{"id":11587,"date":"2026-10-23T12:59:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T16:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11587"},"modified":"2026-10-23T12:59:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T16:59:44","slug":"murder-in-the-crooked-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/23\/murder-in-the-crooked-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Murder in the Crooked House."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Soji Shimada\u2019s <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9781805335788\">Murder in the Crooked House<\/a><\/em> 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 \u2013 the only interesting person in the book \u2013 doesn\u2019t show up until the novel is almost three-fourths done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019s \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue\u201d is the first known example, while there are two Sherlock Holmes locked-room stories, and \u201cGolden Age\u201d author John Dickson Carr wrote several. Horowitz\u2019 reference came up in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9780063305656\">Close to Death<\/a><\/em>, and the recent film <em>Wake Up Dead Man<\/em> had a similar mechanic. The resolutions usually involve some clever way to kill the victim(s) that don\u2019t require the killer to actually be in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Shimada\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<script src=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/widgets.js\" data-type=\"book\" data-affiliate-id=\"2960\" data-sku=\"9781805335788\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019s set for them. He\u2019s 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\u2019s not quite as bad as the Netflix \u201cyou have to explain the plot to people every half hour\u201d before Mitarai shows up, but it\u2019s close, with lots of long-winded explanations of things that don\u2019t matter at all to the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019t spoil the answer beyond saying that it required more of a leap than any mystery I\u2019ve read before, and I\u2019ve read north of 100 of them. It\u2019s not a case of deduction, and you can\u2019t go off motive, because the ultimate motive involves information the reader doesn\u2019t have before the killer confesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Horowitz recommended a few books in that passage of <em>Close to Death<\/em>, including <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9781805336549\">The Honjin Murders<\/a><\/em>, 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 <em>ze leetle grey cells<\/em> 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 \u2013 Shimada is a best-selling author in Japan \u2013 but I\u2019m not among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Next up: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein\u2019s <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9780593701683\">The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Soji Shimada\u2019s 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 \u2013 the only interesting person in the book \u2013 doesn\u2019t show up until the novel [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[177,219],"class_list":["post-11587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-japanese-literature","tag-mysteries","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11587"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11589,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11587\/revisions\/11589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}