Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada

Published in Japan in 1982; published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo on June 25, 2019

Murder in the Crooked House is a locked room murder mystery that Soji Shimada divided into acts and scenes. A locked room murder in the first act is followed by another in the second. The novel challenges the reader not just to identify the killer but to figure out how the murders were committed. The latter is the more difficult challenge.

Kozaburo Hamamoto constructed the Crooked House, an isolated Western-style house next to a leaning glass tower, at the tip of Japan’s northernmost island. Hamamoto is a reclusive millionaire. He invites a few elite businessmen and their glamorous wives to a Christmas party at his Crooked House, as well as a couple of students. The chef, chauffeur, and maid are also present.

The students both have an interest in marrying Hamamoto’s daughter Eiko. Hamamoto puts a puzzle to them, offering his daughter’s hand (if she so wishes) to the winner. The challenge is to determine the significance of the flowerbed at the base of the tower. The significance will be revealed at the novel’s end.

Later that night, a female guest sees the face of a monster in her window — seemingly impossible since her room is on the third floor. The next morning, the chauffeur is found dead in his room with a knife protruding from his chest. The only door is locked from the inside. An art object, sort of like a large puppet or mannequin, is found in the snow outside his room. This turns out to be part of Hamamoto’s impressive collection of wind-up toys and other figures. He calls it a golem.

DI Okuma, DCI Ushikoshi, and DS Ozaki lead the police investigation. They take note of the house’s unusual design, which makes it difficult to move from room to room. A guest might need to climb down one staircase, walk the length of the house, and climb up a different staircase to access an adjacent room. The house is built on a slant and there are gaps between walls and the floor. The intricacies are difficult to follow, but Shimada provides helpful diagrams and maps of the house and murder scene.

Murder in the Crooked House is a classic locked room mystery. Several people were staying in the crooked house, all had gone to bed, most of them had their own room and no alibi, and none had an obvious motive to murder the chauffeur. The second murder is of a lecherous old man. This time, the only guests who had a motive were in the company of a police officer at the time the killing occurred.

The detectives are frustrated and, by the end of Act Two, they are wishing they had the assistance of a Japanese Sherlock Holmes. Enter Kiyoshi Mitarai, the star of Act Three. Mitarai’s role in the story is narrated by his own version of Watson, Kazumi Ishioka. Prior to the final act, the reader is assured that all the clues are in place and is challenged to solve the mystery.

And it’s true, the clues are there, but only a reader with some esoteric knowledge of Japan (and perhaps the ability to speak Japanese) will be able to unlock all of them. Most of the clues, however, would allow a reader to piece together how the murders were committed. To do so, the reader would need to be more astute than I am. Guessing the killer’s identity is somewhat easier.

The plot provides readers with an entertaining murder mystery, but the story is fascinating in its glimpse of certain aspects of traditional Japanese culture. A wife complains that her husband, a salaryman, is sycophantic in his relationship with a business owner, but bullying and bossy when he is at home. An older businessman is sleeping with his much younger secretary but hiding his conduct for the sake of appearances. The detectives are more worried about saving face than catching the killer. The murderer’s motivation for one of the killings is related to Japanese history. When the murderer is revealed, the unfailingly polite detectives fall over themselves to compliment the killer on an ingenious plan. And, of course, the polite murderer praises the investigator who solves the crime. What a nice place Japan must be to live (if you can avoid being murdered).

Mitarai isn’t quite Sherlock, but he brings a theatrical flair to his detecting style. An epilog gives the story a final twist. Murder in the Crooked House is a good choice for fans of Japanese crime fiction and a really good choice for fans of locked room murder mysteries.

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Cygnet by Season Butler

Published by Harper on June 25, 2019

The unnamed narrator of Cygnet complains that she is “marooned on a secluded island with no parents and instead of getting to do whatever I want I’ve got a zillion old grand-dorks bossing me around.” Her perspective as the only teen on an island of seniors is the source of the novel's sharp humor.

