Category: Crime

The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Futaro Yamada

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Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

It’s 1869 and Japan has entered the Meiji era. The Tokugawa shogunate has fallen and the Emperor Meiji has been restored to the throne. After centuries of isolation, Japan is finally opening up to foreign trade and undergoing social, industrial and military reform. In Tokyo, a group of corrupt rasotsu (policemen) have found ways to exploit this period of change and upheaval for their own gain. With the arrival of two Chief Inspectors from the Imperial Prosecuting Office, Kawaji and Kazuki, it seems that the rasotsu will be forced to mend their ways – although the two men have other things to occupy their time as well as dealing with corruption.

With a number of bizarre murders taking place around Tokyo, Kazuki and Kawaji (based on a real person who is considered the founder of Japan’s modern police system) engage in a friendly competition to see who can solve the crimes first. A separate chapter is devoted to each case, which at first seem to be unrelated, making the book feel almost like a collection of short stories. There are five cases for the two detectives to solve, with the help of Esmeralda, a young Frenchwoman from a family of executioners whom Kazuki has brought to Japan along with that most deadly of French weapons: the guillotine. Despite the title, the guillotine is not necessarily used to carry out all of the murders in the book, but it represents the changes that Japan is experiencing as the country becomes exposed to modern, western influence. It also provides a reason for Esmeralda’s presence in Tokyo, which is important as she has a significant role to play in the solving of the mysteries.

The Meiji Guillotine Murders was first published in 1979 and is one of several Japanese crime novels that have recently been made available in English by Pushkin Press. However, although I’ve loved some of the others, I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much. Bryan Karetnyk’s translation is clear and readable (I’m already familiar with his work through some of his other translated novels), but I had problems with other aspects of the book. I struggled with the number of characters, particularly as so few of them have clearly defined personalities and with more and more of them being introduced with each new case the detectives investigate. My lack of engagement with the characters made it difficult for me to concentrate on following the plot, which is important as all of the separate cases are quite complex and you do need to be paying attention! I persevered and was rewarded with the final section of the book where, after some surprising twists and turns, everything is tied together perfectly.

I did like the historical setting of the book and felt I was learning a lot about Japan during the Meiji era. At times it seemed more like historical fiction than a murder mystery, which was fine with me, but I think someone picking the book up expecting a more traditional crime novel may be surprised by the amount of historical detail. It’s an interesting, unusual book, and although I’m not sure whether I would read any more by Yamada, I do hope more of them are translated into English for those readers who loved this one. I’m enjoying discovering Japanese crime authors through Pushkin and so far my favourites have been Seishi Yokomizo and Akimitsu Takagi.

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 7/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

Book 24/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

The Noh Mask Murder by Akimitsu Takagi

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Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

My 20 Books of Summer reading is off to a good start with this 1949 Japanese locked room mystery, now available from Pushkin Press in a new English translation. Thanks to Pushkin, I’ve been able to try several Japanese classic crime authors over the last few years, including Seishi Yokomizo, Yukito Ayatsuji and Soji Shimada. The Noh Mask Murder is the first book I’ve read by Akimitsu Takagi and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The novel opens with a discussion between Koichi Yanagi, a chemist who has recently returned to Japan after serving in Burma during the war, and his old school friend, Akimitsu Takagi (yes, the author himself, who appears as a character in his own novel – just like Anthony Horowitz in his Horowitz and Hawthorne series). Akimitsu explains to Koichi that he wants to write a new kind of detective novel, one based on a mystery he has solved for himself in real life:

‘I’d tackle some fiendish real-life mystery, then set down precisely how I solved it in the form of a novel. My readers would be provided with the exact same evidence as the author. They’d be able to follow the detective-narrator’s train of thought, assess the appropriateness of his actions – and even come up with their own alternatives. But I don’t imagine an opportunity like that will ever present itself…’

His opportunity comes sooner than he had imagined when Koichi stumbles upon a mystery at the Chizui family mansion, where he has been staying since returning from the war. The head of the household, Professor Chizui, who was once a friend of Koichi’s, died ten years earlier and the house is now inhabited by his two children and the family of his younger brother, Tajiro. The first sign that something is wrong within the Chizui mansion comes when an eerie figure wearing a sinister Noh mask is seen at one of the windows. Soon after this, Tajiro is found dead inside a locked room, with a smell of jasmine in the air and a Noh mask lying on the floor beside him. Akimitsu Takagi joins Koichi at the house to investigate the murder, but when they discover that someone has called the undertaker to order three coffins, it seems that there’s going to be more than just one murder to investigate!

