The Architecture of Terror: The Curious case of John Dickson Carr’s Death Watch (1935) and the John Soane Museum – (Part 1)

Ah, what a joy to be back in the midst of Carrian plotting, atmosphere and cunning. In a brief hiatus on the blog to sort out some bits in what we call ‘life’, I have had some time to squeeze in a few marvelous mysteries. And now I am back in the blogging world with the first of a three-parter that I am giving over to another of Carr’s unexpected treasures, Death Watch.

Written in 1935 Death Watch sits between Plague Court and White Priory on one side, and straight after we have The Hollow Man and Red Widow. So Death Watch comes at pretty poignant time in Carr’s career, surrounded by such giants of his work.

I wanted to get to this book specifically after finding such a lovely Penguin copy (pictured above) in Black Gull books Camden on my second hand book walk. And also as Ben from the Green Capsule had peaked my interest when we recorded our Men Who Explain miracles mega-double-whammy podcast episode on the stages of Carr’s career.

To me Death Watch sits curiously in Carr’s ouvre and feels like we have been watching a master magician come off the stage after an amazing show, and then backstage proceed to show you some fresh, intimate, cutting edge tricks he has been working on. Tricks that he wouldn’t put in the main stage show, because they are a little out there and ahead of their time, but that pile on the ingenuity in fresh ways. If that makes sense?…. No? Let’s move on.

I’m going to take a different approach from the normal review. There are some great right ups in the bloggersphere (links at the bottom) if you are interested to see what Death Watch is all about. For this first post of three I’m going to talk about what I believe are a number of internal secrets that I have spotted in a second reading of Death Watch. In particular the use of architecture in the book, and more specifically the homage to one British architect, the great John Soane. Now before you yawn and close your laptop/phone screen stay with me. I propose that this singular relationship to John Soane and his now famous museum in central London, are like a secret backbone, weaved through the book that helps us to see the text in a new light. Let us begin.

The House that John Built.

John Soane (1753-1837) was a British architect most famous for designing the huge Bank of England building and Dulwich Picture gallery, the first art gallery in the world. He was the head of architecture at the Royal Academy and through his life he amassed a huge amount of sculptural, artistic and architectural artifacts which he displayed in a beautiful and intricately purpose built interior, which stretches across two houses, now open to the public and known as the John Soane Museum. If you’ve never been you have to go.

The Museum

One of the many winding interiors housing Soane’s collections

Why is this important? Well, Carr’s Death Watch is set almost entirely in a single, large house. This house is stated in chapter one as being number 16 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The John Soane Museum is (in real life) situated at number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Dr Melson, our young, tag along british side kick to Dr Fell in this case, makes direct reference to the museum in chapter one and the chapter is even called An Open Door in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Carr wanted us to notice this.

And there is more. Take for example, one of the first detailed descriptions as we enter the household of Johanus Carver, watch and clock maker of Death Watch. Notably, the staircase. This staircase will be heavily featured, playing vital roles in the tale, and is described by Carr with a beautifully sinister bite:

It was a prim stairway, with heavy banisters, dull-flowered carpet underfoot, and brass stair-rods; it was a symbol of solid English homes, where no violence can come, and did not creek as they mounted it.

It is also described in chapter three as being if a reddish flowered design carpet that runs into the corridors. Compare those descriptions with the main staircase in the John Soane museum (pictured below) and you’ll get where I am going with this.

The main staircase of the Soane Museum

Coincidence? Let’s continue. After this detail the most telling aspect for me is the room in which the victim is found splayed across the threshold. This room is described as being filled with dark wooden book shelves that cover the walls, Morris chairs, a deep leather couch and high backed Hepplewhite chairs. Look at John Soane’s living room and the similarities abound.

One half of the Soanes living room.

Hepplewhite chairs lined up at the back. They feature throughout the book.

At this stage you could say that this is Carr simply referencing or that many houses could have had these items. But Carr takes it a step further. Their is a notable difference in the living room of Soane and the room of Death Watch where we find our victim: the bookshelves are only shoulder height rather than ceiling height. This is because hung above them, Carr tells us that copies of the famous series of oil paintings The Rake’s Progress by the English painter William Hogarth. This is important. Famously the Soane house and new museum contains the entire original eight paintings of The Rake’s Progress in a purpose built room, and this for me is where the comparison gets really interesting.

‘A Rake’s Progress – The Orgy’ – Painting III

‘A Rake’s Progress – The Gaming House’ – Painting VI

Artworks feature heavily in Carr’s works, and by including The Rake’s Progress, Carr takes a step from visual and atmospheric inspiration, to using the structure and meaning of the Soane museum to drive the plot.

In fact I am proposing dear reader that Carr stood in the room of the John Soane Museum where The Rake’s Progress series is hung and the structure of Death Watch was built in his mind.

I say this for two reasons. Firstly The Rakes Progress, and how one encounters these paintings in within the architecture of the John Soane Museum, is essentially linked to the plot of Death Watch.

Secondly, and for me what makes this whole relationship between Soane and Carr so good, is that The Rakes Progress is a narrative set of paintings, a narrative that Carr uses as a bedrock for his characters in Death Watch. I can only say so much here, but the traditional character of the ‘Rake’ (or a ‘Rakehell) and his journey through the paintings is mirrored in a number of the characters and their journey through the plot of Death Watch. Carr’s book is a subtle but powerful nod of thanks to John Soanes, his home and his collection. Interesting right? (Well it’s been fun for me!)

More historical ‘movements’:

Here’s a few more little historical gems that reveal themselves:

The titular ‘Death Watch’ of the book is taken, as Carr states in his very tongue in cheek prologue, from a description he saw in a clock makers reference book: F.J.Britten’s Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers, published in 1932, probably just as he was writing Death Watch. I have since found that book and here are the illustrations of the ‘Death Watch’ itself.

These watches known as Memento Mori watches were made by a mysterious French watch maker known only as ‘Moyse’. The one used in Death Watch was owned by Mary Queen of Scotts, and the same narrative runs in Carr’s story. In real life the watch was given to one of Queen Mary’s ladies in waiting, Mary Seton. The name Seton will jump out to many Carr obsessives, as being the surname of one of Carr’s most vital career characters, Fay Seton from He Who Whispers.

That book is set in a small fictional french town near Chartris, very similar to the french town of Reims where Mary Seton finished her days as a nun, and where the watch was discovered. (I could be reading into things here too much but I’m enjoying myself dammit!)

– Soane had many clocks in his collection, spread out in different rooms, and a number of clocks and the way they are shown in Death Watch match those in the Soane collection.

– In the third painting of The Rake’s Progress, Tom ‘the Rake’ is having his watch stolen by a women at a fancy party. The opening crime in Death Watch is a unsolved murder in which a woman has killed a man and stole a famous watch.

– The pub at which many of the cast of Death Watch hang out is called the Dutchess of Portsmouth. This pub doesn’t exist but the next road on from Lincoln’s Inn Fields is Portsmouth Road, named after Dutchess of Portsmouth, one of Charles the II’s mistresses.