The narrator was sent to live on Swan Island with her grandmother. Social Services took her from her parents, making Swan Island a slightly better choice than juvenile prison. It is also a good place for the narrator to come of age as she confronts, more pressingly than most teens must, the choices that will determine her future.

The island itself is something of a prison, a place where elderly people isolate themselves from (and are passively hostile to) anyone who isn’t elderly. Most of the island’s inhabitants call the 17-year-old narrator Kid. She calls them Wrinklies. The Kid is from the Mainland, which everyone on Swan calls the Bad Place. The island is rapidly eroding; Kid awaits the day when her grandmother’s home washes into the sea. A nearby island is exploding because of improperly buried waste. Whether the mainland or the islands merit the term “Bad Place” is a matter of perspective.

After her grandmother dies, the Kid stays in her grandmother’s house, waiting for her parents to pick her up — every day, she convinces herself that their arrival is imminent — while working for a wealthy islander who has hired her to digitize the woman’s family history, editing as she goes to make it better. The Kid has amusing takes on her employer’s edited life, including the enlargement of her breasts in family photos and movies to match the results of the woman’s boob job. The woman reviews the Kid’s work long enough to replace her real memories with the better ones that the Kid has created.

In her free time, the Kid visits a woman who had a stroke, imagining herself as the woman’s lost mind. She has monthly sex with a boy named Jason she regards as her imaginary boyfriend. Jason comes to Swan to supply drugs to the Wrinklies (weed for glaucoma, acid for nostalgia). The Kid is in denial about her feelings, including her teenage jealousy, just as she is in denial about the parents who have effectively abandoned her.

The Kid’s mind is a maze of contradictory thoughts. I love the way her consciousness streams when she’s talking to Wrinklies. They take so long to express a thought that Kid has a dozen thoughts of her own before they finish a sentence. Some of her thoughts are hilarious; the rest, as thoughts tend to be, are on a spectrum from mundane to profound.

In the tradition of coming-of-age novels, the end of Cygnet is the beginning of a life. It might be a hard life, but the Kid gains strength and self-awareness from living on the eroding island, interacting with aging people who have gathered together to die. It might take them another decade or two before their lives end, but the Kid has scores of decades to live before she will be begin to live in decline. The island will be gone before she is ready to live there because everything erodes, everything changes. That’s the one unchangeable fact about life.

Cygnet mixes humor with touching moments in the lives of both the Kid and the seniors who tolerate (or resent) her presence. Season Butler creates a strong sense of place in Swan Island. She gives the Kid a full personality, slowing revealing facts about her childhood that help the reader understand her fears and insecurities, as well as her dreams and fantasies.

Growing up, Cygnet suggests, is about putting aside illusions of safety and embracing uncertainty. The Kid does that with such endearing anxiety that the reader can only cheer for her as she takes her first steps toward an unpredictable future.

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Blast vol. 1: Dead Weight by Manu Larcenet

First published in France in 2010; published in translation by Europe Comics on Oct. 7, 2015

The central character in Blast, Polza Mancini, is a morbidly obese writer who resembles a snowman with a carrot nose. Most of the characters have noses that could pass for vegetables, or fingers, or bird beaks. The art seems to send the message that people are grotesque. Mancini is more grotesque than most. But Blast also makes the point that “the legitimacy of disgust as a reaction to deformity is a universal principle,” a natural law that causes abnormality to be a defining characteristic rather than one part of a complex individual. And how can someone like Mancini not hate himself when it is so natural for others to hate him?

The graphic novel Blast is Mancini’s story, as told to the police during an interrogation. But Mancini tells his story in own way, slowly relating the entire story of his life as the police impatiently wait for him to confess his crime. The key event, as Mancini tells it, is his exposure to the blast. He felt the blast at a low point in his life. In fact, the story of his life until that point is in black and white (mostly black, representing a dark life), but with his description of the blast, color appears. It is a transcendent, transformative experience. Then it ends, and the world is dark again. Dark and spooky, with massive blotches of black and trembling shapes in gray.

