Murder in the Crooked House by Sōji ShimadaMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
"Murder in the Crooked House" is the second novel (published in 1982) by Soji Shimada, who started a revival in Japan of detective novels which are focused on the puzzle element, in the style of Ellery Queen. In the late 1980s, Shimada became the mentor of a group of young writers from Kyoto who also put the puzzle – mostly a closed room mystery - central. These were for example Yukito Ayatsuji, Takemaru Abiko and Alice Arisugawa. Not only that, Shimada and others also developed an ideology that the “puzzle mystery”, which they call “honkaku” or “authentic” as is common in Japan, would be the only original and justified way of writing detective novels.
That is of course absurd and a sort of tunnel vision – the world of the mystery novel is large enough to accommodate many different sub-genres. Moreover, in America and England puzzle mysteries were mainstream during the 1920s and early 1930s, but readers soon tired of them and in America we for example get the hard-boiled novels of Chandler and Hammett in the 1930s and 1940s. In France, in the same period, we see Simenon coming up, who again wrote a very different type of crime novels. There is joy in diversity!
In Japan, the puzzle mystery only relatively late took a hold of the mystery world: after the Second World War, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with authors as Seishi Yokomizo, Akimitsu Takagi and Tetsuya Ayukawa. It is claimed by Shimada c.s. that the first golden age of the puzzle mystery was in the early 1920s, when an author as Ranpo Edogawa was active, but that is a falsification of history. Ranpo only wrote a handful of short stories that could be called “honkaku.” In fact. from his first story, “The Two-Sen Copper Coin" (1923), he turns the puzzle mystery on its head and deflates it; and soon after that he would go in the direction of "ero-guro" (erotic-grotesque) stories which were popular among readers in the late twenties and early thirties (it is true that Ranpo after the war became a great fan of puzzle mysteries, but at that time he already had given up his creative work and only wrote essays and children's books).
The immediate postwar boom of puzzle mysteries was also short-lived, for in 1956 Seicho Matsumoto started publishing his “social” mysteries, which often put the finger on corruption in society and these became so popular that the history of the mystery novel in Japan is often divided into “Before Seicho Matsumoto” and “After Seicho Matsumoto.” Of course, Shimada and the Shin-honkaku writers push back against the all-too-dominant Matsumoto (and other writers of the late 1970s and 1980s, when light mysteries and travel mysteries were popular), and it is to their merit that they did call for stronger mystery plots, as that aspect was increasingly neglected. But they are also typically children of the 1980s "bubble economy," as they show no social conscience at all. Their novels are just “games” which are cut off from society (and reality). That is why they are set in the isolated spaces of absurdly large mansions or on small desert islands - not in any places that are relevant to the lives of contemporary Japanese.
I will not give the plot away as that would spoil the reading of the book, but just remark that “Murder in the Crooked House” displays everything that is wrong with pure puzzle mysteries in general:
- the characters are not only two-dimensional, but also utterly forgettable and uninteresting; there is no psychology;
- the novels are filled with discussions, with logical reasoning in which the various characters try to determine who the perpetrator could be. It is very boring to read such endless discussions, which only go back and forth.
- the way the murders are committed is totally impossible (the circumstance of the “closed room” forces the writer to devise a solution which is in fact unbelievable).
- it is also inconceivable that in real life a murderer would go to such weird lengths to commit a crime.
On top of that, in the case of “Murder in the Crooked House” it is quite easy to guess who the murderer is (although the method used is so ridiculous that no reader could guess how it was done).
I love mystery novels: Chandler, Hammett, the above mentioned Simenon, the Kurt Wallander novels by Henning Mankell, the John Rebus novels by Ian Rankin, and in the Japanese case Edogawa Ranpo, Matsumoto Seicho, Yokomizo Seishi, Natsuo Kirino and many others… but “Murder in the Crooked House” is just too much of a "puzzle-only" for me.
I give two stars because in general I applaud translations from the Japanese.
View all my reviews