So, the obvious question in light of this entry into the Reprint of the Year Awards 2020 as organised by Kate at CrossExaminingCrime is: can these stories originally published between 1954 and 1961 be considered a reprint if they’ve never been published in English before? To which I ask: if they couldn’t, would they be in the running for the Reprint of the Year Awards?
Today, or over the coming days, all manner of reputable Golden Age detective fiction bloggers — and Brad Friedman — will be putting their reputations on the line by trying to convince you that their choice of a work of crime and/or detection republished during the dumpster fire that was 2020 is the best of its kind. Then next week, they’re going to do it all over again, and then the following week you get to vote for your favourite(s) and a winner will be decided.
Given my avowed fascination with the impossible crime in fiction, as well as the late in life love affair I have started with the works of Freeman Wills Crofts, it will be no surprise to many of you that I have chosen The Red Locked Room (2020) by Tetsuya Ayukawa as the hat I shall be tossing into this ring. The back cover of this edition invites comparison with both Crofts and John Dickson Carr, the arguable doyen of the impossible crime, and so all I need to do is wax lyrical about the delights of the impossible crime stories — ‘The Red Locked Room’ (1954), ‘The White Locked Room’ (1958), ‘The Clown in the Tunnel’ (1958), and ‘The Blue Locked Room’ (1961) — and pour out joy unconfined on the complexities of the alibi stories — ‘Whose Body?’ (1957), ‘The Five Clocks’ (1957), and ‘Death in Early Spring’ (1958) — and we’re done.
Except, it’s not quite going to go like that.
Someone telling you how great a book is always runs into the problems of subjectivity. The classic example for me is that I simply don’t understand the praise lavished on Death on the Nile (1937) by Agatha Christie: I think it’s…fine, but nothing close to the masterpiece many seem to herald it as. But this is also what’s so great about reading, reviewing, and especially discussing books — we read the exact same words (mostly…) and yet undergo a unique experience as a result. So, to a certain extent, a bunch of us telling you that our selection is the best book republished in any calendar year is folly of this highest order: there are at least two books due to be nominated that I’d probably put among the worst I’ve read this year, and no amount of someone telling me I’ve missed the point is going to change my mind on that front.
Allow me, then, to break new ground in the Reprint of the Year Awards by telling you that the mysteries in The Red Locked Room aren’t really that great. We’ll take a moment here for a few of you to throw your hands up in despair and to remind you of the subjectivity of opinions where the quality of a prose work is concerned, and with that out of the way we can now look through a few of the problems I see in them.
Taking the collection generally, these stories run into the problem that an Agatha Christie short story collection has in that the same trick is used so much that it becomes a little tedious. This absolutely lies at the feet of the editors than Ayukawa, but it’s still something to consider. Of the seven stories here, a surprisingly large number of them (I’ll not say which ones or how many, in the hope that I’ll preserve some surprise for anyone else who spots it) can be boiled down to a two- or three-word phrase in order to explain their mysteries. And while it’s not fair to hold this against the stories, it’s weirdly distracting one you spot it, and it very much took me out of proceedings.
However, the individual stories themselves could also be good, regardless of the company in which they’re put, right? They could, but Ayukawa is so damn prolix that these things run on for, in most cases, about twice as long as they should. Events unfold in such a weird hotchpotch of a way that a lot of the time you’re not even sure who the story is focussing on, and then the narrative breaks off at weird points without resolving issues only to casually throw in the resolution as an afterthought several pages later (Utako Ui going to identify the body in ‘Whose Body?’ being the most egregious example of this). This is no mere infelicity in translation — c’mon, Ho-Ling Wong is magnificent at this by now, having done incredible work for the likes of Alice Arisugawa, Yukito Ayatsuji, Keikichi Osaka, and Takemaru Abiko for Locked Room International, capturing the individual voices of those authors brilliantly (you know this because of how distinctly those books read) — and so I’m prepared to say it’s a feature of Ayukawa’s prose.
