I was saddened to learn of the recent death of John Pugmire who, for the best part of the last 20 years, has been instrumental in bringing the works of foreign authors to Anglophone fans, latterly through his Locked Room International imprint.
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“On the final two days of November, two men and two women shall perish in Magan…” — so sayeth the seer Sakimi, who has a fifty-year streak of being right about these things; thus, anyone in Magan would do well to clear out for the last two days of November. Just a shame that no-one told the nine people who have travelled to Magan at the end of November, some of them specifically to meet Sakimi, and that the message is only relayed as the sole bridge out of town goes up in flames. But, c’mon, prophecy belongs with zombies in the world of cheap and tawdry science fiction, so there’s no way that anyone is really at any risk….is there?
The Decagon House Murders (1987, tr. 2015), the excellent first book in Yukito Ayatsuji’s series featuring the bizarre architecture of Nakamura Seiji, was translated into English so long ago that I hadn’t even started blogging at the time. Follow-up The Mill House Murders (1988, tr. 2023) was, then, much anticipated, and, for this reader at least, doesn’t quite merit the wait. While relatively swift, and enjoyably inventive as we’ve come to expect from shin honkaku, there’s a cleverness lacking in a story whose telling is marred by some unusual writing to the extent that I ripped through this without ever really relaxing into it. Like Soji Shimada, Ayatsuji has written a brilliantly clever debut and then suffered from Difficult Second Novel Syndrome.
Fourteen years and two disappointing sequels after the fact, it might be difficult to believe just how wild people went for the Matt Reeves-directed monster movie Cloverfield (2008) when it was first released. And I was reminded of that film when reading Death Among the Undead (2017, tr. 2021) by Masahiro Imamura for two reasons: firstly because of the time taken in both to ground the upcoming fantastical elements in enjoyably relatable worlds, and secondly because I cannot help but feel, now as then, that the praise heaped on both might be slightly overdone.
The sixth translation of (shin) honkaku by Ho-Ling Wong under the auspices of Locked Room International, Lending the Key to the Locked Room (2002) is a paean to the glory days of the complex puzzle plots of the 1930s while oddly frugal in its own plotting and characterisation. Delightfully self-aware at times in a manner that (to my taste) never succumbs to the danger of outstaying its welcome, the savvy elements of this debut are undercut by issues elsewhere: a reliance on concidence, a tiny cast with very little to misdirect into, and the sheer amount of irrelevant information that carries you through.
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?
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The Invisible Event 