– Charles the II housed the Dutchess in a property on the corner of what is now Portsmouth Road, this house subsequently became famous for being the so called ‘Curiosity Shop’ that features in Charles Dickens famous work Master Humphries Clock, which, wait for it, is a bout a story teller who keeps his manuscripts locked inside an ancient clock. Clocks, watches, time pieces, they are everywhere!

Times running out!

Okay okay, I’m possibly overstating my findings here. But what I love about all these links I am drawing out, is being given what I feel like is a secret window into the mind of the master himself. Where Carr found his inspiration has always been an interest to me as his ideas and settings were so diverse. Here we can imagine him at the John Soane house, surrounded my incredible artifacts, architecture and paintings and the cogs start turning as plot lines and impossible mechanisms fall into place like the beautiful structure of a rare skull-watch.

See you in part two.

From other bloggers:

Ben at – The Green Capsule

JJ at – The Invisible Event

Kate at – Cross Examining Crime

5 More Impossible ‘Thrillers’ to Try (Part 2)

In my last post I gave a list of 5 brilliant locked room mysteries from the golden age of crime fiction, or written in the golden age mould, that work as for runners to the ‘thriller’ genre. Page turning mysteries that never hold up on the pace.

But as with all lists picking out just 5 was too difficult, and so many great books got missed out. So I thought why miss out, let’s do some more! So here are another 5 thrilling, high paced, page turning impossible crime works, to add to your list:

1 – Murder on the Way – Theodore Roscoe (1935)

Published originally as a serial under the title ‘The Grave Must Be Deep’ this is an absolutely rip-roaring mélange of impossible madness. Locked room shootings, lead to hovering guns, lead to impossible vanishings, lead to being buried alive, lead to a woman impossibly healed after being shot in the head, and that’s just a small selection of the book’s mysteries. Constant threat and a brilliant ticking-clock-set-up give this book it’s furious pace, and the maddening claustrophobia of being stuck in one house on one island (pre-Agatha Christie) make this into a perfect example of an early thriller. It is also a book of firsts: set in Haiti it must be one of the earliest golden age crime novels to have a totally mixed race cast, with most of the main characters being black, it is also one of the very first Zombie novels – not the kind of Zombie we know today, but in it’s original Haitian origins – and it opens with the phrase ‘funny queer not funny ha-ha’ which is original to Roscoe, and which thanks to him is now an everyday part of the English language. This book will be the subject matter of our next Men Who Explain Miracles podcast as my fellow podcaster and blogger JJ went on an amazing journey himself getting this book pack into publication.

2 – Captain Cut-Throat – John Dickson Carr

Set in 1805, during the assault by Napoleon on Britain, this is a stand alone Carr and is part impossible crime work, part spy novel and part historical thriller. A silent, invisible killer known as ‘Captain Cut-Throat’, with the ability to to kill without being seen is knifing sentries in the Napoleon’s vast battle-camp poised to sail on England.

Not being hugely drawn to historical works per-se I was totally surprised by this book. The natural flow of the narrative, and the tension built by Carr with every plot point meant that I couldn’t put it down. The impossible angle is played down but gives rise to everything that follows and creates terror among the sentries that makes for a brilliant sense of hysteria throughout. There are some of the best written scenes in any Carr book here, just for the their sheer pace and the depth of the contextual framework.

3 – The Judas Window – John Dickson Carr – as Carter Dickson (1938)

I am honestly trying not to have majority Carr works here, but he has so many good examples what can I say? He isn’t called the master of the locked room for nothing. The Judas Window is hailed as one of Carr’s best, and there is very good reason for that. I also think it’s another of his most thrilling. James Answell arranges to visit his future father-in-law, Avory Hume, at his London home. Hume pours drinks for the both of them in his strong room, fitted with metal shutters on the windows and a huge wooden door with sliding bolts. But after a few sips Answell begins to lose consciousness, finally passing out, his drink being drugged. When he wakes Hume is dead, stabbed with an trophy arrow taken from the back wall. Only Answell and Hume are in the room, and only Answell’s finger prints are on the arrow, all the windows and doors being locked from the inside. Answell says he is innocent and the only one who believes him is the magnanimous Sir Henry Merrivale.

The reason I add this one to the list is for the peril in which Answell finds himself, with the ticking clock of his arrest and impending trial in court, the closing chapters of which have to be one of the best and most fast paced court room drama’s there are. I was literally racing to the end to finish it on my first read.

4 – The Tokyo Zodiac Murders – Soji Shimada (1981)

Another master work from the land of the rising sun. A harrowing prologue sets the pace for a number of brilliant impossible crimes. Painter, serial womaniser and astrological obsessive Heikichi Umezawa is found dead in his studio, locked from the inside. Only his footprints are in the snow leading up to the door and he has a head wound inflicted by an object that is nowhere to be found. Upon his death his studio is searched and a manuscript is found containing an elaborate horrific plan for Umezawa to create the perfect woman, known to him as ‘Azoth’. He would create this woman by killing his daughters and step daughters, recomposing them. And you can see what’s coming next, even though he is now dead, his plan somehow begins to be carried out, and his daughters begin to go missing. Multiple modernist breakdowns and challenges to the reader are all the more maddening, but what makes me add this book to this list particularly is the use of horror to drive the plot. There are twisting moments that rely on some pretty chilling ideas to work, not used for the sake of making something horrific for shock value, but written as a natural development to all that has happened, and therefore all the more powerful.

5 – Big Bow Mystery – Israel Zangwill – (1892)

One of the first locked room mysteries proper, and a very early example of what are now considered both locked room and thriller staples. Mrs Drabdump, owner of a working class, east end boarding house pounds on the door of one of her lodgers, who unusually hasn’t risen from bed. The door locked on the inside she begins to be worried and calls in the expertise of her neighbour, the retired detective Mr George Grodman. Breaking down the door they find the young lodger dead in his bed, throat cut from ear to ear, all windows locked from the inside and no weapon to be found. This book is marvellously written and is a pitch perfect satire of class culture and the East End of London in the late 1800’s, from a man who lived and worked there, and was one of the first books to bring humour into a story of murder. This in many ways was born from the ‘sensation’ literature of the victorian era, but with fast paced, dark twists.

What makes this one a thriller in my opinion is the pitting of the old detective George Grodman against the young gun on the scene Edward Wimp, both of whom detest each other, battling it out with old and new methods of detection. The race to finish line becomes wild as the public outcry for justice builds, with crowds and riots in the street. The last few chapters, and indeed the last few lines are as thrilling as they come. The solution to the locked room was the first of it’s kind and has been imitated no end since.

Special Mention:

6 – Killer’s Wedge – Ed McBain (1959)

Well I couldn’t just do 5 could I? Killers Wedge sees Detective Steve Corella, out on the case of a creepy locked room murder. Back at the station Virginia Dodge walks into the 87th Precinct with a gun and a bottle of Nitroglycerin. One shot into the bottle, or one knock onto the floor is enough to blow the whole block sky high. Dodge plans to kill Corella, and stating that no one can come or go until he arrives she takes the entire station hostage. Taking a seat in the centre of the room, the bottle sits perilously on the edge of the table, and with no way of communicating with Corella or each other, the remaining officers must work out a way of getting to the bottle before Dodge can use it. The suspense is nail biting, and as the heat rises you are flying through the pages to see what happens. A number of perfectly timed phone calls and arrivals in the precinct up the ante all the more.

