Burning Down the House (Part I)

The translations of classic Japanese crime fiction works which Pushkin Vertigo has been publishing in recent years is a veritable goldmine for aficionados and scholars to dig into. If not anything else, these works provide a glimpse into how a genre originating (allegedly) in the West came, first, to be adopted in the Far East, and then developed its own identity in myriad ways, informed primarily by the contemporary social and cultural realities in the eras they are placed in. I find myself particularly fascinated by the novels of Akimitsu Takagi and Seishi Yokomizo, two doyens of the mystery genre in Japan, whose novels often openly acknowledge influences from classic Western works but then go on to transcreate the essence of their inspirations, by moulding highly original stories boasting of a unique Japanese identity. Interestingly enough, the early works of Yokomizo and Takagi, both written in the post-World War II era, seem to take on similar themes, the treatments of which circle around, but never quite intersect with, each other.

The demise of entire families or lineages—often in the most violent and abnormal ways imaginable—is one of the themes the aforesaid writers seem to be preoccupied with. There are a number of reasons that may account for this fixation on part of the authors. The American Occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952 irrevocably changed the social, cultural, political, and economic fabric of the country. The army was disarmed and demobilised, wartime public officials were excluded ('purged') from public offices, wartime criminals were put on trial at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal, while the Emperor himself denounced his divine status. It is no wonder then that the works of Yokomizo, in order to portray the intense turmoil and churn of the times, use the figure of the disfigured, disembodied, demobbed soldier (having served in the colonies) returning home, only to roam aimlessly in search of their families or a place to belong to. Furthermore, the 1947 Constitution of Japan abolished the erstwhile kazoku (a system of hereditary peerage under the Empire of Japan), as a result of which the nobles, princes, dukes, viscounts, barons and marquesses were all stripped of their titles and the privileges that came along with it. The decade between 1945–1955 was, therefore, marked as much by decadence, futility and a loss of purpose, as it was by a fierce clash between newly emerging and traditional world orders—something that both Takagi and Yokomizo use, often to varying degrees and effects.

Yokomizo's Akuma ga kitarite fue o fuku (serialised between 1951 and 1953, translated as The Devil's Flute Murders, and published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2023) chronicles the tragic downfall of the once-proud and noble Tsubaki family: 

The Tsubaki family was a noble one, and one of the most prominent of the old aristocratic lines, but it had produced no notable members since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and although the family had received titles from the Imperial family, their yearly stipend had dwindled. In Hidesuke’s youth they had been reduced to poverty, and he himself had struggled to maintain the basic appearance necessary for a man of his station. He had been saved by his marriage to a member of the Shingu family.

What saved the Tsubakis from complete ruin is the Viscount Hidesuke Tsubaki's 'marriage of convinience' to Akiko Shingu—the Shingus being "peers of the old feudal daimyo lineage" who were "famous for their wealth". The marriage was a strange, mismatched one, and inexplicable to the Viscount himself who had often wondered why Akiko's maternal uncle, the Count Tamamushi, "would assent to letting his darling niece marry a man such as him". After all, Hidesuke "had apparently lacked the vitality necessary to deal with all the changes and turmoil rocking Japanese society at the time", instead spending time on extending his mastery over the flute, while Count Tamamushi "had always remained a powerful political force in the shadows", despite not being a minister himself. The firebombing of Tokyo spares the Tsubakis' mansion, but brings together a lot of combustible elements from branch families of the Shingus under one roof—the Count Tamamushi and his mistress Kikue, and the entire Shingu household, consisting of Toshihiko Shingu (Akiko's brother, "who filled his life with liquor, women and golf" and was regarded by Count Tamamushi as "a true figure of [the] nobility), his wife and son.

The fuse to this powder-keg of a situation is lit, seemingly, not through the internal machinations of this disjointed household, but from an unexpected external source. Yokomizo relies on a real-life case—the robbery-cum-mass-murder at a branch of the Imperial Bank (Teikoku Ginkō, aka Teigin), Tokyo, in 1948—to set in motion the chain of events in The Devil's Flute Murders (which are, however, set in 1947). Acting on an anonymous tip, the police summon Viscount Hidesuke due to his strong resemblance with a montage photo (or a composite photo) of the culprit which they had released. The viscount is later set free due to lack of evidence, but he disappears, nearly two months after the events of the Teigin Case. A month-and-half later, Hidesuke's body is discovered in the faraway Nagano Prefecture. It is established that he had committed suicide, but not all is as it seems as Hidesuke's presence is seen and felt by Akiko during a visit to the theatre, a few months after the former's death. And, thus it is that in the month of September 1947 that Hidesuke's daughter, Mineko, visits the private detective Kosuke Kindaichi to request his help in finding out whether her father is dead or alive. What Kindaichi finds, instead, over the course of the novel, is a whole lot of skeletons buried in the closets of the Tsubakis, Shingus and Tamamushis—miserable secrets that force the chronicler of Kindaichi's adventures to significantly postpone its publication: 

In truth, I should have written about this case before two or three other Kindaichi adventures I have published in the last few years. The reason it comes so late is that Kindaichi was reluctant to reveal its secrets to me, and that was mostly likely because he was afraid that unveiling the unrelenting darkness, twisted human relationships and bottomless hatred and resentment within might discomfit readers.

The opening act of this 'tragedy in three acts' unfolds with two significant events. The first is the revelation of the two 'legacies' left behind by Viscount Hidesuke. One of them is an enigmatic letter to his daughter: 

Dear Mineko, 

Please, do not hold this act against me. I can bear no more humiliation and disgrace. If this story comes to light, the good name of the Tsubaki family will be cast into the mud. Oh, the devil will indeed come and play his flute. I cannot bear to live to see that day come. 

My Mineko, forgive me. 

The second piece of legacy is Hidesuke's last contribution to the world of music—a sinister composition titled "The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute", based on Doppler’s flute song “Fantaisie Pastorale Hongroise”, and which would play a vital role in the unravelling of whodunnit.

