike, but quite like 'our' world." A series that sounds right up my alley. So, of course, there are known plans to translate the novels and the series joins countless other Japanese mystery titles and series remaining frustratingly out of reach.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the second title in the Castle series, Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002), to be one of the unexpected, exotic material to come out of the first round of nominations for the new, updated "Locked Room Library" – similar to Aosaki Yugo's "Tokuma shoten" ("Knockin' On Locked," 2014) and K.O. Enigma's Bunraku Noir (2023). Respectively, an excellent fanlation and an even better self-published, shin honkaku-style mystery novel. The available edition of The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is also a fanlation done by Mitsuda Madoy and his friend, "cosmiicnana." A very well done translation of a tricky, intricately-plotted and multiple locked room mystery that has everything from cursed daggers, reincarnating characters and a bloody galore of inexplicable decapitations! Not to mention a ton of diagrams and floor plans of the various locations and tricks.

The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is structured like an interlinked short story collection, set across in different places and periods, involving the same set of characters, Raine and Marie.

Raine and Marie are lovers who have curse laid upon them by six, star-engraved daggers, "belonging to a certain private order in France," which have "drank the blood of countless people in different times and places" – bringing nothing but misfortune to whomever owns a dagger. Those six daggers snagged the two lovers in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. Every time Raine and Marie are reincarnated, they are destined to meet each other and always ending with one killing the other with one of the daggers ("wherever we run, there's another dagger waiting for us"). They have been trapped in this reincarnation cycle for centuries.

The story opens in 1989 at the library of the Foundation of Knowledge, known as the Library at the End of the World, located in the northernmost part of Japan. A young woman, Kimiyo, is approached in the reading room by a man, Kito, who tells her he has been looking for her for a long time. Kito is Raine and Kimiyo is Marie, but she has no memory of any previous life. Let alone several. Kimiyo is naturally a bit skeptical after hearing the story of the cursed daggers and the legend of the Six Headless Knights from 13th century France ("you a knight, and me a lord's daughter... continuously fleeing the curse of the daggers... it's so cheesy"). There is, however, a dagger collecting dust in the library's storage room ("we always reunite near one of cursed daggers"). And not everything about his story appears to add up.

The next part takes place in 1243, Lapis Lazuli Castle, France, during the Albigensian Crusade. Marie is the only daughter of the villainous Count Geoffroy and Raine one of the six knights assigned to watch over her. Strange things happen inside the walls of the Lapis Lazuli Castle.

Some years ago, Marie witnessed her father and mother enter a room on the fourth floor of the east tower and peeked through the gap in the door. Only her parents had vanished from the room. The next thing that happens is a cup falling over and footprints appearing in the spilled wine, "as if an invisible person was walking through the wine spilled on the floor," coming to a stop at the wall. Marie believes the footsteps belonged to her mother and she disappeared into the wall. Count Geoffroy later comes out of the empty room alone. Raine is both skeptical and suspicious about the disappearance, believing her father knows more about the disappearance, but an investigation of the tower room only gives him answer to the phantom footprints – before disappearing himself together with his comrades-in-arms. The next day, the bodies of six headless knights on the banks of Cross Spring, far west of Lapis Lazuli Castle, which takes a day to reach on horseback. Impossibly, the six knights had been seen alive half a day before at the castle. No horses were taken and nobody was seen leaving the castle. They could "only assume that their corpses had flown to Cross Spring." No, the trick here's not what you think it's.

This is merely the beginning of the galore of gruesome, seemingly impossible murders and decapitations across time as The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders has heads to spare. The next stop is one of the trenches on the French-German front during the First World War. 1916 to be precise.

 

 

In this incarnation, Raine is a young French soldier and Marie an army nurse. Raine is not spared the brutality of trench warfare as he's right in the thick of it. While fighting in the flooded, muddy trenches with shell exploding all around him, Raine keeps encountering impossibly headless soldiers. Raine sees "an enemy soldier suddenly turned into a headless corpse" right in front of his eyes with the same happening later to an allied soldier ("had he been walking through the trenches with no head?"). Later, four headless bodies are found floating inside a flooded bunker, which apparently got hit from above and blew off their heads. However, when Raine went up topside and looked down, they were gone. And it would have taken at least eight men to move the corpses. They would have needed a lot more time than a minute.