Why this is not in the main list is for the way the locked room plays into the plot. There was some discussion, between locked room aficionados JJ and TomCat in the comments of my last post, about how much it could be said that the locked room in Killer’s Wedge provides the thrilling element. In the rest of my list the impossible angle is the origin of the thriller narrative, where as here the locked room provides a reason for Corella not to be there but doesn’t necessarily play into the hold up back at the precinct. Having said that the complexity of the locked room, means that Corella doesn’t leave quickly (which you are desperate for him to do), although again this could be any complicated crime to keep him away.

However what I think does make the locked room a thrilling element in this book, is how it works on it’s own merit. What is revealed as the door is broken down stays with you for a long time. Also the solution is one of my favourites, and this book has pride of place in my locked room collection.

So there we have it, another 6 books to fill your shelves with. I do not apologise in anyway for burdening you with for books to add to your list.

Anymore recommendations from readers? Any more great thrillers from the golden age or in the golden age mould to try?

The Invisible Guest: Oriol Paulo (2016) – Can Thrillers and Locked Rooms work together?

A man stirs from unconsciousness, sprawled on the floor of his hotel room, as he hears the police banging against the door. Coming to, he finds his mistress lying dead in the bathroom, she has been bludgeoned to death. Calling out to the police for help they break down the door and storm in. The problem? All the doors and windows are locked from the inside, the door was watched, and there is no one else in the room. The man is arrested as the only suspect, now about to stand trial for murder.

This delicious problem is presented in the brand new Spanish impossible crime thriller The Invisible Guest by Oriol Paulo. The Spanish title is ‘Contratiempo‘, the literal English translation of which is ‘Against Time’, which I think would in some ways have been a better name, and I’ll explain why. The film opens with Adrián Doria, a hugely successful young business man, receiving a late night call at his apartment where he is now under house arrest for the murder. Doria’s high powered lawyer has employed the services of Virginia Goodman, a prestigious defence attorney who has never lost a case. Goodman comes with the news that a witness with a new piece of evidence has emerged for the prosecution. The judge has called for the witness to testify that same night, which means that Doria and Goodman have only three hours in which to figure out how the crime was committed and compose a solid defence, or he goes to prison for murder. She starts a stop watch and places it one the desk, the untangling begins.

A great hook right? The locked room angle and the ticking clock have you on the edge of your seat from the off. Goodman asks Doria to explain the events from the start as they happened, which gives us a very natural piece of exposition to bring us into the crime and it’s surrounding story. The film develops into a cleverly layered set of extremely twisty plots that build into a number of big crescendos. A lot of the ‘detection’ is done by Goodman as she tries to unpick the motives, and double cross purposes of all involved. She tests and pushes Doria to his limit to draw out every angle on the case possible, and the detection is focussed as much on intuition and feeling – “What does this puzzle say to you?”- as much as does on ratiocination and the deconstruction of evidence.

There are a couple of absolutely killer scenes, and there is one plot point in particular -when one victim’s phone rings… I won’t say anything more – which is heart in throat stuff. The cast is also sparse, which works both for atmosphere and plotting. The cinematography is beautifully moody, with a gorgeous blue and green hue haunting the whole film, across a very limited number of locations. I had heard about this film over at the Golden Age Detection group on Facebook, but didn’t think we would get an English release. So I was chuffed when my wonderful sister told me that it was now on Netflix! I urge my readers to give it a go.

However, I do have a number of criticisms about this film, and that brings me to the title of this post. The Invisible Guest seems to suffer from the problem of trying to do to many things at once, therefore watering down each aspect in turn.

The hook of the three hour time limit, which kicks us off with a bang, is not really used as the plot moves forward. We now and again get a shot of the stop watch, but otherwise the tension is not capitalised upon, which limits the urgency of solving the crime. Therefore, what could have been a brilliantly claustrophobic dialogue between Doria and Goodman across the apartment table, ends up falling a little flat.

The same then goes for the locked room problem. Because Paulo has tried to create a surprise twist by twist plot, the complexity of the locked room starts to get consumed, and the intellectual focus of the impossible crime that opens the film gets lost. This is then apparent in the solution to the locked room itself. When I got to the end, I watched the set up back a number of times just to make sure, but I honestly don’t think it is fairly clewed (would really appreciate your thoughts on that readers), which is a shame because there is some really solid clewing elsewhere. And in the context of what has been set up I’m not sure the solution would be full proof and actually possible. Carr used a very similar solution idea in one of his short stories, but did it better because it was really believable in how it occurred.

And as for the twists, there were so many that they start to loose force, and therefore I could see the final revelation coming a mile off. This meant that what could have been a powerful tying together of threads lost it’s punch because of predictability.

What I will say in it’s defence is that the motive for the twists and the locked room are solid, if  a little outlandish, which is not an easy thing to get right. Therefore it makes me all the more sad that these elements are crowded out by the film trying to be too clever for it’s own good.

So after all that, my question is, can a locked room and a thriller style plot really mix? Does the speed and twisty nature of modern thriller writing work alongside the slow and methodical nature of a locked room problem, or will they always be bumping heads?

I guess a simple answer would be yes, of course they can, as pretty much anything can happen with good writing. There are many stories yet to be penned, so there is nothing stopping it happening. If we look at books like Till Death Do us Part and She Died a Lady by Carr, they are mind blowing in their pace, and shocking plot turns with impossible problems being the absolute centre of the plot. But then in my opinion these books are more thrilling than thriller if that makes sense? So, is it that the elements needed to create a modern thriller are just too different for the elements needed to create a brilliant locked room puzzle? I guess the bigger question is what is the authorial context that makes a thriller work the best and the same for a locked room story? Let me know your thoughts.

Do give The Invisible Guest a go, there is so much to like, and I really enjoyed seeing a screen writer deal with a modern locked room problem. If you loved it and the locked room solution let me know, I’m ready to be wrong! You can watch the trailer here to get in the mood:

 

 

But is it a Locked Room Mystery? The case of the impossible alibi.

Recently I was having a chat with a friend about impossible crimes (believe me this doesn’t happen that often), and though not a big reader they loved the series Death In Paradise. In response to my statement that I liked the impossible episodes of the series so far, they said “but aren’t all the episodes impossible crimes, because no one could have done it?”

In the intro to his brilliant CADS magazine number 74, editor Geoff Bradley writes a lovely off-hand piece about Death In Paradise, and its wave of bad press despite it’s popularity, (something I considered in this post). In his intro he also calls the stories of the BBC series ‘impossible crimes’.

Both these examples got me thinking. The idea that these stories are all being considered ‘impossible crimes’ seems to be because usually everyone has an alibi. This point of view doesn’t just apply to the TV series, but also to novels I have seen in discussion online. Some have suggested a novel as an impossible crime or locked room mystery because all the characters claim to be elsewhere at the time of the murder.

