#677: “You must forgive me if I repeat that which you know already…” – The Old Man in the Corner [ss] (1908) by Baroness Orczy

Old Man in the Corner

You are three weeks away from, but I have just recorded, an episode of In GAD We Trust with a focus on short stories, part of the preparation for which got me reflecting on the works by Baroness Emmuska Orczy about the old man found in the corner of the A.B.C Teashop holding forth on unsolved crimes.  And the more I thought about them, the more I wanted to write about them.  So here we are.

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#632: The Honjin Murders (1946) by Seishi Yokomizo [trans. Louise Heal Kawai 2019]

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After years of occasional titles like The Tattoo Murder Case (1948) by Akimitsu Takagi trickling through the East-West translation gap, it seems English-speaking audiences might be getting more classic Eastern honkaku.  The shin honkaku translations brought to us by Locked Room International have highlighted the ingenuity in works coming out of Japan, China, and surrounds during the 1980s and 1990s, an era when the Western crime novel was rather more focussed on character and procedure, and so the puzzle-rich seam of GAD-era honkaku titles might finally get more attention.  And the first non-LRI novel to come across is one that was greeted with much excitement.

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#331: She Who Was No More (1952) by Boileau-Narcejac [trans. Geoffrey Sainsbury 2015]

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I have no specific rule for the order in which I read the books on my TBR, but only in special cases does something immediately jump to the head of the list.  The chance to lock horns with French grand pooh-bahs Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac is one such special case: sure, their reputation in the English-speaking world might come from writing the novel that became Alfred Hitckcock’s Vertigo, but for the classic detection and locked room fan there’s plenty of excitement attached to these names through a reputation attained by other ends, too.  Separately and together, their titles precede them, and so this is an opportunity to savour.

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#158: The Tattoo Murder Case, a.k.a. The Tattoo Murder (1948) by Akimitsu Takagi [trans. Deborah Boehm 1998]

tattoo-murder-caseSince 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.

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#30: The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) by Soji Shimada [trans. Ross & Shika Mackenzie 2004]

Tokyo ZodiacSome families have all the luck – take the Khardashians, for example, who are universally blessed with charm, intelligence and talent – whereas some miss out altogether.  Into this second category would definitely fall the Umezawa clan: not only is patriarch Heikichi found battered to death in his locked art studio, his eldest daughter is then found murdered a few months later and, following that, his six other daughters, step-daughters and nieces all disappear simultaneously and their dismembered bodies are discovered at various intervals buried in different locations around Japan.  Then it turns out that Heikichi Umezawa had written a document outlining his intention to do exactly this to these women, with methods of murder and disposal based on their zodiac signs, so the mystery of who could have carried out his nefarious scheme raises its ugly head and remains unsolved for decades…

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