In much the same way that so many modern crime novels are churned out with Agatha Christie comparisons emblazoned on every spare inch, I’m not entirely sure that the complexity here is anything close to Crofts’ league, not are the impossibilities — once you spot that common theme and get a sense of how they were planned — in Carr’s bunker. Easily the best scheme is ‘The Five Clocks’. but there’s no detection: we’re simply sat down and told how it was worked rather than how the detective worked it out — it’s marvellous, but done so disinterestedly that it becomes difficult to engage. The essential misdirection in ‘Whose Body?’, too, is very clever, but Ayukawa needs more the focus and skill of Osaka (in particular) to bring this home to the reader in a less verbose manner. In solidly two or three of the stories the detective, having explained the workings of the crime, sees that witnesses are confused and so has to explain it again — one presumes because Ayukawa thought it wasn’t clear to the reader (it was to this one…). That’s…not a good sign.
And so an obvious question remains.
If I’m not a fan of the stories, what the hell am I doing nominating this for Reprint of the Year?
What this collection does magnificently — magnificently, better than any book I’ve ever read in the genre — is capture a culture in a time of transition. The introduction by Taku Ashibe does a wonderful job of placing the honkaku revolution in Japanese crime writing in the appropriate context, and of making it clear just how much upheaval was going on throughout the country in the wake of the Second World War. Osaka was writing honkaku in the 1930s, and we know that Western-style literature was virtually contraband for a while in the East — see Seishi Yokomizo’s delight at the detective fiction found on a character’s bookshelves in The Honjin Murders (1946) — and Taku reels off just a few names here (Biggers, Christie, Crofts, Milne, Queen, Van Dine) that would obviously go on to be very influential. Yes, a paucity of Western-style detective stories would of course result in literature that doesn’t quite meet the expectations of my Western weaned brain, but Ayukawa is actually fairly late to the party — and he’s read The White Priory Murders (1934) by Carter Dickson, at least, so he has some idea of the standard he’s working within.
It’s away from merely aping the masters of this genre, however, and instead dropping little hints about the quotidian existence of the average Japanese citizen that this really flies. The occasional question may be raised by some of this (“[H]e had given the stereotypical apology about how sorry he was that his lack of supervision had led to his subordinate becoming a murderer” is a fascinating sentence for the idea that this happens frequently enough for such an apology to be stereotypical…!), but most of the details that creep out around the edges of our characters’ encounters enrich the picture of post-WW2 Japan in a way that many textbooks would fail to convey so memorably.
“Envision if you will a man who is respected as a gentleman, and who prides himself on such a reputation, being stabbed by a woman,” we’re told at one point — driving home the importance not of justice but of chivalry…something echoed later on when a detective realises that he has for the first time “been invited into the private dwelling of an adult female” and looks around him as amazed as any child at the zoo. Elsewhere a discussion is had about a man refusing to acknowledge his responsibilities at having got a young woman pregnant and the options she has regarding abortion:
[He] couldn’t believe his ears. What had once been a major crime before the war, was now being done by everyone. And they didn’t even feel ashamed, daring to talk about it in front of others.
Of course, it’s not all progress — “Back then, it was still possible to see Mt. Fuji through the pines covering the area, but now it was covered with houses and stores, and those memories had been expunged” — and the callousness with which Western troops simply swept in and took over buildings of particular significance or beauty (“Before the war, it had been a well-known luxury building, but — as often occurred after the war — it had been requisitioned as lodgings for American army officers…”) without much care or consideration of what damage was done or wreckage left behind (“… and most of the ground floor had been converted into one large hall”) is communicated with the bland statement of fact, showing the shame of its ubiquity.
Culturally, too, there is the bleeding in of Western influences within these Western-influenced tales: musical groups being formed on the back of the lucrative business of performing Western styles of music like jazz, and even singing in English “even though they couldn’t differentiate between Ls and Rs.” — “It’s a shame to see how Tokyo has changed” Chief Inspector Onitsura opines at one point, and to a certain extent that feels very much like the theme of these stories more than the eye-catching comparisons which make it so appealing in the first place.