At the risk of treading some old ground covered by JJ somewhat in this post from last year, (it’s worth reading his post to see how he defines the terms ‘locked room’ and ‘impossible crime’ generally), I want to add my voice into the mix on this more specific point. I do not think a novel or episode of detective fiction counts as an impossible crime or locked room mystery simply if all the characters have seemingly solid alibis, and that is your complete set up. Why do I think this? Well, I think it’s something to do with the fact that an alibi and the impossible or locked room element of a novel are two very different things, with different roles.

Alibis are often created to be broken or solidified and therefore, even if seemingly watertight surely they can’t be the edges of an impossibility for the fact that most of the time they don’t hold up under scrutiny, or are meant to be broken down. Another problem is that the alibi can also be a lie. Many characters may say that they weren’t there or provide themselves with a place to have been, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. I think for a story to qualify as an impossible crime or locked room mystery something impossible has to have taken place, not just that there is a murder in an easily accessible location or within a generally plausible murder situation and everyone says ‘I wasn’t there.’

Seeing as Death In Paradise was the beginning of this thought process, let’s take the set ups of two episodes from series one as an example. Episode 1: ‘Death in Paradise’ tells the tale of a British detective shot while locked inside a solid steel panic room. Only the police know the code to the door, and when they get inside he has been shot at close range, no weapon and no murderer left within. The killer has somehow vanished into thin air. Therefore the physical circumstances under which the murder occurs are baffling and not able to have taken place, in other words an impossible crime. In Episode 3: ‘Predicting Murder’ (the series masterpiece I think) a woman is found poisoned in the classroom of a local school. There are two shot glasses on the teacher’s desk, and a bottle of strong drink, with only hers and the head teachers fingerprints, and only her glass poisoned. For the time of the murder however, the head teacher has an unbelievably rock solid alibi: “So let me get this straight, your alibi is that you were doing charity work, in an orphanage surrounded by nuns.” And so does everyone else who was involved in the school. This I would say, however, is not an impossible crime. The murder method and setup while complex, are not ‘impossible’ to occur, in that anyone could come and go into the room as they wished, even someone outside the cast of suspects could be responsible, and although they have alibis they were not all continuously watched, and it doesn’t mean that they are not lying or conspiring together. It seems as if complicated or tricky murder set-ups are being confused with an impossible or locked room set-ups.

‘Predicting Murder’

But maybe I am on shaky ground here? Alibis do often provide or hold together an impossibility. We could take the most classic locked room trope of the ‘first on the scene’ as an example. Used countless times over the years, here the alibi is: ‘We were all together when we broke down the door and the victim was found stabbed inside’, which is also the crux of the impossibility/solution ‘you were there, but when you went to examine the victim, who was only incapacitated, you stabbed them without anyone realising.’ Here then the alibi and the mechanics of the impossibility serve each other. Another example could be Keigo Higashino’s Salvation of a Saint (2008), we know who the murderer is, but we also know that she was on the other side of Japan at the time of the murder, so how on earth did she do it? Her alibi is, in essence, the impossibility.

Here I could run into even more problems, in that sometimes an impossible crime story is only such because a character’s testimony says so, but they are later found to be lying. Does that then mean the novel has changed from impossible to not? Or as was discussed a little in the comments on JJ’s post, Carter Dickson’s Judas Window (1938), one of the most important locked room mysteries ever written, requires us to believe that the central figure is innocent for the impossibility to even be there.

But in saying all this, I believe my point still stands, because I would say the impossibility in the ‘first on the scene’ scenario suggested above is: that they were stabbed in a room locked from the inside, but the killer managed to vanish away. Perhaps it’s the circumstances of the type of murder itself, rather than the alibis of those involved taking priority? Maybe it’s something to do with a mix up between the ‘howdunit’ and the ‘whodunnit’ and where final boundaries lie?

So what do you say? I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think constitutes a locked room proper, and how alibis play into that, as I try to traverse this rather narrow, icy path of definitions (leaving no footprints as I go).

Galileo: Intuition vs Logic in a Japanese Impossible Crime Series

What’s this you say? A Japanese impossible crime TV series based on the works of Keigo Higashino? Yes please!

Galileo (ガリレオ) explores the relationship between rookie detective Kaoru Utsumi – first introduced to English readers in Higashino’s Salvation of a Saint – and University physics professor Manabu Yukawa, as they team up to solve complex cases. What’s not to love!

Each episode features an impossible mystery: young boys astrally project themselves to give alibi’s to accused murderers, people die in locked rooms with the only clue being that fireballs are seen leaping across the room from the building opposite, secret messages float on water then disappear when grabbed at, and much more. Each crime has some route within a scientific hypothesis, and Yukawa, known lovingly by the police force as ‘Galileo’ for being a ‘weird’ scientist, arrives at the solution through some kind of testable method, after furiously scribing an equation wherever he may find himself, which can then be demonstrated in his university laboratory.

The series is exactly what you would expect from a prime time Asian drama. Melodramatic performances, knock-about and groan worthy humour, parodied characters and crazy music choices. But within that is some really sophisticated writing and some high level plotting, clueing and original impossible set ups.

The characters Utsumi and Yukawa are based on two series detectives from contemporary, Japanese mystery writer Keigo Higashino. However, apart from their job titles, the complex crimes, and the fact Yukawa drinks instant coffee, that’s pretty much where the resemblance to the books ends. But it doesn’t make the series un-enjoyable, and the writers are consistent with what they have created, and after the first two episodes (it seems like they needed to warm the general viewer into the series) the writing and the crimes get much more serious, chilling and eerie. Each episode can be seen as a short morality tale with a theme explored through each paranormal or impossible situation: is it right to sympathise with a serial killer? Is it right to commit suicide if it benefits others? Is it right to allow people to keep false beliefs if it comforts them? And the overarching theme of the whole series: logic against intuition and emotion. It was a tough choice, but to warm you into watching this series, here are my top 5 episodes from the 10 in this first series, in order of appearance:

‘Moeru’ (Burns) – Ep 1

The opening episode of the series begins with a group of young social layabouts causing havoc in a quiet area of town. A man looking at them out of his window lifts his phone, types in a few digits, and the groups leader freezes on the spot, his head bursting into flames. Great visual clues throughout and the witness of a little child to a strange occurrence during a lantern festival bring Yukawa and Utsumi to the incredibly complex solution. But just when you feel like things are tying up too neatly, and the crime seems outlandish, there is a sudden twist which changes your perspective on the entire event, and makes the solution totally believable.

‘Sawagu’ (Poltergeist) – Ep 3

Utsumi gets a call from Yukawa, asking her to help find the missing brother-in-law of one of his students. The man, missing for over a week, was known to enter the house of a recently deceased old woman. The house now seems to be occupied by a cast of suspicious characters. When Utsumi breaks in to investigate the walls are covered with handwritten protective signs against spirits, and a few moments later the entire house shakes violently throwing objects everywhere. Is it the spirit of the old woman, or a message from the missing man? The solution to the poltergeist activity is super simple, but it’s the why it happened at the exact time of the death and disappearance which makes it so clever.