The second significant event is the divination ceremony held in the Tsubaki house the day after Mineko's visit to Kindaichi. The ceremony held is unlike seances in the West, instead sharing resemblances with Japan's "kokkuri-san" divination and sand divination, as noted by Kindaichi. Needless to say, a number of events happen in quick succession before, during, and after the ceremony—not unlike the opening stretches of Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit. The house is plunged into darkness, footsteps are heard from the unoccupied, former room of the Viscount, the ceremony goes sideways when the image of a kaendaiko (or flaming drum), eerily matching the birthmark on Toshihiko Shingu's shoulder (a later revelation), is found engraved on the sand in the divination apparatus, and the haunting notes of "The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute" are heard immediately after the end of the divination. As if this isn't enough, the Count Tamamushi is found dead the next morning in the locked "Western-styled" room with its "long ventilation window or ranma" where the divination had been held the previous night. Preliminary investigations by Kindaichi and his friend, Chief Inspector Todoroki, reveal that the count had been beaten with a statue and then strangled with a scarf. Some other incidents—a missing statue, a jewel stolen in the Teigin case ending up in Viscount Tsubaki's flute case, and a typewriter with a particular peculiarity—amp up the mystery quotient in this section to a fever pitch.

The commencement of the second act marks a tonal departure from the preceding section, as Kindaichi travels to the west to follow in the footsteps of Hidesuke's final days, and unravel the singular mystery behind why he took his own life and left the aforementioned, ambiguous letter to his daughter. Personally, I quite like this section as it unfolds in the form of a travel narrative where Kindaichi indulges in conversations with people from different stratas of society—from inn owners, domestic helps, craftspeople, temple priests and prostitutes, all the way up to former aristocrats. Also, the pictures Yokomizo paints of the countryside in these sections are tinted with a sense of nostalgia, of places, faces and figures lost to the vagaries of time and war:

The one saving grace, he found, was that the Three Spring Garden Inn was not one of the shady new-built inns, aimed at couples looking for some brief privacy, that had proliferated after the war—the ones with the fake onsen, hot spring signs. Rather, it was a grand old lodge with a long history—as well as wide gables to keep the rain off—and a calm atmosphere.

Kobe had been heavily bombed in the war, and the district of Suma itself was mostly burnt out, but the area around Sumadera temple had been largely spared. These few old, miraculously surviving buildings standing in that heavy autumn rain served as faint reminders of better days long gone. The Three Spring Garden Inn was itself a serene testament to those days, as well.

Or, take, for instance, the section where Kindaichi discovers the former villa of Count Tamamushi:

At this, Kindaichi shook his head and looked around like he was waking from a dream.

He saw a stretch of about two and a half acres of scorched land spread out in front of him. It looked like a brick wall or something similar had been up on the hillside where they stood, but it was completely burnt away, and now all that was left was bare land. No buildings, no trees; nothing was left. Nothing, except for the stone lamp that Okami-san had mentioned. It, too, had been scorched white by the flames, and now it stood forlorn in the autumn dusk.

[...]

At the bottom, they stepped out into an overgrown field piled with charred tiles and other rubble. The red heads of knotweed, damp from the rain, danced like waves in the breeze on their long stalks. Osumi and Kindaichi trudged through them, the hems of their kimonos soaking up the damp, heading towards the lantern.

Once, this garden must have been a wonderful place. The layout of the land, with the pond and hill, and the remaining garden stones, gave a hint of its past glory, though now it was nothing more than a dismal ruin.

Or, the description of Akashi Port:

The rain had lifted, but clouds still hung low and dark in the sky, and the waves on the leaden sea at Akashi Port were running high.

The port was shaped like a coin purse with its mouth facing south. At its back were two piers, each about thirty feet long and seemingly made of old ship parts, jutting out over the filthy, debris-covered seawater. The Bantan Line steamships bound for Iwaya used one pier, and the other was for Marusei Line ships sailing around the Awaji route.

Rain-battered fishing boats were clustered around the roots of the piers, rocking like cradles on the heavy swells. One rather elegant lighthouse still stood at the mouth of the port. Awaji Island rose beyond it like an ink painting.

The eastern half of Akashi and Kobe city had survived relatively untouched through the war and still had some old houses, but the western half looked to have been completely lost to the fires. Now it was covered with the same slapdash temporary buildings that had spread across most of Japan. None of the beauty that the Suma and Akashi districts had once been famous for was left to be seen.

This is not to say that Kindaichi completely abandons the investigation to indulge in melancholic reflections over the lost Japanese countryside. Rather, the investigation Kindaichi and the young police detective Degawa conduct is of a more intense, intimate and sensitive nature. That is because The Devil's Flute Murders, from the reader's perspective, is not a story where one can employ principles of logic and fair-play to solve it. The core question of "what really happened in the past?" requires one to go along for the ride the author wants the audience to embark upon. On the one hand, in this act, Kindaichi peels layer after layer of the depraved and senses-numbing history of the Tsubakis, Shingus and the Tamamushis, by interacting with a whole host of people, spread across myriad locations, who were connected with these families in the past, however remote that connection might have been. On the other, events unfold in a most thriller-like fashion in real time. A stone lantern with the mysterious but important inscription, "Here, the devil's birthplace", is found defaced the next day. Furthermore, on an island away from the mainland, a hitherto-unintroduced nun called Myokai is murdered before Kindaichi can meet her. As it would later transpire, Myokai, the last person Hidesuke Tsubaki spoke to, was possibly the one living person who could have seen and predicted the plot of a majority of the novel, plain as a map.

Things pick up in the third and concluding act of the story as Kindaichi races back to Tokyo, on being informed about Toshihiko's murder in the hothouse, with his head split open, at a time the culprit, in a premeditated manner, arranged for Toshihiko to be at the crime scene at the right time, away from the sight of others. At the same time, the missing statue makes its reappearance with its base sawn off. Two other murders—that of Toyasaburo Iio, one of the suspects in the Teigin case, and of Akiko Shingu, through poisoning—and a bit of sleuthing involving a confirmation of identity of a particular member of the Tsubaki household hastens the novel towards its conclusion. A very neat and inspired piece of clueing, focusing on the manner in which "The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute" is composed and played, ultimately points to the culprit. By the end of it all, the events of a single summer day in the faraway past lead to four households being effectively wiped out—the Tsubakis, the Shingus, the Tamamushis and the Kawamuras.