I could very much have kept my opinions about these stories to myself, but at the end of the day that’s all they are: my opinions. The collection might compel itself to you on account of the stories and you, dear reader, may well love them all — I hope you do. However, whatever you take from Ayukawa’s plotting and writing, it’s the picture of Japan at a period of unimaginable change, and the excitement and terror that comes with that, which makes this such a fascinating read. We all have our niches in which we like to read, and part of the richness of older fiction has always been for me the cultural, technological, and social dynamics and breakthroughs that determine the setting of a story, and it was wonderful to pick up on so much of that while immersed in the death, mayhem, and criminal ingenuity on display here. It is the not for the subjective quality of the stories, but rather the objective ambient — forgive me — corona of cultural enrichment that I consider this to be the best reprint 2020 has brought us.
Hopefully you agree, and will vote accordingly when the time comes — but, at the very least, I strongly urge you to read this collection and come to your own conclusions regarding the above. And then, naturally, come and shout at me on here if you disagree.
~
A post with links to all this week’s nominations can be found here at Kate’s blog.
The Invisible Event 
I was pretty surprised to see this as your selection, as I would have guessed it would have been one of the Crofts reissues or maybe Mr Pottermack’s Oversight or The Heel of Achilles. There’s definitely been some nice looking reissues this year.
I picked up The Red Locked Room in October and was struck by a thought: perhaps I have a poor memory, but am I right that hardly anyone has reviewed this? It just struck me – or still strikes me – as so odd that Locked Room International released a honkaku novel and I only recall one review of it. For that matter I think I’ve only seen one review of The Helm of Hades by Paul Halter, so maybe I’m reading the wrong blogs.
Anyway – I totally connect with the main point of your review. I remember those days of absorbing the culture of WW2 Britain – black out rules, rationing, etc – and just swooning. It sounds like there’s a whole different world to be discovered in The Red Locked Room, and I’m looking forward to it.
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Others opted for Crofts and Achilles ahead of me, and Pottermack wasn’t reprinted this year — but, yes, they’d certainly be among my choices if there weren’t 10 of us in competition…!
Reviews of this…I know Nick has @ The Grandest Game in the World, and TomCat did, too, I believe. I wonder if people are less drawn to short story collections, y’know? The Ginza Ghost collection is fabulous, so I’d hope the quality of that would get people snapping this up, but if people haven’t read that, either, then I suppose it wouldn’t. Oh, and I reviewed the Halter stories in The Helm of Hades, just before they were collected.
The only thing to come close to this in cultural terms was The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi, but that was mainly the tattoo lore of the first quarter or so of the book, and it gets dropped pretty heavily into things. The gentle, subtle weaving of those threads throughout the stories here is all the more pleasing for how much it allows the reader to discover through their own close attention — far more subtle and, to my taste, vastly preferable.
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Thanks for the nomination!
Interesting take on the atmosphere of these tales. Personally, I felt this much stronger with the stories in The Ginza Ghost, though I can definitely see where you’re coming from (maybe it’s just because I’ve read more stories from the period of the stories included in The Red Locked Room). I wonder what you’d think of Ayukawa’s debut novel The Petrov Affair also mentioned in Ashibe’s introduction: I read it a while ago and the setting of the international city of Dalian in Manchukuo (Manchuria as puppet state of the Japanese empire) is just so bizarrely unique for a mystery novel.
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Hey, if you’re offering to translate it then I’m very happy to read it 🙂
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I’ll be honest: I read the first story – THREE times! – and I just . . . didn’t get it. The prose was thick, or the setting out of details was confusing, and after the first read, I honestly forgot who the killer was. (I’m not sure I could tell you now.) I do think I remember being enlightened a bit about women in university in Japan, but nothing struck me as particularly atmospheric about that tale. I’m sure there are better stories here, but sadly your review kind of makes me want to take this off the bed stand and put it back on the shelf for, perhaps, a long while. It also makes me want to buy The Ginza Ghost which, unfortunately, I do not have yet, but there are SO MANY BOOKS sitting here that I haven’t read . . . .
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If I remember correctly, the first story — ‘The White Locked Room’ — isn’t even one where the characters themselves are confused…so that may not bode well for future instalments. Or, because you can’t remember what happened here, you might also fail to spot the common theme that formed the backbone of my difficulties here and so love the rest of them unreservedly.
