I haven’t loved these annual translations of the Bizarre House Mysteries series by Yukito Ayatsuji, but there can be no denying that they’re written with the precepts of the puzzle mystery — maximum confuse, maximum unlikely, maximum invention — front and centre, and as a puzzle-head myself I’d be a stick in the mud to not want to dive in to each new book. And The Clock House Murders (1991), newly translated by Ho-Ling Wong, might well be the most successful entry since opener The Decagon House Murders (1987), using its setting superbly in a way that I’m not sure the other books did and turning on a trick so ingenious that you can’t help but be impressed.

The Clock House is another isolated mansion designed by architect-of-the-unusual Nakamura Seiji, who was also behind the other bizarre houses featured in this series. When a group of students fascinated with the occult arrange to spend three days locked in the clock-shaped new wing, holding séances with a celebrated medium in the hope of contacting the ghost of the daughter of the house’s previous owner, there’s obviously nothing that could possibly go wrong…except the group getting killed one by one as all contact with the outside world is cut off and they must face up to who could be killing them and why.

Getting to that point is, however, a slog that I did not enjoy at times.

The first hint to this is that the paper of this Pushkin Vertigo edition is thin, presumably to hide the fact that the book is a good 100+ pages longer than the previous translations. And, my god, did I ever feel it. Events are so strung out and so padded with irrelevant asides and perspectives that what should be a dizzying, baffling, rip-snorting good time is drawn out past the point of my really being able to care too much any more. After reading it for months I realised I was still about 40 pages from the halfway point, and I don’t think I’ve felt despair of that sort since crawling through Michael Innes‘ fiction.

Tear out about a quarter of this, and what remains is both excellent and informative: the discussion about Japanese temporal-hour-means of measuring time, for instance, where daylight accounted for twelve hours no matter how long it lasted, is fascinating, and some of the discussions had by the students — largely a bunch of redshirts, there to provide a body count in the second half — veer into the intriguing at times even if they do feel rather empty, esoteric, or clunky as all hell:

“I dislike the mindset of calling everything we don’t understand unscientific and denying it outright — that’s just the arrogant pridefulness of modern man.”

On and on and on it drags, with an occasionally atmospheric scene of murder sprinkled in and enough space around these scenes for everyone to sit around and discuss or think about past actions whose importance in coming events could not be more bleedin’ obvious (it doesn’t help that Ayatsuji foreshadows with the subtlety of a rhinoceros in a phone box). Of course, despite this horribly clunky writing — it can’t be the translation, Wong has proved too adept at that in the past — it’s still just about persevering with because, in a manner that I think the puzzle-plot community was led to believe would happen more in these shin honkaku novels, there really is a genius-level misdirect at the core of this which almost makes up for the sheer damn monotony of getting there.

While again I’m not sure there’s any detection as such, the way Ayatsuji waves the core principle under your nose is breathtaking, and just about earns this an extra star, because, my god, I was so far past the point of caring when we got to it. With a damn good edit — we don’t need the opening ten pages, we don’t need the perspective scene from the first two victims immediately before they die, or so much wandering in the dark, or the infuriating passage in which nominal sleuth Shimada Kiyoshi is sent away from the Clock House only to be immediately recalled to it — there’s a better book in here, no doubt. Sometimes less is more, an adage I’ll apply to this review and stop now.

But, yeah, count me in for The Black Cat House Murders (1992) when it comes out in February 2027.