As with Death on Gokumon Island, The Devil's Flute Murders suffers from some characteristic, familiar flaws—most prominent of them being the inconsistent and extremely repulsive characterisation. In order to portray the depravity and perverted mindsets of Japanese nobility in its 'sunset years', the main characters in the tragedy—Toshihiko Shingu and Count Tamamushi—are portrayed in a most unpleasant manner, with no redeemable features. Indeed, while it is possible to sympathise, to a degree, with the fate of the Kawamuras, the actions of the elder members of the Shingus and the Tamamushis deserve no such consideration. On the other hand, the women (with the exception of Kikue, perhaps) are mostly relegated to secondary roles, with most of them coming across as victims with barely any agency of their own, whose plight ought to be pitied. Furthermore, a very casual strain of misogyny comes across in certain sections, as is evident in Kindaichi's first impressions of Akiko ("Akiko was certainly beautiful. However, it was the beauty of an artificial flower. She seemed as hollow as a woman in a painting. Akiko’s smile filled her whole face. It was a dazzling, beautiful smile. However, it was one that someone had taught her to make, not one of genuine feeling. Her eyes were pointed at Kindaichi, but they seemed to actually be looking somewhere else, somewhere far away."), or the description of Shino, Akiko's senior lady-in-waiting ("Next to her sat an old woman who was as ugly as any in the world. This must have been Shino, the senior lady-in-waiting who had accompanied Akiko here when she left the Shingu household. [...] Ugliness of such purity and extent is actually not unpleasant. Indeed, it becomes a kind of art at that point. The corrosion of age seemed to have washed all marks of shyness or vanity from her expression, and she stood unabashed in front of guests as if having forgotten her own ugliness, even putting it on display, making it an object of awe. In a way, this woman seemed to have left some elements of human weakness behind."). There is also a section that revolves around linguistics, and differences in local, regional dialects, that comes across as jarring and a bit too obvious in the translation. But perhaps, the most glaring of these shortcomings is a major plot point involving the science of birthmarks, which seems to be quite inaccurate and would require a significant suspension of disbelief for it to be convincing enough.

The strength of the novel is its treatment of its core theme: the decline and demise of the Japanese nobility and aristocracy in the post-World War II era—something Yokomizo was inspired to explore after reading Osamu Dazai's 1947 book, The Setting Sun, as he admits in the story ("This was all before Osamu Dazai wrote his work Setting Sun, about the decline of the aristocratic class after the war, so we did not yet have ready terms like 'the sunset clan' or 'sunset class' to describe these people, newly bereft of their noble privilege and falling into ruin. But, if we had, then I think it likely that this case would have been the first to see the term used."). Along with this, Kindaichi's 'travel journal' in the second act is a welcome addition. Replete with brief but illuminating interactions with numerous characters, these provide a rich study of the lives of people from different social classes, and how they evolved from the pre-War to post-War times. Nicely dovetailing with this are Yokomizo's descriptions of the landscape and activities in the countryside and harbours around Kobe and some islands, with their evocation of what they had lost with the passage of time and two World Wars.

I had briefly touched upon a 2018 adaptation (a TV special) of Akuma ga kitarite fue o fuku in a previous post of mine, where I had argued that a wonderful casting choice and some creative liberties to alter the plot of the book in subtle but major ways led to an incredibly sinister, foreboding and dramatic viewing experience. Having read the translated version of the book now, I would say that the plot-based alterations in the movie were a bit too over the top—the darkness and wickedness in the original novel is quite overwhelming and unpleasant, as it is.

In the second part of Burning Down the House, I hope to discuss Akimitsu Takagi's 1949 novel Nōmen Satsujin Jiken (translated as The Noh Mask Murder, published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2024) as an intriguing companion piece (in some respects) to Yokomizo's The Devil's Flute Murders. Takagi's novel too is not for the faint-hearted—the levels of perversion and evilness seen in The Noh Mask Murder far surpass what one encounters in The Devil's Flute Murders.

Night of the Living Dead

The tendency of Japanese mystery authors to fixate on apocalyptic, end-of-the-times themes has much to do with the country's own tryst with bloody conflicts, internecine strife and wars going back decades and centuries. This is visible in the settings and politics of works by prolific wartime authors such as Seishi Yokomizo (taking on the theme of the disfigured individual and society crippled by the Second World War in multiple novels) and Akimitsu Takagi (portraying the seedy underworld in the midst of bombed-out ruins in The Tattoo Murder Case). Images of the war continue to loom large in the works of authors writing a few decades later such as Natsuhiko Kyogoku (with a number of characters in the Kyōgokudō series suffering from post-war PTSD), and in manga series such as The Kindaichi Case Files and Detective School Q (both of which have stories with wartime biological experimentation in their backgrounds). And, if one includes historical crime fiction in the equation, the net has to be cast much wider, travelling further back in time — Honobu Yonezawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner takes place against the backdrop of the siege of the Arioka Castle (1578–1579), while the events of the Boshin Civil War (1868–1869) and the Meiji Restoration play an important role in Fūtarō Yamada's The Meiji Guillotine Murders.

When Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no Satsujin (translated as Death Among the Undead, Locked Room International, 2021) first came out in 2017, it was widely hailed as a much-needed shot in the arm for the shin honkaku sub-genre. As Soji Shimada points out in his insightful introduction to the book's translation, the genre had been showing tendencies similar to the preceding 'social school of mystery fiction'—namely that the sub-genre was restricting and limiting itself too much by sticking religiously to a select few 'golden rules', as a result of which originality was being stifled. Indeed, if one simply glances, at the surface level, the elements the novel introduces and the genres it blends, Shimada's observation is warranted. Yet, as has happened with so many works in the past, Death Among the Undead is also driven by bloody violence, albeit in a modern avatar—a bioterrorist attack.

Imamura clearly loves popular Japanese mystery tropes—a university setting, mystery clubs and an incredibly young cast. In fact, the opening stretches resemble, in essence, Yukito Ayatsuji's groundbreaking novel, The Decagon House Murders. The wry, self-deprecating humour ("It was up for debate whether his 'deductions' could be considered logical, but I did agree that humans do not act as predictably as they do in books.") punctuating sections (such as the one where Shinkō University's Mystery Society members Kyōsuke Akechi and Yuzuru Hamura make idle deductions on the food a girl may order at the cafeteria, or the one where Akechi strikes a 'deal' with real-life detective Hiruko Kenzaki to enter the Film Club's summer trip) makes for easy reading in the early going. All the ingredients indicate a classic, closed-circle setup: the Film Club receiving a threatening letter on who the next 'sacrifice' will be, and all the members of the Film Club going ahead with the trip and gathering at the Villa Violet close to Lake Sabea, with Akechi, Hamura and Kenzaki as the 'invited' guests.