Mancini has a history of entering and leaving psychiatric hospitals, but in a story like this, the reader is asked to decide whether his perspective of life is any less valid than any other. Mancini maintains that society has no problem with individual decisions to alter bodies, sometimes painfully, with surgery and tattoos and piercings, but when people decide to change spiritually “through delicious intoxication,” they are seen as contemptible and unbalanced. A police officer say that Mancini is giving himself “poetic excuses” for being an irresponsible and destructive drunk.

Mancini has (he tells the cops) experienced life, lived without boundaries. He abandoned his wife and his job as a food editor to live the life of a bum, not necessarily choosing to be a bum, but choosing solitude.

Yet solitude is not so easy to find. In the woods, he encounters a group who live apart from society, a self-proclaimed Republic that wants him to join their community. That isn’t the life for Mancini. Yet it is in the woods, joined by a member of the Republic who appears whenever Mancini opens a bottle, that Mancini experiences a second, colorful blast. He perceives all; his awareness is complete. “I heard the inaudible, saw the invisible. There was nothing left to hold me down.” And so he begins to float.

At one point, Mancini muses that silence, like solitude, is a poetic invention. Living in nature is both terrifying and comforting. “There’s a mystery in nature … something you can’t force. It’s revealed only if you know how to wait, perfectly still, and it cannot be shared.” A good many panels are silent, in the sense that they are wordless, but they carry the story along as Mancini travels, observing the world in all its detail — the stray dog lifting its leg, the crumbling wall, the beetles on the forest floor.

When the police provide more facts about Mancini’s past, the reader is challenged to decide whether the police are correct in their view of Mancini, or whether there is any truth in Mancini’s perspective. Has he adopted a self-serving philosophy to avoid remorse or has he discovered a way to live with himself, a philosophy that might benefit others? Blast leaves it to the reader to decide, but since this is the first of four lengthy volumes, there is much more to this original and inventive graphic story. Fans of graphic storytelling, of philosophy, and of the macabre will all find something to admire in Blast.

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Rosewater by Tade Thompson

Published in small press edition in 2016; published by Orbit on September 18, 2018

An alien blob landed in London in 2012, wiping out part of the city and releasing a bunch of microorganisms into the biosphere. The government decided to call the blob Wormwood. The British attacked Wormwood because humans always attack what they don’t understand. They succeeded only in driving Wormwood underground, where it tunneled itself around the planet.

Eventually, a biodome grew out of the ground in Nigeria. A donut-shaped city developed around the biodome. The dome opens once a year, emitting microbes that cure bystanders of diseases, disabilities, and some mental impairments. Sometimes the cure takes; other times it causes problems down the road. Some people seem to be rebuilt in grotesque ways. The microbes also raise the dead, but the aliens apparently don’t appreciate, or don’t care, that animated corpses are zombies and not really welcomed by the living. Fortunately, Rosewater is not a zombie novel.

The planet has been laced with something like a fungus that allows some humans, dubbed sensitives, to tap into a psychic link comprised of fungal filaments and neurotransmitters. The tiny filaments attach to nerve endings and are constantly transmitting information to a worldmind. Sensitives can access the worldmind, also known as the xenosphere, which exists in the realm of quantum physics. Which means it is cool but too complicated to understand.

So that’s the background. The story jumps around in time as it follows Kaaro. Kaaro is a sensitive. He used to be a thief because he could sense where people hid their valuables. That career did not go well after his mother kicked him out of her house and a mob tried to set him on fire. Later he was trained by a government agency called S45 and developed the ability to probe minds. Now he uses his abilities to augment a firewall, protecting customers who conduct banking transactions from black hat sensitives who try to pluck identifying information from their thoughts. His second job is for S45, which uses his talents to pry into the minds of prisoners.

Working with or against Kaaro, depending on the year, are two women: Femi, who runs S45, and Oyin Da (a/k/a Bicycle Girl), who knows how to enter different dimensions in time and space. Another woman in Kaaro’s life is Aminat, his girlfriend in 2066. It is too simplistic to say that he is transformed by love, but Aminat at least forces him to look at himself, to deal with his guilt (or to examine why he does not feel more guilt), and to confront his demons.