‘Shiru’ (Foresight) – Ep 6

A cracker of an opening scene leads into the only semi-inverted mystery of the series, the premise and setup of which could have been lifted straight from a Higashino story. (Who knows maybe it is, we don’t have a huge amount of translations here!). A newlywed is drinking with his beautiful wife and best friend when he receives a strange call. After looking at the number, he pretends to answer a business call and slips into another room. An affair is revealed and the woman on the phone says that he had promised to marry her. He says it’s impossible, and with that she tells him to look out of his window. Pulling the curtain aside he looks to the flats opposite, and there is the woman, stood on a chair, her head through a noose. She says he has five seconds to decide or she will hang herself and begins to count down. The man in desperation pleads, but she reaches one, and kicks the chair away. Utsumi is called to her flat to see the body and clear the scene, but a few passing strange objects show that things might not be what they seem. This was definitely my favourite episode from the series, the clueing, pace and plot are just perfect.

‘Miru’ (Spiritual Sight) – Ep 8

A famous chef is stabbed to death (over 270 times) in her cooking school kitchen, but at the exact time of her murder she is seen by her sister, standing outside the window of her apartment seemingly warning her of her murder. The apartment is over 30 kilometres away, and impossible to reach in the time frame. This isn’t the strongest mystery in the series, but some lovely clues – including why a button on a cd player would make music go fuzzy – and again the reason why things happened in the way they did, make it convincing and memorable.

‘Utsuru’ + ‘Hazeru’ (Transcription and Explosion) Ep 9-10

Utsumi is forced to do a police talk at a local secondary school during their school festival. Afterward she is looking around the school art exhibition when she encounters an unbelievably life-like (or should I say death-like) sculpture. A plaster cast face suspended in a gilt frame titled ‘Death Mask of a Zombie’. There is a commotion in the crowd looking at the work, and a woman claims that the cast is the face of her son, registered missing for the last month. The boy who made the piece is called forward and says he made the piece from a metal cast he found near the local nature pond, which he grabs from the shelf. The metal cast has the shape of the man’s face perfectly moulded, including evidence of a bullet wound in the centre of his head. This brilliant start sets up a twisty plot which pits Yukawa’s intellect against an evil relation from his past life.

You can watch the whole series online here on Viki, a site much like Netflix but for asian drama. If you are happy with adverts every 15 minutes you can watch it for free, or if you pay a small fee you can watch without. Unfortunately one episode (Ep 4 – Kusaru) seems to be missing and I’m not sure why, but hopefully they’ll resolve it.

And let me implore you to read Higashino’s books. They are very much worth your time, and are subtle, social and enigmatic reads. Detective Utsumi is also one of my favourite detectives I have read, and how she is set off against the other members of her team is brilliant. You can read more about that here in my review of the impossible crime novel Salvation of a Saint.

Japanese Golden Dozen: Ellery Queen, Intruiging Mysteries from Japan

A magical find from my last London second hand bookshop walk.

This collection from Ellery Queen catalogues the best detective story writers from Japan at the time of publication. Ellery Queen was the moniker of detective fiction writers and anthologists Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee. Published in 1978, Lee had passed away by this time and the back cover shows an image of Dannay. This must have been one of the last big collections Dannay produced as he would also pass away only 4 years later. This copy to my surprise was actually printed in Tokyo by the Charles E. Tuttle company, who are still publishing asian fiction, mystery and poetry. As the title suggests there are 12 short stories in this collection and a lot of hits (and some misses), here are my top 5 in order of appearance in the book:

1 – Too Much About Too Many – Eitaro Ishizawa

This semi-impossible short story reads like a forerunner to Keigo Higashino, and concerns the poisoning of a glass at an end of year office party. 13 suspects on Friday the 13th, but all the suspects speak highly of the victim who was loved by one and all. The chilling denouement makes one think of Agatha Christie’s Endless night.

2 – A Letter From the Dead – Tohru Miyoshi

A columnist for a small town newspaper receives a letter to his office from an anonymous author writing from ‘The River Styx’, saying that they were murdered but no one knew it except them and the murderer. There is a return address and postmark which show upon investigation that the letter was sent after the author had died in an apparent suicide. The columnist tracks down the address and visits the widow, and I thought there was going to be a brilliant locked room set up when she would only speak to him through the letterbox. He passed the letter through the letter box and after a moment she started groaning in pain. But alas she wasn’t dying in impossible circumstances (we can’t have everything) but groaning as she recognised the handwriting as her husband’s, although it seemed impossible. The ending is convincing and satisfying.

3 – Cry from the Cliff – Shizuki Natsuki

This was the absolute crown of the collection. A gorgeously written story which perfectly uses a small cast of characters and beautifully described locations to explore a semi impossible stabbing on a beach cliff. The prose are deceptively spare and have inspired me to seek out more of Natsuki’s books. Only a few of her novels have been printed in English, and I would value hearing from others if you have read any of them. Natsuki has often been called the Agatha Christie of Japan, which she begrudges, and this fascinating interview from 1987 shows how she defied gender traditions to become an author, and that she also wrote all her books out by hand!

4 – The Kindly Blackmailer – Kyotaro Nishimura

An absolutely killer opening where a barber has a strange new customer turn up at his shop, who tells him “I’ll be dropping in here, often”. The mysterious man reveal the barbers name and says that he has knows a lot about him. Then drops the bomb shell: “for instance, I know that three months ago, when you were driving a light truck, you ran into a little kindergarten girl.” Holding out his shaving razor blade, a million thoughts run through the barber’s head, and from here develops a twisty blackmail plot with a bag full of mixed motivations.

5 – No Proof – Yoh Sano

This must be one of the most intriguing ideas for a crime short I have ever read. A team of Japanese business men and women head to the roof of their office block for a celebratory new year group photo. The photographer, a co-worker, pretends to be focusing the camera under a piece of cloth, but is secretly putting on a rubber monkey mask. As he shouts cheese, he jumps from behind the camera, scaring one and all, snapping the photo of their terrified faces. They realise they have been party to a practical joke and are laughing away when one member keels over, dying of a heart attack. His last moment immortalised on photographic film. The question… did the photographer knowingly cause his death, and if so, how on earth can it be proved with any credibility? Over three meetings a cast of police officers and detectives named only officer A,B,C and onwards, wrestle out the many moral and legal twists of the case, the motives of which turn out to be much more complex than they think. Really enjoyed this one, highly original.

How this collection came around is another mystery in itself. Queen in his foreword says that he was asked by the Suedit Cooperation to put this collection together. However I can’t find any information about this company anywhere, and the company name looks strangely un-Japanese. At the end of each story is also a gorgeous hand drawn miniature Illustration, but I couldn’t see any accreditation to the artist.

Illustrations for: Too Much About Too Many, No Proof, and Cry From The Cliff.

The book explores a lot of uniquely Japanese themes, and it’s slow and social pace are really satisfying once you get into the mysteries, but at the same time some of the stories are too slow paced to hold you. Of the last four pieces, the first three go down the erotic route, and The Vampire by Masako Togawa is definitely not safe for work, or for reading on the train as I was at the time! Although these three stories do speak to the history of erotic literature in Japan and are not badly written. The final story of the collection was just a shade too dark in its comedy for my tastes, but a nice concept.