It is here that another thread in the form of a bioterrorist attack at the Sabea Rock Festival nearby collides with this closed-circle setup with the force of a freight train, and transforms the section into a scene straight out of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Even though the members could hear ambulance sirens since the afternoon and observe an unusual glow from the festival area, it is only during the evening-time Trial of Courage held between the Club members that things are thrown into disarray. By this time, there have been significant casualties, but it is during the main cast's encounter with wandering zombies that the novel acquires a personal touch. Both the Club members as well as Yuzura lose their friends to the horde of zombies wildly stumbling about. They are also forced to retreat into the confines of the Villa Violet, while closing, shuttering up all points of entry and egress, and barricading themselves. The book then purports to unfold as a zombie survival narrative. Or, does it?

The use of zombies to double down on the closed-circle and enforced isolationist aspects of the novel, besides positioning them as potential instruments and perpetrators of murders most foul, can indeed be considered to be revolutionary in textual or literary terms. However, in my view, Death Among the Dead can best be enjoyed as a cinematic experience*. Much of it has to do with how the novel transpires henceforth. First, Imamura carefully outlines the extent of the zombies' capabilities, laying out what they can and cannot do:

"[...] these zombies appeared to have badly-developed motor skills. Their speed of movement on the steps was much slower than on level ground, and they had trouble staying balanced. Any zombie that did somehow manage to make their way up found the barricades in their way, got their feet wrapped up in the sheets and tripped backwards, taking the zombies behind with them in their fall. The process kept repeating itself. [...]"

Despite all the precautions taken based on the collective observations of the gathered people, the following morning, one of the members is found dead in a closed room in a gross manner (with his face gnawed off), slowly transforming into a zombie before the witness' eyes. The victim is 'killed' a second time, before the observers find a note with the words 'let's eat'. This sets off a second wave of revised speculations and discourse on zombies, their abilities, and the process of zombiefication, with conversations on locked room mysteries and their applicability (in the current scenario) thrown in between. Some of the discourse has a surprising philosophical depth (which is, unfortunately, never really followed up on), despite being peppered with pop-cultural references to cult hits in the zombie fiction genre, such as Resident Evil and Shaun of the Dead:

"Zombies are not simply grotesque, horrifying monsters anymore. They are beings that can be used to cast a light on so many themes: the sin of man, economic class differences, the strong and the weak, or the tragedy of how friends and family can turn into enemies in the blink of an eye. Zombies are projections of our own egos and minds."

However, no amount of philosophising, theorising and notes-taking help the survivors prevent two other murders—one on the second night and the other on the morning of the third day. In the second case, the corpse is found with its head smashed to bits in a closed elevator stuck on the second floor of the building, while the third case involved the poisoning of a character in the room he had holed himself up in. In the meantime, the threat of the gathering multitudes of zombies breaking through the barriers put in place has increased exponentially.

So, these three incidents, featuring the involvement of zombies to varying degrees, form the crux of the narrative. The incidents are all explained in a rational manner—and to answer the question I had posed earlier, it is ironic to note that the way the novel unfolds after the introduction of the zombies makes it a celebration of logical and deductive reasoning, with the survival of characters against a zombie outbreak being presented as a consequential byproduct. In particular, I prefer the explanation of the first incident, which has a tragic and pathetic aspect to it, and merges the mystery and horror aspects very well.

Perhaps, it all unfolds a bit too logically and rationally for a reader invested in the setting of the work. The biggest failure here, in my opinion, is that Imamura sorely undersells the psychological impact of the zombie attack on the characters. The fact that they all display too much of a 'calmer heads should prevail, let's wait for help to arrive' attitude, accompanied by an almost placid acceptance of the situation, beggars belief and feels excessively unnatural, artificial and forced by the dictates of the author's plotting preferences and the need to conform to a particular brand of mystery fiction. There's no unpredictability or instinctiveness in the reactions of the characters holed up in Villa Violet in the face of a zombie invasion. Instead, even though the book had previously poked fun at the predictability of characters in fictional works, it all feels too premeditated, predictable and well-rehearsed, like a movie script. What's disappointing is that the zombies are almost peripheral in the central sections of the book, only serving as tools to advance the plot, and the sense of threat emanating from their presence is often severely underplayed. Paradoxically, therefore, the introduction of the zombie element that promised to add a new dimension to the dynamics of the shin honkaku sub-genre ends up restricting the narrative potential by imposing the dictates of a classically-constructed shin honkaku story on to the characters and their reactions that do not seem to be appropriate to the circumstances they face (except for the portion after the denouement leading to the rescue of the remaining characters). What's extremely lacking is a consistent level of panic and nervous/manic energy seen in, say, Frederic Brown's Night of the Jabberwock.

It begs the question: is the inspired use of zombies really essential to Imamura's debut work? Given the larger genre-wide implications it has wrought, the answer is a resounding yes. But, seen in the context of Death Among the Undead specifically, one cannot help but argue that Imamura fails to do justice to or explore the enormous potential of the zombies that he introduces in his fictional universe. Akechi indeed has the final say when he remarks, "... Things don't always go right."

*Thankfully, a 2019 movie version of Death Among the Undead, titled Murder at Shijinso, can be found online. In all respects, it is fairly faithful to the events in the book, but the use of dramatic tropes, some creative liberties and a stylised treatment focusing more on the action and survival elements, makes for a more entertaining, spectacle-filled view that could help one gloss over the identity-based issues one encounters when reading the book.

Tokyo: A Love Story

Akimitsu Takagi's 1948 novel Shisei Satsujin Jiken (published in English first as The Tattoo Murder Case by Soho Crime in 1999, republished as The Tattoo Murder by Pushkin Vertigo in 2022) happens to be one of the first books that kickstarted my fascination with Japanese crime literature. As it was the only title missing from my collection of Pushkin Vertigo's translated Japanese titles, I recently decided to buy and revisit it after a period of eight-odd years. So, how did the trip down memory lane fare for me this time around?

