Let’s get the new year off to a happy start by showing some appreciation for contemporary authors who make life difficult for themselves by upholding the traditions of Golden Age detective fiction in their own works. And, if you want to discuss modern detective fiction, few are better-placed than Puzzle Doctor, a.k.a. Steve from In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.
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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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After two wonderful shin honkaku novels in The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji and The Moai Island Puzzle by Alice Arisugawa, John Pugmire’s Locked Room International now brings you this honkaku story collection from early pioneer Keikichi Ōsaka. The introduction by Ashibe Taku, author of Murder in the Red Chamber (2004), does a great job of putting Ōsaka in context, since this was a nascent form of mystery writing that allows a fascinating and at times hugely inventive take on a genre we thought we’d seen everything in already — no mean feat when some of the best here are over 80 years old. And some of these solutions have to be read to be believed… (in a good way, that is).
Since Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was republished by Pushkin Vertigo, I’ve found myself reading increasing amounts of Japanese detective fiction: the shin honkaku of The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji and The Moai Island Puzzle by Alice Arisugawa from Locked Room International, The Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino (yes, The Devotion of Suspect X will follow in due course…), and I’ve recently started Gosho Aoyama’s Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) manga. And authors such as Seicho Matsumoto and Kyotaro Nishimura are climbing ever-higher up by TBB list as I encounter more of the high-quality work that has been translated for our pleasure. And, of course, the proliferation of impossible crimes in these stories doesn’t hurt, with the added cross-cultural glimpses also offered simply making them an even more attractive proposition.
The Invisible Event 