If you see this on your journeys, grab it, it’s a real Japanese gem.

 

What are you reading? WWW Wednesday

What have I been reading this past few weeks, and what’s coming up next on the book pile? To show you lovely readers, I’m getting involved with the WWW Wednesday meme over at the brilliant Taking on a World of Words blog.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?

What did you recently finish reading?

What do you think you’ll read next?

Here we go!

What am I currently reading?

I am super excited to be half way through Nine and Death makes Ten by Carter Dickson. A classic golden age impossible crime mystery, that takes the award for my favourite title for a crime book.  Set against the backdrop of WWII aboard the ‘HM Edwardic’, the ship is forcibly on blackout in protection against attacks. This so far has created a literal and figurative darkness over the artificially lit cabins, making way for a ingenious impossibility related to a set of bloody fingerprints that match no one aboard the ship. 

I am also at the start of contemporary crime novel Tana French’s The Trespasser. Having read many glowing reviews I wanted to give this book a go and it’s brilliant so far. The black female lead, the caustic Antoinette Conway, is super refreshing and very well written.

What did I recently finish?

Just closed the last page of a The Japanese Golden Dozen. A very curious and enigmatic collection from the 1970’s by golden age crime writer and anthologist Ellery Queen. I found this treasure on my last London second hand bookshop walk. The book catalogues and translates some of the best detective fiction writers from all over Japan. There are some misses (and shockers!) but a lot of hits in this collection, my review of this will be up in my next post.

What do you think you will read next?

Well… this week I found possibly my best hall of golden age impossible crime novels from a single secondhand bookshop visit. Dropped in on the off chance and got myself 8 titles! These books are all penned by golden age writer John Dickson Carr, who produced over 80 novels in his time, almost all of which have impossible crimes or elements (also under the pseudonym Carter Dickson, see above). I am a big fan of Carr and a few of these are considered classics so I’m pushed for choice! On the contemporary crime front I have also ordered to my local library Sarah Hillary’s first novel Someone Else’s Skin. And keen to get on Sara Paretsky’s feminist crime series with her first book Indemnity Only.

Spoilt for choice!

What’s on your to read pile, and what top books have you read lately? Anything you want to recommend me?

The Sherlock Holmes of China: Robert van Gulik’s Chinese Gold Murders

The hard hitting detective Judge Dee has been called the Sherlock homes of China. But interestingly, the T’ang Dynasty mystery stories of Judge Dee were penned by a Dutchman.

On my last second hand book walk through London (see here for the guide) I was very fortunate to come across a copy of The Chinese Gold Murders by Robert van Gulik. A locked room mystery set in 7th century China, following the exploits of Judge Dee and his first cases as the new magistrate of the fictional Chinese city of Peng-Lai. After the second world war broke out the author, Robert van Gulik, lived in China as a representative of the Dutch government. Here he became an expert on Chinese translation, art, literature and culture. While in Japan before the war he came across the book ‘Dee Goong An’ (The Cases of Judge Dee) in a second hand book shop. The book, written in the 18th century by an unknown author, was an early piece of Chinese detective fiction based on De Renjie, a real life country magistrate who lived roughly between 630-700 AD. van Gulik was so taken with the anonymous book that he decided to translate it into English, and after it’s publication he went on to pen his own series of Judge Dee mysteries. The Chinese Gold Murders being his fourth Judge Dee novel written in 1952.

To begin, I have never read a crime novel with so many crimes! Judge Dee comes up against an impossible poisoning, the victim’s ghost now seeming to be haunting the corridors of the tribunal, a woman who vanishes from a muddy pathway, a man beaten to death and thrown into a river, two victims stabbed to death in their beds one of which consequently disappears after being buried, a prowling weretiger mauling victims in the woods, smuggling of arms and a headless monk. And that’s all on his first two days on the job!

However, van Gulik neatly weaves this all into three distinct cases each solved in order through the book. This rule of three, van Gulik writes in his postscript, follows that of the traditional Chinese detective novel where the sleuth would solve three or more cases in succession.

There are so many threads and clues going I was worried that van Gulik wouldn’t manage to keep the plot afloat, but he ties things together throughout. There are some lovely riddle and enigma like clues which reveal themselves convincingly at the books close. A particularly nice scene is where Judge Dee is dragged along to a Chinese melodramatic street performance of a number of traditional mystery plays. The last two stories of the play, showing the cases of another ancient master detective ‘Judge Yu’, show how a murderer is revealed by the clue of a secret message being hidden in an almond shell. However, it’s not the secret message that is the real clue, but the almond itself, as the real murderer liked almond milk. This is obviously preposterous, and is hammed up to great effect in the farcical street play, but the idea of ‘not the thing inside the but the thing itself’ then links to a very real clue happening in one of Judge Dee’s complicated cases. This and other inside-out ways of looking at things are very satisfying elements throughout.

As a historian of Chinese culture, van Gulik is faithful to the historical setting, and the book reads as much like a historical diary as well as a crime novel. Set during the development between opposing Confucian and Buddhist worldviews this tension becomes a backdrop to many of the cases. Also taken as running subplots are the high level of patriarchy evident in the culture of the time, alongside the ethics of sex and gender. The buying and selling of wives and prostitutes is all shown, and sexist remarks abound, which Judge Dee smashes down or subverts. van Gulik also illustrated the novel himself, with 10 line drawings completed to mimic the traditional Chinese print style.

Two of van Gulik’s illustrations from the Chinese Gold Murders

As well as the difficult sexist characters, I did find the book was too slow paced in places. The book begins at high speed but there is some drudgery and dryness in the middle when getting through the more technical aspects of historical exposition and case details, particularly after the impossible poisoning was resolved about half way through. Though the pace picks up again towards the end and the final reveal scene in a huge temple meeting is worth getting to.

To focus on the impossible situation itself for a moment, as this blog is designed to, the poisoning had a convincing and well plotted set up. The original magistrate of Peng-Lai is poisoned in his library locked from the inside. Poison is found in his teacup but all of his tea making equipment is kept in a locked cupboard which only he has access to, and no one was seen entering or leaving the building at the time. I felt that the mechanics of the solution were a little unconvincing, and I’m not sure if it would actually work. Two semi-alternative solutions were produced through the book, one which included the slamming of a door, which I actually would have preferred as the solution. But this ends up being a recurring motif which becomes more and more important and creepy and it makes sense that it therefore only pointed to the final solution. Interestingly, van Gulik writes in his postscript that the idea for the impossible poisoning, of which he modified, was based on a much older story from the original anonymous ‘Dee Goong An’ stories, the motif for which is very reminiscent of a Sherlock novel, even though the Sherlock story was written 100 years later.

What also warmed me to this book were the unresolved paranormal elements that van Gulik chose to leave us with. He doesn’t give us any doubts that the crimes were explainable, but that Judge Dee may in the end have had some ghostly help along the way. That refreshing element gave it the little edge that it needed to round off. Looking forward to finding more of this series and trying them out.