Eight years are a long time for anyone to forget major chunks of a work, but I must admit I was pleasantly surprised at how much I remembered the setting of this novel. Against the backdrop of a wound as raw as World War II, it must have been difficult for an author to replicate its ambience. But, Takagi pulls it off and evokes the atmosphere of a bombed-out, defeated, post-World War II Japan in a manner that is refreshingly different from Seishi Yokomizo's Death on Gokumon Island, a work that was written and published in roughly the same time period. I keep returning to the opening two paragraphs of the novel that firmly establish the environs where the work will be set in and locates it strictly in a very particular time period:

"It was the summer of 1947, and the citizens of Tokyo, already crushed with grief and shock over the loss of the war, were further debilitated by the languid heat. The city was ravaged. Seedy-looking shacks had sprung up on the messy sites of bombed-out buildings. Makeshift shops overflowed with colorful black-market merchandise, but most people were still living from hand to mouth.

Even in formerly posh neighborhoods around the Ginza, the same pathetic scenario was being played out. During the day, ragged crowds of people with empty eyes would meander aimlessly about the crossroads, mingling with the American soldiers who strutted along triumphantly in their dashing uniforms. When evening rolled around, the rubble-strewn streets teemed with prostitutes, petty criminals, and vagabonds seeking a cheap night’s lodging. The uneasy silence of the night was frequently shattered by the report of a pistol."

Author Takagi's interest in an unfamiliar Tokyo provides fuel for the seedy atmosphere that he sustains for a majority of the novel, and his gaze (which he shares with the readers) has a flâneur-like quality in the opening stretches. Page after page, chapter after chapter, we travel through the charred streets and neighbourhoods of Tokyo to witness the curious, sometimes aimless, movements of the characters whose lives and motivations have taken unpredictable turns after the war. The overall, pointless, arbitrary nature of survival in a post-war period is best illustrated when Akimitsu describes the existing buildings in the several locales spread across the city. For instance, one is introduced to the opulent mansion of Professor Hayakawa as follows: "Professor Hayakawa had married money as well as beauty. He and his tattooed wife lived in Yotsuya in a splendid European-style brick house with leaded windows, wrought-iron balconies, and a classical English garden hidden away behind high brick walls. The house had been spared by some wartime fluke, while both of the formerly elegant dwellings on either side were now bombed-out ruins, overgrown with weeds." This illogical reality of certain settlements surviving with the surrounding ones in ruins persists throughout the novel. And it is against this backdrop that the story unfolds, with many of the key characters relying on the forbidden charms of the underworld and the red-light districts to escape from their mundane, sobering reality of their everyday lives.

The apathy in the lives of a number of the characters in the novel is juxtaposed with the sinister designs of some others. The result is a transformation of the flâneuristic gaze into a voyeuristic one—the object of voyeurism being a magnificent tattoo of the mythical sorcerer Orochimaru on the body of a certain Kinue Nomura. The tattoo is unveiled in all its glory at the first post-war meeting of the Edo Tattoo Society, an event meant for the recreation of a certain section of Tokyo's people suffering a long and terrible summer. This act of exhibitionism sparks a chain of events that leads different characters to 'tail' this bewitching tattoo and its owner for different reasons: first, Kenzo Matsushita (an aspiring student of forensic medicine), Professor Hayakawa (also called Dr Tattoo), Gifu Inazawa (the manager of the company owned by Kinue's husband, Takezo Mogami), and later, Ryokichi Usui (Kinue's former yakuza lover) and Tsunetaro Nomura (Kinue's brother, who had supposedly perished in World War II). Now, tailing is an essential tool for detectives—and as the late Sari Kawana mentions in her work, Murder Most Modern, it even allowed scholars and researchers in the 1920s and 1930s to put on their thinking caps and step in the shoes of a sleuth (a fact well illustrated in Kawana's encapsulation of a slightly creepy social experiment involving the tailing of a woman in a department store and then making observations based on her shopping habits and buying patterns). Not surprisingly then, the act of tailing became a keystone of crime and detective fiction works in the country—an investigative tool of such sanctity that deductions could safely be made on the basis of these actions and the secrets unearthed consequently.

When it comes to tailing, Edogawa Ranpo usually played it straight in his "ero guro nansensu" (erotic-grotesque nonsense) stories such as "The Stalker in the Attic". However, The Tattoo Murder (which mirrors some of the aesthetics of Ranpo's ero guro nansensu) subverts the role and purpose of tailing by turning it on its head and changing it into a tool of misdirection which fools not only the characters caught in a trap but also the police who draw their observations based on their misguided surveillance and pursuit of the suspects and the testimonies made. From the standpoint of the miscreants, however, it all unfolds perfectly like a well-rehearsed script. Kinue Nomura, the subject of much fascination, plays the role of a damsel-in-distress-cum-femme-fatale, using her feminine charms (and her tattoo, of course) to appeal to men like Gifu and Kenzo ("I feel that I am going to be killed very soon ... A terrible death is stalking me, and I am terrified of what may lie in wait. I fear my days are numbered, and the happiness I’ve found with you will be cruelly snatched away.… You’re the only one who can rescue me, my love."), even making out with them. However, the dismembered body parts of Kinue are soon discovered in the locked bathroom of their Japanese-style house, with her husband having ostensibly disappeared. To add further suspicion, Kenzo, Gifu, Ryokichi and Professor Hayakawa are all discovered to have visited the scene of the crime on the evening or the day after for their own, not-so-honourable ends. One by one, the authorities shift their focus on each of the suspects while simultaneously bringing to light the murky past of Kinue and her family (consisting of her father Horiyasu, an incredibly talented tattoo artist, her mother, a hardened criminal who ran away and died in person, her sister Tamae, who was supposed to have passed away in the Hiroshima explosion and her brother Tsunetaro, who had gone to serve in the Philippines during the  war and was listed as missing in action). It is also believed that Horiyasu had left a curse on each of his offsprings by etching three mythological characters on their bodies (Orochimaru on Kinue's, Tsunadehime on Sanae's and Jiraiya on Tsunetaro's). Such an act is considered to be taboo, because the three are warring magicians who are said to have destroyed each other—and with Kinue's death, the prophecy seems to have been fulfilled. Except, the killings don't quite stop at this point—a few days later, the body of Takezo Mogami is found in the storeroom of an abandoned building, a bullet hole above his right ear. And, in yet another turn of events, Tsunetaro turns out to be alive with a tattoo business of his own, only to soon end up dead (for real, this time) in a burnt-out building with the skin removed from his torso, hands and thighs, after promising to expose the perpetrators. This intense, secretly manipulated tailing and pursuit has no happy, satisfactory ending for any of the parties concerned.