The mystery is a fascinating one and although some time is spent discussing the mechanisms of how the locked room murder took place, the story never becomes too bogged down by the puzzle aspect; the focus is on the characters, their relationships and their motives. I did find the structure slightly confusing at times as we know we’re reading a book within a book written by Akimitsu Takagi (as both character and author), but within that there’s a journal written by Koichi and a long letter written by Hiroyuki Ishikari, the public prosecutor, so the narrative is sometimes three layers deep. There are some clever twists towards the end, however, which might not have worked if it had been structured differently.

Apart from the mystery, I found it interesting to learn about the different types of mask used in Japanese theatre and how although the Noh mask, which represents a demon, cannot change expression the actors can still use it to show various emotions by tilting the mask up and down and by the clever use of lighting. With the story being set in the post-war period, it’s also interesting to hear the characters reflect on the irony of being so concerned with the death of one person after living through a war in which millions died. If you kill a man in peacetime you’re considered a murderer, says Tajiro’s son, Rintaro, but if you kill a man on the battlefield you’re given a medal.

I really enjoyed The Noh Mask Murder, then, but be warned – in the prologue, where Takagi is discussing his plans for a detective novel, he casually spoils the solution of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Not a problem for me as I’ve already read it, but I wish authors wouldn’t do that!

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 1/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

They Found Him Dead by Georgette Heyer – #1937Club

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This week, Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings are hosting another of their very popular clubs, where we all read and write about books published in the same year. This time it’s 1937 Club and for my first book I’ve turned to a favourite author who can be almost guaranteed to have had at least one title published in any chosen club year. In 1937, she had two and although An Infamous Army, a novel set before and during the Battle of Waterloo, is one I read a few years ago and didn’t particularly enjoy, I’m pleased to say that I had a much better experience with this one.

They Found Him Dead is one of twelve contemporary detective novels written by Heyer. It begins with the family, friends and business associates of Silas Kane assembling at his country house to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. As with many large gatherings, there are various tensions between members of the group, but when Silas is found dead at the bottom of a cliff after going out for his usual evening walk, the police decide that it was just a tragic accident. Only fourteen-year-old Timothy Harte, half-brother of Silas Kane’s nephew Jim, suspects murder – and when Kane’s heir, Clement, is shot in the head several weeks later, it seems that he could have been right.

Superintendent Hannasyde and Sergeant Hemingway arrive from Scotland Yard to investigate and quickly discover that there’s a large number of suspects including several nephews and nieces in the line of inheritance, some of Kane’s business partners and even his elderly mother, a woman in her eighties. However, they first need to decide whether they really are dealing with two murders or just one – and if there have been two, were they both committed by the same person?

I thought this was an entertaining novel, although I did panic at first due to the huge number of people introduced in the opening chapter. I wished I had drawn a family tree to keep them all straight in my mind, but after a few more chapters everything had settled down anyway and the characters and their relationships became more clearly defined. As a mystery it’s not a very clever or original one – in fact, it’s quite formulaic in many ways, with the country house, family party, motives revolving around inheritances and business deals and the Scotland Yard detectives all being very familiar to anyone who has read a lot of Golden Age crime. The murderer is also quite easy to guess, once you’ve picked up on one very obvious clue.

What I really enjoyed about this book was not the plot but the characters. I particularly loved Timothy, who has an active imagination leading him to see drama and conspiracy in every situation and is nicknamed Terrible Timothy by Sergeant Hemingway. He does actually help to solve the mystery, but not in the way he had expected! There’s also a bit of romance (although it’s quite understated and not a big part of the book), with Timothy’s half-brother, Jim Kane, falling in love with Patricia Allison, companion to Silas Kane’s mother. I liked these two characters as well; in general, the characters in this book are a more pleasant bunch than in the other Heyer mysteries I’ve read! A few of them also appear in her 1951 novel, Duplicate Death, which I read before this one and I’m now wishing I’d read them in the correct order!

I still have a lot of Heyer’s mysteries left to read and am looking forward to them. They don’t really compare to Agatha Christie’s when it comes to plotting a crime, concealing clues and creating red herrings, but they’re still fun to read. This was a great start to the 1937 Club for me and I’m also enjoying my second book, which I’ve almost finished and will be reviewing later in the week.

Impact of Evidence by Carol Carnac

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“The snow and the floods have been abnormal even for these parts,” said Rivers. “I’ve had several investigations in country areas, but I admit I’ve never struck anything quite like St Brynneys. It has a secret quality, and its remoteness affects all the people who live in it.”

First published in 1954, Impact of Evidence has recently been reissued as a British Library Crime Classic. It’s my first Carol Carnac book – I haven’t read Crossed Skis, the other one currently in print – but she also published as E.C.R. Lorac and I’ve read her before under that name. This one is subtitled A Welsh Borders Mystery and is part of a series featuring Chief Inspector Julian Rivers and his sidekick, Inspector Lancing.