And, are you seeking sympathy for the size of your TBR? You know Bev has an entire page on her blog dedicated to hers, right? And it runs into, like, a thousand titles? The rest of us, Brad, are mere amateurs and need to learn some respect.
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Ah, yes, but Bev works for the university system, and every morning she is hooked up to wires in their Computer Ed department and has a dozen titles uploaded into her biological network. High tech, baby, that’s the only way to catch up!!
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I know Christian over at Mysteries, short and sweet will take a good deal of well-informed umbrage with my opinion, but…There is something inherently more satisfying about spending time within a mystery. A novel (not exactly defined, but let’s say anywhere from 40,000 to 500,000 words) gives the feeling of participation. I enjoyed The Red Locked Room, but even now I struggle to remember key elements and when I was reading, I didn’t feel like I was playing along.
As a young teen, short stories were everything. I reread O’Connor, Salinger, and Carver many times over. But none of those authors wrote detective fiction. It leads me to believe the genre is suited to a longer form in which the clues are gradually doled and the evidence has time to be properly considered. (Hiding in a ditch to avoid the incoming brickbats.)
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I don’t entirely disagree, because I feel that there’s more time to really marinade a mystery over a novel, but we must of course acknowledge that sometimes an idea just does not stretch to novel length. ‘The Five Wrong Clocks’ herein would be a magnificent Inspector French-alike novel-length investigation with revelation overturning revelation for 250 pages…but Carr’s The Curse of the Bronze Lamp is a wonderful short story wearyingly staggering over the page count of a novel like a marathon runner who thought he was doing the 400m sprint.
And the likes of, say, Edmund Crispin’s first short story collection show how a single core idea can be developed to perfection over only a few pages…and then left as it is. Indeed, Crispin’s later novels are really just a series of short story ideas strung together, so adept was he at picking out the essence of a piece of misdirection.
But, where I’m headed with this is that I find novels more enjoyable than short stories overall mainly because a disappointing novel often had some element to it to make up for the shortfalls. The plot may be bad but the characters are delightful (c.f. Josephine Tey) or vice versa (c.f. Paul Halter). Good short stories are wonderful, but so, so, so hard to write. And bad ones are…ugh, just the worst.
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I’m reminded of a rule in cooking. When making a five-ingredient dish, the cook should use the best possible ingredients because everything stands out. A twenty-ingedient dish (for instance) doesn’t need the fanciest pepper.
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This at least explains why I became such a social pariah after that (pre-Lockdown, don’t anyone start shouting) barbecue…
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I blow a raspberry in your general direction!
No, I can certainly see where you are coming from. When a novel really works it will outshine a short story every time.
But the same way a short story can be too short to really become great, novels can be bloated, overextended and stretched out beyond their breaking point. What I probably want to say is that the format isn’t everything, it’s the ideas contained within and how they are presented.
What the short story definitely provides that a novel can’t is that within the covers, you will get several stories, problems and solutions. Generally, a couple of those stories will be satisfying enough. With a novel, if the story, problem and/or solution doesn’t satisfy, well, that’s a washout then.
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I had no idea new translations were allowed to be nominated, but suppose they technically qualify as reprints. Anyway, a good and interesting choice, considering your pros and cons, but it’s certainly an admirable and refreshing reason to nominate a title. I would have simply pointed out The Red Locked Room is a collection of cast-iron alibi and impossible crime stories and called it a day. So you might have earned yourself a vote with that.
“Taking the collection generally, these stories run into the problem that an Agatha Christie short story collection has in that the same trick is used so much that it becomes a little tedious.”
Short story collections of a single authors usually has one of two problems: repetition of certain themes, tricks and plot devices or collection makes an author look weaker than single stories in anthologies or magazines. A Hoch story is usually one of the highlights of any mystery anthology, but a Hoch collection is more often than not a mixed bag of trick and not every one of them is a “Case of the Modern Medusa” or “The Theft of the White Queen’s Menu.”