Takagi's love for the art and the culture of the Japanese tattoo shines through the novel—and it is no surprise that the trick behind the case of a mistaken identity revolves around the process of tattoo engraving and removal. A review of the book termed it as "a document of the times", and this is best seen in sections where Takagi reveals, with an almost journalistic flourish, the harsh realities of post-war Japan that people could scarcely believe would have come to pass—women, both elderly and preteen, thrown into prostitution; the intricate and artistic Japanese tattoo as a symbol of superiority over the "unimaginative" American tattoo, providing solace (in a perverse way) to a population hurting from a wartime loss; tattoo parlours in hidden alleys being meeting grounds for the affluent and the downtrodden where skilled but outlawed tattoo artists sketched and imprinted these symbols of national pride and identity, flouting strict rules prohibiting such practices. Takagi paints the underworld and, in particular, the shady, tattooing industry in post-war Tokyo in vivid, sensual detail and in a sensitive, sympathetic manner that should resonate well with the layman reader. The rules, etiquettes and the inner workings of the world of the Japanese tattoo artists too are explained in a comprehensible, but perhaps excessively earnest, way.

Till this point, the narrative develops organically, providing reasons, along the way, for a reader to develop interest in Japanese history and culture. The denouement, comprising the last third of the novel, comes as a bit of a surprise, though. The arrival of the amateur detective Kyosuke Kamizu, who provides the much-needed "fresh point of view" and "miracle", signals the beginning of a significant tonal shift. Hereon, Takagi completely drops the ball on the creepy, seedy atmosphere he had so painstakingly established and rushes towards the endgame with a ruthlessness and clinical efficiency that would have done Freeman Wills Crofts proud. Gone are the discussions on the Japanese tattoo and the importance of mythological stories in the world of the Japanese tattoo; these are instead replaced with conversations on Western philosophies and ways of thought, and deliberations on Kamizu's pet theory of "criminal economics". For a novel that caters so much to Japanese tastes, cultures and sensibilities, The Tattoo Murder sure does proclaim the superiority and triumph of Western perspectives and methods of detection in its final stretches. The locked-room murder is explained satisfactorily and competently but in an uninspired, perfunctory manner, while a final dramatic twist and reveal is perhaps an inevitable development that may be considered predictable by today's standards.

When I referred to The Tattoo Murder as a novel of a very specific time period, I may have subconsciously also been hinting at the unfortunate, excessive cross-pollination of genre aesthetics and mechanics in its final portions—a development that was perhaps inevitable in that era. That is why this treatment is perfectly understandable too—for an author like Takagi writing right after the end of World War II, the challenge must have been to incorporate Japanese aesthetics and sensibilities in a genre that was essentially seen as a Western import. And, make no mistake—The Tattoo Murder as a mystery novel is a gripping page-turner of the first order that also wonderfully explores a city in ruins and offers fascinating insights into aspects of an oft-ignored profession and class of society (at that time). As a Japanese mystery, however, the lack of an organic conclusion stunts its status somewhat and, in my humble opinion, prevents it from reaching the heights of Seishi Yokomizo's The Inugami Curse and Death on Gokumon Island.  

(This post was published on the Scroll website with the following title: The Tattoo Murder’ injects local aesthetics into a post-World War II Japanese crime novel)

Into Thin Air

"Nobody ever notices postmen somehow ... yet they have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily."

—Father Brown in "The Invisible Man" (1911)

This climactic observation in the Father Brown short story is the culmination of one of the first short stories I ever read that took on the theme of the vanishing corpse and the criminal. It is a theme that is fairly prevalent in crime fiction, but one that may be difficult to execute, especially because the limits of 'suspension of disbelief' are often stretched to unrealistic extents due to the dictates of the plot and to lend the 'wow' factor to it. "The Invisible Man" doesn't exactly dazzle with its plot—it is a rather linear, simple story with a slightly creepy sub-plot featuring headless cleaning robots/machines, the spirit of which would reemerge, later, with the automaton in John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938). What the story does do well, without resorting to any complicated trickery, is the portrayal of the 'blind spot' in people's vision and perceptions, and how context and circumstance determine our observation of and reaction to a particular situation. It is a grounded, back-to-the-roots kind of approach that simply sticks to the fundamentals.

Building on these fundamentals, more sophisticated variants of the 'disappearing criminal and/or the transported corpse' theme would be plotted over the next few decades. It may not have been intentional but this year I have had the fortune to read three titles of relatively good acclaim that treat this theme to varying degrees of success. The first of these was The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) by Clayton Rawson, an author I was acquainted with having read his previous work, Death From a Top Hat (1938). A magician by profession, Rawson populated the pages of both novels with magical chicanery of all kind, but the execution is fundamentally different in the two novels. The Footprints on the Ceiling is replete, top to bottom, with a host of tricks and stagecraft that give Rawson an excuse to describe some engrossing magical secrets for the readers. The novel, however, has many more moving parts and character agendas compared to Death From a Top Hat, which is a more focussed read and dealt with perhaps only two or three well-defined set pieces. Consequentially, the minor mysteries in Death From a Top Hat take on a more superficial, showboating nature than in The Footprints on The Ceiling, where the lesser mysteries add to the excessively (and perhaps, irritatingly so) tangential nature of the narrative, yet stay integral to it because the culprit's actions can only be understood in relation to the individual actions and mutually negating deception of the rest of the other criminal characters surrounding the culprit. Whether they intend to or not, the sequence of events has the domino effect of covering up not only for their own selves but also the murderer in their midst. The device of 'covering up for another' can also be seen in a novel such as Seishi Yokomizo's The Inugami Curse, but there, it has a more direct bearing to the main plot than this one, and unfolds in a far less confounding manner than here.

The scale and the complexity of the plot also requires a breakneck pace to be employed early on in Rawson's work, which makes for a most pulpish and thriller-like read. Within the first few chapters, you have an ad for a haunted house that leads the detective, Merlini, and his journalist friend, Ross Harte, heading to Skelton Island. But, before they can even get to the island, Harte is ambushed ("Something that might easily have been the Chrysler building hit me on the top of the head, and was followed immediately by an elegant display of shooting stars in full Technicolor.") and there is a switcheroo involving suitcases and counterfeit guinea coins. Once they land, they come across the corpse of the heiress of the island, Linda Skelton, in an old, decrepit building, followed by an attempt on their own lives when said building is set on fire. Over the course of the night, Merlini, Harte and the readers come across an excessively suspicious cast of characters, there's gunfire, a jungle chase and all the boats are scuttled to prevent the escape of any character. All this goodness and more before the police even appear on the island.