The novel begins with a car accident near the village of St Brynneys in the hills of the Welsh borders. Elderly Dr Robinson – whom everyone agrees was too old to be driving – has collided with Bob Parsons’ jeep, with both vehicles being thrown off the road by the impact. Parsons has been lucky and escaped with minor injuries and concussion, but the doctor, whose car has ended up in a stream, has been killed. The Lambton family, who live on a farm nearby, hear the crash and hurry to the rescue, but after retrieving the doctor’s body from the car, they make a shocking discovery. There’s a second body in the back of the car – a man none of the local people have seen before, and as St Brynneys has been cut off from the world for the last few days due to extreme winter weather, nobody knows where he came from.

A local police inspector visits the doctor’s house to try to get to the bottom of the mystery, but when he suffers a fatal accident on the stairs, the mystery only deepens. Chief Inspector Julian Rivers and Inspector Lancing are called in from Scotland Yard, and with the roads still impassable they require the help of the army to access the area. Once they reach St Brynneys, Rivers and Lancing begin their investigations and uncover tensions between the local farming families, the possibility of blackmail and a range of theories to explain the presence of the unidentified corpse.

As my first Carol Carnac book, I’m not sure if there’s anything significantly different between these and her books published as E.C.R. Lorac. The writing style feels very much the same but I haven’t really read enough of her under either name to be able to comment on any other differences. What struck me most about this particular book was the setting and the wonderful atmosphere Carnac creates. The novel is set in a place that has experienced several days of very heavy snowfall, followed by a thaw that has caused flooding, destroying bridges and blocking roads. Carnac’s descriptions of the flooded countryside, the damaged infrastructure and the effect all of this has on a small community really convey a sense of isolation and remoteness. Also, with no routes in or out, this means the suspects (and for that matter, the victims) are limited to people who were already in the area when the snow began.

The actual mystery, I felt, took second place to the setting – which is not to say that it wasn’t interesting, because it was, but I think the descriptions of the snow and the thaw and a society severed from the outside world are what I’ll remember about this book rather than the plot. I’ll try to get round to Crossed Skis at some point and hopefully some more of the Lorac books as well.

Deadly Duo by Margery Allingham

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Deadly Duo (also published as Take Two at Bedtime) is a 1949 collection of two novellas by Margery Allingham, neither of which feature her famous detective, Albert Campion. I’ve discovered over the years that I tend to prefer Allingham’s stories without Campion to the ones with him, so I thought I would probably enjoy this book – and I was right, although I found one of the novellas much stronger than the other.

The first of the two novellas is Wanted: Someone Innocent. Twenty-year-old Gillian Brayton is attending a school reunion when she is approached by an older woman, Rita Fayre, whom she barely remembers from her school days. To her surprise, Rita greets her like a close friend and offers her a job in her household. Gillian has been completely alone in the world since the death of her beloved uncle and is struggling financially, so despite her misgivings she finds herself accepting. On arriving at Rita’s house, she learns that her job will involve taking care of Rita’s husband, who was injured in the war – but why do all the other servants seem so suspicious of Gillian? Is there another reason for Rita’s invitation?

I really enjoyed this story and thought it could easily have been developed into a longer novel. Allingham creates a lot of suspense and atmosphere and although we see everything through the eyes of Gillian, who is rather naive and gullible – the ‘someone innocent’ of the title – it’s obvious to the reader from early on that she is going to be used as a pawn in a crime. I guessed some of the solution but not all of it and anyway, part of the fun was in getting to know the various members of the household, as well as the police officer, Superintendent McNaught, who is brought in to investigate. McNaught is a character I particularly liked; I’m sure he could have been the star of his own series!

The second novella, Last Act, is the longer of the two and it didn’t interest me as much as the first. It’s written from the point of view of Margot Robert, a young French actress who has fallen in love with Denis, one of the grandsons of her guardian, Mathilde Zoffany (known as Zoff). Unfortunately for Margot, Zoff doesn’t like or trust her grandson and has accused him of trying to kill her. When Zoff is indeed found dead under unusual circumstances, suspicion naturally falls upon Denis – but there are other people in the house who all have motives for wanting her dead.

This story has a more complex plot than the other one and a larger cast of characters, but it didn’t have the same atmospheric feel to it and I felt that the characters were less well developed. I disliked almost all of them, particularly Zoff, who was so unpleasant I couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to be in thrall to her. The solution is clever and quite surprising, but as I didn’t really care how or why Zoff had died, the revelation was less impactful than it probably should have been. Still, these two novellas together made a light, quick and entertaining read!