Haunted Objects, Gender and Impossible Poisonings: Salvation of A Saint by Keigo Higashino

In recent weeks I have begun making my way through the books of Japanese author Keigo Higashino. Having teared through the brilliantly tense, inverted thriller The Devotion of Suspect X (2011), made way for me to read the second in the Detective Galileo series Salvation of A Saint (2012). I prioritised it as it is also a locked room mystery!

Yoshitaka Mashiba, a big time CEO, runs his marriage much like his business. Yoshitaka has forced an agreement with his wife, famous tapestry and patchwork artist Ayane Mashiba, that if they can’t have children within the first year of their marriage, that they should separate. The book opens with Yoshitaka telling Ayane that time is up. He makes it quite clear that he is ready to move on, and that she should be too. Ayane, zoned out it a seemingly psychological defense mechanism, stares at a selection of white pansies ‘Not particularly showy flowers, but they’re tough’, she speaks in her head. It’s a subtle but weighty premonition of the book’s tensions to come.

Needing to get away, Ayane decides to leave Tokyo and spend the upcoming three day weekend with her parents in Sapporo, Northern Japan. She leaves the keys to her house with her young, committed studio assistant Hiromi. But when Hiromi enters the house on the second day of the weekend to find Yoshitaka lying dead in the living room, a poisoned coffee cup by his side, with all the doors and windows locked from the inside, save for one small opening in the upstairs bathroom not big enough for anyone to enter, the puzzle really begins.

Having just been thwarted by her pragmatically cold husband, suspicion immediately falls on Ayane. But how could she have poisoned her husband when she was thousands of miles away in Sapporo at the exact time Yoshitaka died? Enter Manabu Yukawa, a university physics professor, known lovingly as Detective Galileo, alongside police detectives Kusanagi and Utsumi, to explain how not to just to solve but to prove the perfect crime.

An interesting sub plotting tool, is Higashino’s take on the themes of ‘female intuition’ and the classic idea of poison being a woman’s weapon. This is an interesting angle to work with, and represents a lot of contemporary questions about gender, and gender roles. There are arguments throughout the story between old a new school ways of looking at a women’s involvement in a crime and discussions about whether the young and brilliant female detective Kaoru Utsumi (one of my absolute favourite detective characters in recent years) can detect more easily the motives of the suspects because she is a woman or because she is brilliantly observant. All this discussion is then further muddied by the fact that the lead detective on the case, Kusunagi seems to have fallen for their main suspect Ayane, and keeps trying to defend her in his wearied mind.

Japanese Edition

Higashino gives us a strong introduction to junior detective Utsumi. We observe her first through Kusunagi’s eyes, where she happens to not be in the house observing the crime scene, but standing on the front lawn looking up at the flowers on the first floor balcony. When she finally makes her way to the body she wanders off during the chief commissioner’s explanation of the death, only to be found later staring at a cupboard where she notices that 4 champagne glasses are missing from the shelf. What looks to Kusunagi like absent mindedness, and a rejection of authority, sews wonderfully plotted seeds in our minds, and Utsumi’s incredibly detailed observances turn out to be crux points in solving the riddle of the poised coffee cup. Detective Galileo of course sees Utsumi’s brilliance, presenting her with many a challenge to draw out the young detective’s abilities. Interestingly, the Japanese TV series Galileo (ガリレオ) based on the books of Higashino, have Galileo and Utsumi as the lead characters, solving complicated crimes as a double act. 

Masaharu Fukuyama and Kou Shibasaki as Galileo and Utsumi.

Another thing that Higashino does so well in Salvation is to draw out a foreboding and haunted sense of setting. Higashino does this through the use of a minimal cast of characters (hot housed together page after page), through a minimal amount of locations (which we constantly re-enter) and through his repeated use of objects as a site of haunted and imbued meaning.

The central crime, is an impossible poisoning, a lethal dose of arsenous acid, a brutal and convulsive poison, somehow present in a cup of coffee. This event and its memory then become the haunting elements as Higashino has his characters constantly drinking coffee, visiting tea shops and passing cups to each other throughout the rest of the book. There is even one moment where Detective Kusanagi, having spent time jumping from tea shop to tea shop decides to opt for a tomato juice, the taste of which burns his tongue due to all the tea he has drunk.

The theologian and novelist G.K.Chesteron, author of the legendary Father Brown series of crime stories written in the early 1900’s, wrote a short essay titled ‘In Defense of the Detective Novel’. The centre of the essay takes up this idea of how the axiomatic structure of the crime story has a particular ability to imbue things with resonant meaning, the ‘romantic possibilities’ of objects and cities. The Detective novel he states:

‘…declines to regard the present as prosaic or the common as commonplace… The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the mystery…’

The use of the word ‘derisive’ (mocking) here is poignant in describing how detective stories, and maybe even more so impossible crime stories, carry so much of their power. Higashino’s characters constantly drinking and tasting these fluids don’t just haunt the book, but are a kind of mocking play with the reader, a continual reminder of what is not known (the solution) against what is known (the clues). It’s as if everyone is being poisoned over and over. Poisoned not just by fluids, but by ideas, doubts, and misplaced affections which affect the characters judgement and reason, something which they try to grasp onto, as they work to solve a crime which is at it’s heart a logical puzzle of deeply in need of solid reason. These fluids and liquids of ideas, teas and coffees, seep through the book, much like the poison seeps through the cup and into its victim. It’s a constant dark and playful reminder of what is consuming the characters.

As usual with Higashino, and with any good locked room mystery, the solution (and in this case the title) only make sense in the last few pages. The solution itself is incredibly cheeky, and I’m not sure how other impossible crime fans would feel about it, but over time it has grown on me. All the clues are indeed there for the observant reader!

I recommend Salvation of A Saint and the first book The Devotion of Suspect X to anyone wanting a taste of thriller with enigmatically puzzling elements.

Where are all the Locked Rooms? Crime Fiction and Morality: Part 1

The heart of the traditional crime novel and the traditional locked room mystery is wonderfully, and essentially a morality tale. A tale of good and bad, with justice prevailing at the denouement. This is a deeply satisfying and important type of storytelling, and appeals to our humanity. But many modern crime works are not traditional ‘whodunits’ but ‘whydunits’ with the dark motivation of the killer being the centre of the story. Is the apparent lack of interest in the golden age locked room mystery, something to do with the time period that we find ourselves in?

Otto Penzler is an editor of many crime collections, including the huge anthology of short stories ‘The Locked Room Mysteries’, published by Black Lizard in 2014, and is also the proprietor of the Mystery Bookshop in New York. In writing for the Independent about the seeming disappearance of the traditional Locked Room genre Penzler puts it like this:

‘Many modern readers don’t have the patience to follow the trail of clues in a detective story in which all suspects are interviewed… until all the suspects are gathered for the explanation of how the crime was committed, who perpetrated it and why they did it. It is not realistic and was never intended to be. It is entertainment, as all fiction is… or should be.’