One of the problems of a novel with too many moving parts concerns how the author manages to tie it all up with no loose ends, especially if the characters have diverse, personal motivations of their own that sometimes conflict with each other and manage to be congruent with each other at other times. Similar is the case with The Footprints on The Ceiling—and to his credit, Rawson is able to bring together the diverse narrative strands into a coherent whole, mostly by relying on page after page of exposition that describe magical trickery and scientific phenomena in equally excruciating detail. The effort is much appreciated, but it can be trying for a first-time reader unused to such a treatment. However, sprinkled in between are a few neatly and competently executed ideas—the mystery of the blue-skinned man, the mystery of the eponymous footprints on the ceiling and the segment involving decompression sickness which is actually the culmination of the independent actions of quite a few characters that ultimately claims the life of one of the Skelton siblings. On the flip side, the plethora of mysterious incidents, all to be explained by Merlini, ensures that certain events are simply glossed over. For instance, there are two separate instances in the novel that involve the disappearance and reappearance of corpses and which fulfill different narrative purposes. However, these are explained in a most desultory manner, while the motivations behind these actions seem almost superfluous to the needs of the core plot, existing seemingly to only complicate the story further.

Two other issues hurt the novel even further. One is the lack of a map or diagram of the island and its various scenes of crime, which makes it difficult to picture some of the ingenious tricks such as the bullet 'that bends around walls' and the shootout at the climax of the novel that claims the lives of two of the cast, somewhat inexplicably and to the bewilderment of the rest of the characters and the readers. Even more than this is a logistical issue that I would perhaps terms as 'the problem of the starting point'. However well Rawson pulls off the connecting-the-threads act at the end, there's this persistent sense of jarring disconnect throughout. Much of it, I believe, has to do with the point at which the readers are introduced to the novel. As later events attest, the plans of many of the characters are already underway by the time Harte and Merlini land on the island, and even before Harte is attacked in the opening chapters. One could even argue that Harte and Merlini arrive when these plans have almost matured completely. What this results in is that we are deprived of the larger context because the novel is seen through Harte and Merlini's perspectives—and the reconstruction of the events prior to those in the novel, which are essential to understand the happenings in the present day, is simply conjecture on Merlini's part. While this lends to the excellent shock value of the work, for those looking to solve the incidents on their own rather than simply going along for the ride, it can be very frustrating because without the context of events past, the onslaught of the present events leads to constant cluelessness and befuddlement (what is happening? why is it happening?) and not always in a good way, even with the minor mysteries being explained over the course of the novel. I think the novel would have been better served if Rawson could have interspersed the narrative with individual perspectives from the suspects (first-person and/or otherwise) other than Harte and Merlini, casting light on their motivations and actions, their personal opinions of the fellow cast members and how their thoughts and plans were influenced by those of the other. It is a ploy that was used to devastating effect in Szu-Yen Lin's Death in the House of Rain—and in the case of The Footprints on The Ceiling, it could have successfully shifted the starting point to an earlier period, in the segments where the characters shared their perspectives and provided the necessary context, perhaps making for a fairer and more dynamic read.

***

A better example of a good starting point lies in Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), long touted to be one of the best locked-room mysteries ever written. Like Rawson, Talbot too was a magician with the result that Rim of the Pit is full of exquisite magical flourishes that set up an atmosphere of hair-raising, full-blown horror. But, it is not an all-out assault from the word go. A bit of breathing space at the start of the work allows readers to appreciate the background and context, while a few minor but striking incidents (such as the voice of a deceased person being heard over a frozen lake, eerie accordion music suddenly being played in a wooden lodge and threatening messages being left in door cracks) prepare one for the horror soon to unfold.

Things escalate—and brilliantly so, to a feverish pitch—when the cast gathers together in snowbound New England (Canada). Eight participants are invited by the Ogden family to attend a seance by one Irene Ogden in the Cabrioun, the two-floored log house built by Irene's former deceased husband—an elaborate ploy by Irene's current husband, Frank, to gain the 'permission' of Irene's deceased husband to open up a profitable stretch of a forest for the purpose of logging. The seance veers off in a most unpredictable direction when the spirit of Irene's former husband, who appears in the form of a Windigo (a mythological creature of evil in Native American cultures) and berates her vehemently before disappearing. To pile on the humiliation even further, one of the guests happens to be a magician called Vok who immediately sees through some of the other mysterious phenomena in the seance and denounces Irene as a fraud, leaving her a bundle of nerves. The only real mystery at this point is the appearance of the spirit.

A somewhat decent page-turner would probably have focussed on developing this singular plot point further in an engaging manner. But, in a masterpiece such as Rim of the Pit, the end of the seance marks the point where the story both springs into life all of a sudden and launches into overdrive. It is also at this point that the novel starts resembling The Footprints on The Ceiling in earnest, with the sheer number and diversity of impossibilities being presented to the reader in a dizzying, breakneck pace. Irene soon meets her end in a grisly manner in a locked room, mirrors are found smashed in the Cabrioun, footprints are discovered 'leading to nowhere' in an open snowfield, the Windigo makes an appearance again, Frank Ogden seemingly loses his mind and still manages to escape from a locked room, using the collective 'blind spot' of the onlookers (a throwback to Chestertonian aesthetics?) and is later found dead outside in the midst of a blizzard with no surrounding footprints. What helps Rim of the Pit compared to The Footprints on the Ceiling is its relative straightforward, linear narrative, with a marked paucity of character motivations and plans as far as their individual actions are concerned. That energy is instead expended in sustaining the ambience of horror, invited and uninvited, throughout the work. This is no mean feat given the fact that some of the impossibilities—such as that of the disappearance of the phantom in the seance, and the mysteries surrounding the smashing of the mirrors, the appearance of Irene Ogden's corpse in a locked room, the disappearance of Frank Ogden from a locked room—are great pieces of logical, rational misdirection and obfuscation that make use of positional and circumstantial awareness to distract readers and characters alike.

