Certain so-called friends of mine have made a point of telling me that back issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine are available at their local library. My library, while cool, is not quite that cool, and so it’s taken me a while to track down some stories published therein, including this one from the September/October 2020 edition.

“Once again, I was up against a deadline to write an impossible-crime short story,” we’re told early on in ‘The Dashing Joker’ (2001) by Ashibe Taku, our nameless narrator — presumably Ashibe Taku himself — being a detective fiction writer who is seemingly in a rush to come up with something new and yet concise. And so he visits his friend, the detective Morie Shunsaku, who seems to have only dealt in the most baffling and ingenious of crimes and who seems to have exactly what is needed.

“[T]here’s a map involved. Is that a problem?”

“A map, a map, how delightful,” I said, clapping my hands. “Maps are the flowers of Honkaku. Whenever there are diagrams of setting or maps of mansions I get goosebumps.”

The story-within-the-story, then, starts with nightwatchman Ninomiya Ryota sitting in the large central hall of a villa, and reflecting on the unusual group of people staying therein: a famous human rights lawyer, an icily beautiful female reporter, a couple in their forties, and their sixteen-year-old son…who is accused of a series of violent murders. Ninomiya is there as a guard of sorts, since the group are threatened with violence wherever they go, but even he can’t anticipate what is going to happen: at 3 a.m., one of the bedroom doors, all within view from his central location, will open, and someone dressed “exactly like a joker in a deck of cards” will step out…wielding a bloody knife. Not only will the joker step into a room that should be locked but, when Ninomiya goes to follow them, the joker appears behind him again and knocks him unconscious.

When he awakens, one of the household will be dead.

After this, well, I’ll be honest, it seems to me that Ashibe seems to work hard at making the thing appear impossible when in fact it doesn’t. We’re told at one point that it appears as if “a joker had walked through walls to kill the guests [sic]” but…that’s not the case: it was seen opening one door, and then, as Ninomiya is about to pass out, seen entering another. Equally, the possibility that the journalist Sawaki Chizuru didn’t see the joker because the joker “must have disappeared into thin air just by the door” is stretching a point somewhat, no? There’s, like, a very obvious alternative which, in fairness, the narrative does address…but, in doing so, it robs it of the potential for any impossibility.

And that’s a shame, because there’s a neat, simply-parsed idea at the core of this which is actually pretty clever without being too elaborate (and, yes, the map does help). There’s no evidence, and I’m not sure the various human elements introduced in the closing page or so necessarily make sense, but the story evinces the sort of canny cleverness that we’ve come to hope of from shin honkaku in recent years, and almost makes up for the shortcomings elsewhere.

For what its worth, I had an alternative solution worked out (rot13):

Gurer jrer gjb wbxref: gur svefg (gur wbheanyvfg) rkvgrq gur ynjlref ebbz naq ragrerq ure bja ebbz, ybpxvat gur qbbe nsgre ure. Gur frpbaq (gur ynjlre) gura pnzr bhg bs uvf ebbz, gbb, naq xabpxrq Avabzvln Elbgn bhg, znxvat fher gb or frra tbvat vagb gur fgberebbz. Gur checbfr jnf gb znxr Elbgn frrz penml nf ur unq frra fbzrguvat juvpu pbasvezrq gur thvyg bs gur Abzv puvyq, naq gurl arrqrq gb qvfperqvg uvz.

Gura — gjvfg! — gur wbheanyvfg xvyyrq gur ynjlre orpnhfr fur jnf npghnyyl gur xvyyre, ohg gur ynjlre unq orra znqr gb oryvrir gung gur Abzv puvyq jnf thvygl, naq fur jnagrq gb cerfrag gung rivqrapr gb gur cbyvpr fb gung fur pbhyq trg njnl jvgu gur pevzrf. Fur gura haqerffrq gur ynjlre, naq yrsg uvf obql va uvf ebbz, naq uvq gur pbfghzrf…fbzrjurer.

Lrnu, vg’f abg cresrpg, ohg ba gur rivqrapr ninvynoyr vg’f nobhg nf yvxryl.

Okay, it’s not very honkaku, I realise, but I can’t help it if I’m an unimaginative bore.

All told, this was a more positive experience with Ashibe’s work than I’ve had previously, and it makes me more likely to finally open the copy of the recently-translated Murder in the House of Omari (2021) which I bought and then almost immediately convinced myself I wasn’t going to read. Over a longer arc I can believe his character work might improve, and that’s a promising prospect. So expect developments in that area before the year is out.