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We have a debate every year about new translations — and the one this year about how late the original publication date of the work could be will go down in infamy. One of these days we’ll settle these things good and proper, but for now everyone just tries to sneak their favourites in even if they may not fit Kate’s original remit. And Kate, being wonderful, lets us.
You’re absolutely correct, too, about single-author collections amplifying the flaws in weaker stories — Ayukawa’s worst is doubtless better than, say, Cyril Hare’s best (I pick that name at random, people, don’t “@ me” as the cool kids say), but Ayukawa’s worst will be worse than Ayukawa’s best and so straight away stands out. I’d have liked there to be less repetition of the trick used herein, that might have helped me appreciate the qualities better in isolation from each other, and both JFW and Ho-Ling have made his books sound wonderful. So I say we get one of those soon, please… 🙂
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I recall reading the first short story, but was too distracted by the commendable mention in the introduction of Tetsuya Ayukawa’s full-length novel, ‘Lilac Villa Murders’ – that I proceeded to read that instead… 😅
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Any time you want to translate it for the rest of us, you go right ahead. I mean, Ho-Ling doubtless has a lot on his plate at present, so…
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If I were to do so – it’d be a reprint of a reprint, and a translation of a translation. 😅 The integrity of the original might be doubly compromised…
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Interesting you thought the stories were too long. I remember reading “The Blue Locked Room” and thinking that the trick would’ve maybe been more fun if it’d been a longer story, so it had some more chances of misdirection.
…That said, yeah “Whose Body?” kinda went on for a bit too long.
I honestly thought the collection was just alright overall, I think. I think the fact I can remember about half of the stories kind of reflects that pretty well. The strongest of the actual locked rooms is probably the titular one; shame I saw through it pretty quickly.
I was also skimming through the post at one point and read this out of context:
“get a sense of how they were planned — in Carr’s bunker”
Now I’m imagining there’s a secret bunker where Carr just threw innocent people in and forced them to plan out locked room situations for him; or else he fills the whole thing with poisonous gas.
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“Carr’s Bunker” shall heretofore be the term used when referring to grinding out ideas of a creative nature: I did some work in Carr’s Bunker and came up with a great idea…
Interesting you say BLR seemed the novelish one to you, and this is a wonderful example of how much what we take away differs. ‘Five Wrong Clocks’ is, for me, the final chapter of one of the best novels never written.
It’s an interesting day when one can feel a little non-committal about a collection of honkaku impossible crimes and alibi problems, though, eh?
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Don’t try TOO hard to create your own “dragging the Marsh.” Besides, “Carr’s bunker” has unfortunate Hitler-ian overtones.
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Oh, feeling the pressure, are we?
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I’ve just finished reading this collection and overall was more positive than you. I’d read bits of this review before I read but I can’t see the common thread that you refer to above – please could you ROT13 it in a response?
There definitely needed to be more showing rather than telling and whilst I thought that only one of the five clocks was particularly clever, with a few more suspects and a rigorous Frenchian investigation you could make a good novel from it – although I think that “Whose Body?” has even more possibilities as an expanded work.
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The recurrent theme, rot13’d is:
Va zbfg pnfrf, gur pevzr unf unccrarq rneyvre guna cerfragrq.
I agree that those two stories, in particular, would expand up readily. Great potential on display here, I’d love to know what Ayukawa’s novels were like…
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Thanks – I hadn’t noticed that.
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This book has traveled with me to Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, North Carolina, Texas, California – just to touch the tip of what I can remember – always as a backup for if I finish the main reads that I brought with me. Well, I never finished the novels I was focused on, so this book has remained unread. I finally cracked into it this weekend, starting with The Clown in the Tunnel, as it receives the rave reviews. It’s a bit of a messy affair: a lot of characters and circumstances sandblasted at you over the course of a dozen pages, and I found it a bit difficult to keep track of who was who.
And yet it was marvelous. It’s the ending that makes it all. Such a simple misdirection has you looking at the problem the wrong way, and when Tetsuya Ayukawa finally shows his hand, it perfectly captures why we read these stories. Carr would have been proud.
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Glad you enjoyed the story; I think that was the point where I cracked what was going on in this collection overall…so maybe give it a bit of time before reading further 🙂
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