If Penzler is right, the ‘Impossible Crime’ is the genre of crime fiction which you could say requires the most patience of all. Could I see in my own city of London, a commuter sardined in high-paced commute trying to piece together the clues to work out how a man was shot in an empty room, with the only entrance watched, to then have the still smoking gun delivered in a package only minutes later?… (Joseph Commings’ X-Street Murders if you’re interested) Maybe not… But then again, maybe I could.

There have been a number of modern Locked Room mysteries twisting their way into our minds in recent years. The BBC series Death in Paradise, originally penned by Robert Thorogood, has had 4 impossible problems. One of my favourites being the last episode of the most recent series 5 (as I write this) titled ‘Flames of Love’. This episode, written by Matthew Barry, puzzles on a victim shot in a room where the window is locked from within and her body is propped up against the inside of the door leaving no way for a killer to get out. Mark Gattis’ modern Sherlock series has contained a few impossible situations, notably where one victim was stabbed while inside a locked shower cubicle, with no weapon or assassin to be found. And casting our mind back a few years you could have seen an impossible crime every week with David Renwick’s Jonathan Creek series. There is a new 90 minute Creek episode on the way, so there is more to come from Renwick. (Check my last post for more details – I am a big Creek fan!)

But with the exception of Creek many locked room stories today are still few and far between, usually used as openers or punctuation points to a series, and are mostly in the TV format. Comedian Miles Jupp wrote an article for the BBC saying that locked rooms still had a strong appeal, but had his doubts as to whether they could make a resurgence in the world of paper and print:

‘So could the locked room mystery stage a similar comeback in Britain? Not necessarily, according to publisher Daniel Mallory of Sphere, who consigns the locked room mystery to the world of the “cosy” crime thriller.’

The question here is, why? What is holding the impossible crime novel back (other than maybe the time needed to read one) and why would a publisher not see it as a viable investment? Well in many ways, why should they? The form itself could be seen as somewhat of an outdated one.

The height of the locked room mystery came during the reign of the classic fair-play detective novel, known as the Golden Age of detection (or GAD for crime buffs). Think Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, G.K Chesterton, John Dickson Carr, all between the two world wars. These writers and many others formulated the classic ‘whodunit’ style of puzzle fiction, with plotting, clueing, misdirection and sometimes pages with a ‘challenge to the reader’ to work it all out before the detective does. The addition of the locked room, then, made these books not just a whodunnit but a ‘howdunit’, taking the puzzle element to it’s highest point.

Much popular modern crime writing does not fall easily into either of these two categories. We could call many contemporary crime stories a ‘why-dunnit’. We can find out who the killer is on the first page, sometimes the book or TV series is from the point of view of the killer themselves. What is important is why they did it, their psychology. The more brutal, thrilling and serial the murders are, and the more twisted the killer’s motives, the better. Even if their motive is that they simply just like killing (maybe the darkest motive of all).

So then, the modern psychological thriller (fast paced, gritty, psychological) and the Golden Age locked room mystery (social, contained, complex and moody) could seem like worlds apart. But essentially, as ‘crime fiction’, there are a number of things that still link these time periods together. For the purpose of this post I will discuss just one: morality.

In our current pluralistic culture, ideas about morality and justice are (importantly) being called into question and are therefore more difficult to grasp onto. It’s not a wonder then that so much of popular crime fiction deals more with the motives behind the killer in question. For example, if someone is simply psychotic, how do we understand what they have done? Or if murdering someone seems almost essential in the narrative situation, then how do we and the other characters relate to the perpetrator, as in the brilliant inverted crime thriller The Devotion Of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino. In this novel a horrible, abusive ex-husband re-appears tormenting his ex-wife and daughter, consequently being murdered in self defence, all of which we see. The enduring grip of the narrative is then about how to cover the crime up, because surely the wife and daughter are really innocent in these confused circumstances?

The thrill of many modern popular crime books comes in what lies behind the killer or what ties the killings together, the reader trying to psychoanalyse and unpick the brain of the murderer, and in that way it’s an interesting reflection on our own time period. To think that in a epoch where we are statistically safer than ever, but at the same time all the ills of the world are so easily available to watch at the click of a trackpad, we should land on such a gritty form of popular storytelling is striking. Although if you read Endless Night by Agatha Christie (not too late at night) or Margery Allingham’s stories you will see something of the horrific psychotic killer and the most brutal and gory of murders even within the golden age of detection…

But above all this, as we read a crime novel or watch a crime series we still have that same impulse that drives the whole crime genre: simply wanting to work it out. Even if modern crime works are less about means and opportunity in favour of motivation, our propensity as humans to get to the truth and to see justice prevail is not extinguished. And therefore the essence and the very beginnings of the crime novel, as both morality tale combined with puzzle, still remains at its heart. Even if the puzzle is less about how killers can escape from locked rooms, and more about how the murderer’s brain locks together.

However, in saying all this I want to acknowledge some generalisations on my part. There are many writers today still working in and around the golden age style. Take for example Sophie Hannah, and the TV series’ Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Dr Blake Mysteries and Death In Paradise. There are also many modern thriller’s with fair play elements, like Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series, the as mentioned Higashino novels and the American Sherlock TV series Elementary to name a few examples in a big list. But much of the books that make it into big posters on the platforms of train stations, are of the fast paced, often inverted, psychological crime thriller.

In regards to the title of this post where all the locked rooms? it could seem that the psychological thriller genre has all but taken over the golden age locked room format. But… there is indeed a contemporary locked room novel scene bubbling, and it may surprise you to hear that to access it, we need to look to Europe and the far east.

In 2007 the noted locked room anthologist Roland Larcombe brought a group of crime fiction experts and translators together to create a hypothetical library of the top 100 locked room mystery novels. In the final results a huge 40 percent of the books chosen were French titles. The full list can be found here. Arguably the first Locked Room Mystery proper the fantastic The Mystery of The Yellow Room was written by french author Gaston Leroux, who then went on to pen The Phantom of the Opera. Continuing from there is the legacy of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. In their own right they both wrote many famous locked room novels, which appear on the top 100 list by Larcombe. And together under the nom de plume Boileau-Narcejac they wrote, among many other works, the noir classic Vertigo, adapted by them for cinema at the request of Alfred Hitchcock. Interestingly, these works by Boileau-Narcejac alongside other french authors like George Simenon could also be said to have been the start of the ‘whydunnit’ genre, where the killers and criminals are more interesting than the detectives. Other writers such as the hyper prolific Paul Halter, who has written some 40 Locked room mysteries in French, continue to carry the impossible crime mantle right up to the present day.

And to search further afield in Japan, the classic detective novel and the locked room mystery are absolutely thriving. Take for example the wonderfully complex and brutal Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada where an artist is killed by an unknown weapon within his studio, locked from the inside. His 6 daughters then all go mysteriously missing from a bath house, their body parts found scattered all over Japan, set out by a riddled code.

But the problem here is, barely any French or Japanese locked room novels get a translation into English. This could leave English readers thinking that the locked room book is all but dead, when in many cases it is most definitely alive! So, maybe the locked room mystery genre hasn’t vanished as much as we might think, and every time one makes it’s way into the UK many seem to love it. Who knows, maybe we will see a resurgence in the world of books. But they may have to be translated from Japanese or French first!