What's really disappointing to me, however, is the denouement to the novel. A work so steeped in horror deserved a better ending, especially when one considers the 'false ending' where the remaining characters work in cahoots to cook up an overelaborate scenario to hoodwink the police who would investigate the incident. In the aftermath of this cover-up, however, in typical GAD fashion, the detective Rogan Kincaid bares it all (and how he did so) before the culprit in the midst of a most genteel conversation in a train-car—a starkly observable tonal shift for the worse, veering more towards the armchair-detective school of stories, and not at all befitting of its status as an excellent horror-detective story.

***

However, in terms of both quality and aesthetics, I think I am most biased towards John Sladek's Invisible Green (1977) as the best of the lot being discussed here. Now, let me clarify at the very outset that Invisible Green is a work quite unlike either Rim of the Pit and The Footprints on The Ceiling, and comparing them isn't exactly a fair practice on my part. What they do have in common, however, is a love for impossibilities and locked rooms, even though the way Invisible Green goes about expressing its admiration and then engineering its own twists on these tropes is very different from the treatments seen in the other two.

Invisible Green does not have a sudden spate of impossibility after impossibility as seen in Rim of the Pit, nor does it have excessive distractions in the form of too many divergent character motivations and plans (as was the case in The Footprints on The Ceiling). In fact, it has three distinct, well-defined scenarios with the rest of the incidents serving merely as misdirection/red herrings or to enhance the setting and purpose of these scenarios. All of them feature murders—one of them in almost locked-room conditions, another in impossible circumstances and a third featuring a clever subversion of locked-room mystery conventions.

For me, the best thing about Invisible Green was its pacing. For a relatively modern work, the setup is as classical as it gets—and befitting its nature, Sladek devotes both time and space to build up the eccentricities of each character, and to allow the plot to breathe, fester and develop. It starts in the past, with a meeting of the Seven Unravellers, a club of seven odd personalities, to whom "murder meant a game with rules" and "suspects with false alibis, clues becoming red herrings, and courtroom revelations". The cast is a diverse one—from word-game and logic puzzle aficionado Miss Dorothy Pharaoh and the conspiracy theorist and "crypto Nazi" Major Edgar Stokes (with his paranoia of a Communist takeover) to the bohemian artist Gervase Hyde (with his predilection for real crimes and the psychological angle), the violent police constable Frank Danby (with his love for "sensational news stories of shotgun murders"), the chemistry student Leonard Latimer Derek Portman (who had read "all the weightiest tomes" on forensic chemistry and "the stories of R. A. Freeman, ...  where a murderer is hanged by the evidence from a single speck of dust"), the solicitor's clerk Derek Portman (who "enjoyed cutting into the legal fabric of other murder mysteries") and finally, the good old baronet, Sir Anthony Fitch.

The scene soon shifts to more than 30 years later, when Miss Pharaoh sends out invitations for a reunion of the remaining members of the Seven Unravellers (Sir Anthony having long passed away) sometime in the 1970s. In the meantime, Major Stokes has grown even more paranoid of a Communist conspiracy targetting his life (which he does by deciphering 'clues' in the Times crossword and codes in a movie hall, no less!). His state concerns Miss Pharaoh, even more so when it transpires, through Stokes' own admission, that an invisible antagonist, Mr Green, is issuing threats to the major and offering money to him to move out of the house. Soon, his cat is murdered too. Thus it is that Miss Pharaoh invites her acquaintance Thackeray Phin, a detective whose sense of fashion leads Inspector Gaylord of the Scotland Yard to comment that he looked like "best man at a pimp's wedding".

Stokes dies of a heart attack in the hall toilet of his home as Phin observes the same fortified house with spiked windows and floors sprinkled with talcum powder to capture footprints. Yet, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the death was not a suicide or accidental. As Phin starts investigating this devilish incident, he discovers that the rest of the Unravellers have been the victims of certain non-malicious attacks, all linked to a common theme—colours. The investigation soon leads the Unravellers and Phin to Frank Danby's seaside residence. Here, Danby too is inexplicably stabbed to death while the exits were being watched, after saying "Who are you" presumably to his murderer, even though the possible suspects had been introduced to him only moments before. The third murder, that of Miss Pharaoh clubbed to death, reveals itself with the discovery of Miss Pharaoh's corpse in her own house, with the rest of the cast miles away at different locations.

So, the three core puzzles of the novel take up different challenges. The first is a classic locked-room setup, the solution to which is underplayed by Phin himself. But, it is no less stunning—and its functionality is borrowed in one of the story arcs of Seimaru Amagi's Tantei Gakuen Q (more specifically, the Q vs A storyline), even though the tool Amagi uses in his story is the one Sladek rejects in Invisible Green. The second one isn't really innovative and may even be considered a bit of a cheat by some, but to me, it's a wonderful case study in realising the difference between a simple observation based on what is visible and making the right interpretation based on the said observation, by also factoring in other contextual information gleaned before, which may not be immediately apparent in the current circumstance. Personally, however, I have the highest regard for the third incident. Not only is it a subversion of the locked-room trope with the corpse (and by extension, the assumed scene of crime) and nearly all the suspects seemingly in different locations at the time of commission, it also deliciously inserts the unbreakable alibi conundrum into the equation. The manner in which this particular incident is explained is perhaps the icing on top of the cake. Seen as a whole, the three problems and the overarching essence and rationale of Invisible Green evoke the spirits of John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie in sufficient measure.

What's even more pleasantly surprising is how contemporary the work feels for its time. The effort spent in delineating the characteristics of the culprit (to make them the 'right fit') and the 'modern' nature of the motive behind the crimes not only make Invisible Green a product of its time, it also lends a high degree of credulity and believability to the work. Add to this the wry, easy humour with which Sladek peppers this story (particularly in the climax, which, to me, replicated the chaotic energy and hilarity of the climax of Edmund Crispin's 1946 work, The Moving Toyshop)—and I think we have a work that is perhaps deserving of a higher rank than what Edward D. Hoch and other literary reviewers and experts gave it in their 1981 poll.

As a reader, one of the most satisfying achievements is to discover an author whose works leave you with the dual feelings of bliss and wanting more, at the same time. Early last year, I hadn't the foggiest idea of who John Sladek was or what his works were like. I do not believe in subscribing to reading goals, but Invisible Green might have, unwittingly, led me to have one for 2023.

(This post was published on the Scroll website with the following title: Crime fiction: Three novels where we don’t see the solutions because of our blind spots)