The Undetective by Bruce Graeme – #ReadIndies

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It’s good to see so many forgotten Golden Age crime authors being brought back into print by various publishers. Bruce Graeme (Graham Montague Jeffries) is another I had never heard of until my eye was caught by the bright and colourful cover of this recent reissue of The Undetective. Graeme appears to have been very prolific, particularly during the 1930s and 40s, but this is a later novel from 1962. It’s a real gem and I highly recommend it to classic crime fans! Along with several of Graeme’s others, it’s published by Moonstone Press, which makes it a perfect choice for Karen and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies month.

Our narrator, Iain Carter, has abandoned a career in law to become a crime writer, but is finding it less profitable than he expected. Luckily, his brother-in-law, Edward, happens to be a police detective who is often indiscreet when discussing his work with his family, and Iain decides to use Edward’s inside knowledge as the basis for a new series of books. He creates a superintendent character based on Edward’s boss, whom he portrays as a bumbling idiot incapable of solving any crimes – more of an ‘undetective’ than a detective!

In order to avoid getting Edward into trouble, Iain publishes under a pseudonym – John Ky. Lowell – and goes to great lengths to ensure that nobody can ever trace Lowell back to him. The new series proves to be a huge success and everything is going well for Iain…until a man is found murdered and it emerges that the main suspect is John Ky. Lowell! Can Iain divert suspicion away from his alter ego without making himself a target?

I found this an entertaining read from beginning to end. As an author himself and a founding member of the Crime Writers’ Association, Graeme pokes fun at the publishing industry and his fellow CWA members, namedropping people like John Creasey, Christianna Brand and Julian Symons (who writes a bad review of one of Iain Carter’s books). He also offers some interesting insights into the world of publishing, the royalties an author could expect in 1962, and the reasons for writing under a pseudonym. The schemes Carter comes up with for trying to hide Lowell’s true identity are ingenious!

Although a murder does take place, this is not really a conventional murder mystery, and it’s not a police procedural either as we only hear about the police investigations and theories from Iain’s perspective, due to his friendship with Edward. Iain is not really interested in trying to solve the mystery – he just wants to make sure that neither he nor the non-existent Lowell can be connected with it. With the help of his wife, Susan, he begins planting false clues and red herrings to try to lead the police in the wrong direction and part of the fun is in wondering how long this can go on before he eventually makes a mistake and gets caught out!

I enjoyed this book so much I’m definitely planning to read more by Bruce Graeme, as well as maybe trying some of the other authors available from the same publisher.

Moonstone Press is a member of the Independent Publishers Guild and focuses on “detective, crime and humorous fiction published before 1965”.

Fear Stalks the Village by Ethel Lina White

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The village was beautiful. It was enfolded in a hollow of the Downs, and wrapped up snugly — first, in a floral shawl of gardens, and then, in a great green shawl of fields. Lilies and lavender grew in abundance. Bees clustered over sweet-scented herbs with the hum of a myriad spinning-wheels.

With its Tudor cottages and cobbled streets, the village depicted in Ethel Lina White’s 1932 novel seems at first sight to be an idyllic place to live. There’s no poverty or unemployment, an endless round of tea parties and tennis games, and once settled there, people find that they never want to leave. Joan Brook is a relative newcomer to the village, having arrived to take up a position as companion to Lady d’Arcy, and she has already fallen under its spell.

When a novelist friend from London comes to visit, she entertains herself and Joan by imagining the secret scandals taking place behind closed doors. Perhaps the village doctor is poisoning his wife, she says, and the saintly Miss Asprey is bullying her companion; the Rector is leading a double life, and Miss Julia Corner, President of the local Temperance Society, is a secret drinker. The visit is a brief one and the friend soon returns to London, but when the inhabitants of the village begin to receive anonymous poison pen letters, it seems that the scenarios she had imagined were not so far from the truth after all.

Fear Stalks the Village is an unusual crime novel; although there are several deaths, it is not a murder mystery and the plot revolves entirely around finding out who is writing the spiteful letters threatening to expose the private lives of the villagers. Other reviews compare it to The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie, but as I haven’t read that one yet it reminded me most of Henrietta Clandon’s Good by Stealth. There’s lots of witty, satirical humour and a large cast of strongly drawn characters, all of whom appear at first to be happy, well-adjusted people…until the letters begin to arrive. The question the novel raises is whether the cracks have always been there beneath the surface or whether they have been created by the letters and the suspicion and anxiety they cause.

The mystery is quite a clever one, with some red herrings to throw us off the track, and I didn’t guess who was sending the letters. However, it took me a while to get into this book as the pace is quite slow and, despite the title, I didn’t feel that there was any real sense of fear or menace. Still, this is the second book I’ve read by Ethel Lina White, the first being The Wheel Spins (the book on which Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes is based) and I think it’s my favourite of the two – probably because with the other book I couldn’t help comparing it unfavourably to the film, which I love! I would be happy to try more of her books so let me know if there are any you would recommend.