When it comes locked room murders, Kitayama saved the best for last as the story returns to Kito and Kimiyo in 1989. The Library at the End of the World is turned into a veritable house of horrors with one of the most striking, elaborately staged and layered locked room scenarios I remember coming across. I'm not going to attempt to describe the whole situation, but everything from the locked room-trick itself and the reason for creating such a scenario to the additional impossibility of a cursed dagger materialization out of thin air is brilliantly done. I'll get back to all those inexplicable crimes in a moment.

So an ambitiously-plotted detective novel, stretching across countless lifetimes, requires a rare kind of Great Detective and Kitayama has one, "Snowy" – a white-haired, white-clad genderless being who hops through time. Snowy is tasked with managing chaos, "this world has a self-correcting function, and when it gets all out of whack, it seeks to restore order," which makes them a detective comparable only to Edward D. Hoch's Simon Ark. A character who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest cursed to wander the earth forever in search of evils to exorcise. Snowy is the eccentric sleuth taken to its extreme, but perfectly suitable for a mystery like this one. Snowy appears to Raine and Marie in every time period from the Lapis Lazuli Castle in 1243 to the Library at the End of the World in 1989 to give an explanation of the numerous impossibilities and the mechanics of reincarnation.

First of all, those numerous decapitations and stabbings under seemingly impossible circumstances. Over the years, I gorged on made a study of these impossible crime extravagances and concluded that the magic number is about four. More than four and the story usually starts bumping into one of two problems.

A locked room murder or other type of impossibility always comes with the expectation the author has something to deliver on that premise. Something really original or simply good enough to be acceptable. And those expectations go up with every additional impossible crime. So if you have four impossibilities, you need at least one or two quality locked room-tricks. One really good, quality trick can be repeated under similar circumstances, while the two other can be less original and more routine in nature. A locked room mystery with five or more impossibilities are rarely capable of delivering a satisfying explanation to more than two, three of them. A. Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023) broke with that long-standing tradition by delivering on all eight of its locked room and impossible crime situations. However, the book bumped into another problem. Successfully stringing together eight impossibilities without using overly simplistic, routine trick as filler material is to be applauded, but, even to an impossible crime addict, eight in a single novel can be a bit much to take in all at once. Your mind eventually loses track of the smaller details.

The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders has roughly the same number of impossible crimes as Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes, but Kitayama neatly sidestepped both pitfalls of the miracle extravagance. Firstly, the impossibilities are clearly arranged to their specific time period and location with the minor ones (e.g. the footprints in the wine) getting explained away early on the story. Secondly, the solutions are uniformly excellent. I already mentioned the multi-layered, absolutely insane locked room murder at the library, but not to be overlooked is the bonkers explanation to how the headless knights disappeared from the castle or how the soldiers wandered around the trenches without their heads. I particularly loved that solution! It probably wouldn't work as well as suggested here, but the trick is certainly original and something that would only have a shot of succeeding in the real-life horror story called trench warfare. Very fitting! So a very well managed locked room mystery novel.

However, The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is not entirely without flaws. Kitayama crammed a lot in what is really a short novel and wished certain parts of the story had been given more room to breath and develop. Such as the 1916 case or Snowy's explanation of the mechanics of reincarnation, which gives way to another problem. Kitayama tried to play the game fairly, but the nature of the plot, complexity of the tricks and Snowy's revelations are eventually going to outpace even the most brilliant armchair detective – where it becomes nigh impossible to anticipate the final twists. Even more so, once the reincarnation mechanics begin to influence the overarching plot and characters. It becomes a ride towards the end, you simply have to go along with, but what a ride! Absolutely insane in the truest, most flattering sense of the word!

Somehow, someway, this is reportedly considered to be the weakest of Kitayama's four Castle novels. This is the weakest? This one?! When can I expect translations of the other three?

Anyway, to cut another needlessly long, rambling review short, The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders simply is shin honkaku at its gory best. Highly recommended!