The chapters shift between 2055 (then), 2066 (now), and some interludes between then and now. In 2055, Kaaro is looking into a village that vanished, attributed by some to tribal genocide, a theory that does not explain the absence of bodies.

The time jumps impose a burden on the reader to keep track of the story’s pieces and reorder them chronologically so that they make sense. Some of the shifts are so abrupt and untethered that they breed momentary confusion. There’s nothing wrong with burdening a reader and Rosewater isn’t nearly as complex as The Sound and the Fury (chapter headings and dates give the Rosewater reader some help), but readers who have poor memories might want to opt for a digital version so they can quickly jump back and refresh their understanding of what happened in each time frame.

Rosewater has a good bit of intellectual appeal but it falls short on emotional appeal. I like the concept and the background detail, but the character of Kaaro failed to resonate with me. I had little interest in whether he lived or died, succeeded or failed, had success with his love interests or fell on his face. The plot is intriguing and, as the opening novel of a trilogy, Rosewater offered enough substance to whet my interest in the next installment.

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The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan

Published by Penguin Books on May 14, 2019

The Scholar is an Irish police procedural. It follows The Ruin, which introduced the series protagonist, DS Cormac Reilly. The novels are set in Galway, where Cormac has been transferred from Dublin and assigned to cold cases as punishment for his justifiable shooting of another cop. In The Scholar, DS Carrie O’Halloran prevails upon her superior to move Cormac from cold cases to open investigations because her department is severely understaffed.

Cormac’s first major case seems destined to end with his return to the basement, if not fired. Cormac lives with Dr. Emma Sweeney, a fragile woman who is haunted by her past. Emma calls Cormac when she finds a dead woman in a road, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run. Cormac can see that the driver ran over the victim twice, likely wanting to make sure she was dead. The victim’s face is mangled but she is carrying a student ID with the name Carline Darcy.

Emma works as a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company that was founded by Carline Darcy’s wealthy grandfather. Carline wants to follow in her father’s footsteps and is widely seen in her college a having inherited her grandfather’s genius. Not everyone shares that assessment, including her grandfather, but she was given a chance to prove herself with an internship in her grandfather’s Galway lab.

Carline seems to have come to an unhappy end, leading Cormac to be surprised and a bit embarrassed when he discovers that Carline is alive and well. Carline has a story about how she lost her ID some months earlier. Cormac’s powerful grandfather, unhappy to be bothered by news of Carline’s death, makes clear that he wants the inquiry to end, as least as it involves his family. Cormac’s politically attuned superior is happy to oblige; Cormac, not so much.

Carline’s relationship with her family contributes one layer of intrigue to the story. Office politics relating to Cormac’s past adds another layer. Since Emma discovered the dead body, Cormac probably shouldn’t stay on the case, but nobody regards Emma as a suspect so he continues the investigation. That turns out to be a misjudgment that Cormac’s enemies in the garda use against him. Whether Emma is or isn’t involved in the murder is the key question the reader is asked to consider, while the impact that question has on her relationship with Cormac adds a bit of domestic drama to the plot.

The Scholar is a straightforward procedural as Cormac works with and against colleagues to solve the murder (as well as a second murder) while hoping that the murderer is not Emma. The plot moves quickly. The reader is given enough information to work out the motive for the murders, although perhaps not the killer’s identity.

Cormac is the kind of character who is a staple of police procedurals: the beleaguered cop who is haunted by his past, doggedly competent and driven by a desire for the truth. Unlike many American police procedurals that make detectives in that mold too sanctimonious to stomach, Cormac is humble and self-doubting, which makes him an appealing character. Minor characters, particularly the first murder victim’s family members, are developed in enough detail to make Cormac’s varying reactions to them seem authentic. The combination of sympathetic characters and an enjoyable story make The Scholar a good choice for fans of police procedurals.

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