Soji Shimada’s Murder in the Crooked House earned a recommendation from the great Anthony Horowitz as a successful, modern locked-room mystery. I could not possibly have been less impressed: The resolution of the mystery is absurd, and the detective character – the only interesting person in the book – doesn’t show up until the novel is almost three-fourths done.
A locked-room mystery involves a murder that takes place in a room that is locked from the inside, so it appears to be an impossible crime; the killer would have to still be in the room, in theory. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the first known example, while there are two Sherlock Holmes locked-room stories, and “Golden Age” author John Dickson Carr wrote several. Horowitz’ reference came up in Close to Death, and the recent film Wake Up Dead Man had a similar mechanic. The resolutions usually involve some clever way to kill the victim(s) that don’t require the killer to actually be in the room.
Shimada’s novel is quite long for a straight mystery, about 350 pages, and that would be fine if the mystery and/or the characters were interesting enough to sustain it. The murders take place in the eccentric mansion of a Japanese industrialist who has invited some subordinates for a holiday party, also attended by his daughter and son-in-law and a few others. The mansion is oddly designed, with slanted floors and weird paths so that you can’t easily get between rooms on the same floors. The chauffeur of one of the guests is the first victim, in a locked room, and no one can figure out how he was killed or see any possible motive, not even the local police officers who arrive and end up staying at the house because of bad weather and, eventually, to try to prevent the killer from striking again.
His detective character is the voluble Kiyoshi Mitarai, who claims to be a psychic or a fortune-teller, and who says ridiculous things so that people will underestimate him and potentially fall into traps he’s set for them. He’s reasonably funny on the page, but more than that, he provides some actual life to the story, keeping things moving, engaging in realistic dialogues that shine compared to the boring-as-hell conversations taking place in the house before his arrival. It’s not quite as bad as the Netflix “you have to explain the plot to people every half hour” before Mitarai shows up, but it’s close, with lots of long-winded explanations of things that don’t matter at all to the story.
Worse than that, however, is the resolution, which comes after a page that taunts the reader by saying that you have all the information you need to solve the case. I won’t spoil the answer beyond saying that it required more of a leap than any mystery I’ve read before, and I’ve read north of 100 of them. It’s not a case of deduction, and you can’t go off motive, because the ultimate motive involves information the reader doesn’t have before the killer confesses.
Horowitz recommended a few books in that passage of Close to Death, including The Honjin Murders, which was a better read but which had a similarly unsatisfying answer, in that case relying on the reader to properly visualize the room as the author wrote it. Both of these novels ultimately used the physical spaces of their settings as key parts of the mystery, rather than using motive, psychology, or ze leetle grey cells to let the reader reason through the suspects and find the solution. There may very well be readers who enjoy this sort of engineering puzzle – Shimada is a best-selling author in Japan – but I’m not among them.
Next up: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie.
Keith, have you ever read Seishi Yokomizo? He wrote a locked room mystery in The Honjin Murders. The great Fredric Brown wrote a few short stories using it.
I mentioned reading that book in the last paragraph.