Tag: crime

The Decagon House Murders (1987): Yukito Ayatsuji

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★★★★½

Only a few days ago, I wrote about finding it difficult to engage with Japanese fiction. Clearly I only had to wait for the right book, because Yukito Ayatsuji’s cult mystery novel has had me absolutely hooked. Seven students head off to spend a week on a remote island, intrigued by a tragic murder committed there six months before. They believe, as members of the K-University Mystery Club, that they might just have the deductive skills to solve the crime. As a local fishermen ferries them out, they discuss the problem with modern crime fiction. It doesn’t allow enough scope for deduction, one of them complains. ‘What mystery novels need,’ he argues, ‘are… a great detective, a mansion, a shady cast of residents, bloody murders, impossible crimes and never-before-seen tricks played by the murderer.’ Best of all is the ‘chalet in a snowstorm‘ model, where characters are cut off from the outside world. Little do they realise that, soon, they will be in that very same situation, trapped on an island with no means of escape. And then, one by one, they will begin to die. Someone on that island is a murderer. But who? Intricately plotted, this stonking novel challenges the reader to use her ‘little grey cells‘ to solve the mystery before the grand denouement. All the clues are there. But can you work out the solution? (Spoiler: I didn’t!)

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The Belting Inheritance (1965): Julian Symons

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★★★

Christopher Barrington has lived at Belting, the sprawling country house belonging to his maternal great-aunt, ever since the age of twelve, when he lost his parents in an air crash. The family is a strange one: the widowed old Lady Wainwright and her two sons, hapless Miles and uptight Stephen, along with Stephen’s wife Clarissa. Two other sons, Hugh and David, were lost in the Second World War and Lady Wainwright has never come to terms with her loss, especially that of David, her bright and charming favourite. In the summer of Christopher’s eighteenth year, we watch through his eyes as the old order at Belting comes under attack. As Lady Wainwright lies dying of cancer, a letter arrives, closely followed by a stranger, who claims that he is the long-lost David Wainwright. Inspired by the famous Tichborne case, this is a highly entertaining – albeit hugely convoluted – story.

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One Corpse Too Many (1979): Ellis Peters

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★★★★

The Brother Cadfael Chronicles: Book 2

In times like these, it’s comforting to read a book where the author is entirely in control: where everything gels beautifully, and you don’t have to do anything but be carried along on the story. Few books convey this ‘sinking into a warm bath’ feeling better than Ellis Peter’s Cadfael series. I read the first book some time ago now, and actually read this second instalment immediately afterwards, but didn’t write about it at the time. It’s been long enough that I’d completely forgotten what happened, and had the pleasure of reading it all over again: disguise, distrust, nefarious deeds and all! It’s 1138 in Shrewsbury and King Stephen and his army are camped outside the town walls, while the last of the Empress Maud’s loyalists wait defiantly within the castle. When the castle finally falls, as all know it must, the garrison are executed. The monks of Shrewsbury Abbey volunteer to undertake the pious work of burying the 94 dead men, but when Cadfael takes charge of the task, he makes a troubling discovery. There are not 94 corpses but 95, and the extra man has not been hanged along with the rest of the garrison, but garrotted. How has a murder victim come to be concealed among the bodies of these men, and who was he? Cadfael and his new assistant Godric resolve to find out.

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The Inugami Curse (1951): Seishi Yokomizo

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★★★½

Kosuke Kindaichi: Book 2

I really enjoyed my introduction to Kosuke Kindaichi in The Honjin Murders, and was keen to read more of his adventures. Enter The Inugami Curse, the second novel in the series to be translated by Pushkin Vertigo, which like the earlier book blends a highly readable mystery with insights into traditional Japanese culture. As the novel opens, Kindaichi arrives in the lakeside town of Nasu, north of Tokyo, after receiving a worrying letter from the lawyer Wakabayashi. The powerful businessman Sahei Inugami has recently died, sending shockwaves through the local community, for whom he was a figurehead. Everyone is breathlessly waiting for his will to be read, to reveal how his fortune will be divided. Each of Sahei’s three daughters waits, hawk-like, with their husbands and children in tow. But Wakabayashi has seen the will and knows it will have the power to rip the family apart in blood and fury. Kindaichi initially believes Wakabayashi’s predictions to be overblown, but when the lawyer is poisoned moments before their meeting, he realises someone in the Inugami clan will stop at nothing to secure Sahei’s fortune. And this, alas, is only the first of the murders…

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The Colour of Murder (1957): Julian Symons

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★★★

My next book in the British Library Crime Classics series takes an unusual approach to narrative. The first half is a first-person account, presented as a psychologist’s record of sessions held with the speaker, a young man named John Wilkins. About halfway through the book, we find out that there has been a murder – but it would be a spoiler to say, right now, who’s been killed, or who is the suspect. During the second half, we follow the action in court, watching prosecution and defence in action, we try to understand exactly what happened on the beach at Brighton that dark summer night, and whether the accused truly is guilty. As a murder mystery it isn’t entirely satisfying – there’s very little sense of catharsis to be had – but it’s fascinating as a social history. Reading it so soon after The Fortnight in September, I found myself drawing lots of parallels between the modest lives of the Stevens family in the 1930s and that of John Wilkins in the 1950s: a world of humble jobs, social striving, and frustration, which hasn’t changed as much in twenty years as you might expect. However, while the Stevens family ultimately find joy and hope in their lives, Wilkins feels consistently hard-done-by: a man whose search for self-fulfilment leads to a tragic outcome.

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Castle Skull (1931): John Dickson Carr

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★★★

Henri Bencolin: Book 2

The British Library Crime Classics series doesn’t just embrace British writers. Castle Skull is positively international: the work of the American crime novelist John Dickson Carr, set in Germany, with the Parisian detective Bencolin as its protagonist. It’s one of Carr’s earlier works, published in 1931, and he seems to have thrown everything at it in an excess of exuberance. A mystery, but also a macabre piece of Grand Guignol, this story takes us deep into the dark gorges of the Rhineland, and to the eponymous Castle Skull, former home of the magician Maleger. This extravagant folly was left jointly in his will to his friends Jerome d’Aunay, the Belgian financier, and Myron Alison, the British actor. But now d’Aunay has come to Paris in search of Bencolin’s brilliant mind, for there has been a horrific death, and the castle has seen blood spilled upon its walls: ‘Alison has been murdered. His blazing body was seen running about the battlements of Castle Skull.’ It’s definitely one of the more ‘what the…?!’ opening gambits in detective fiction. A blazing body; a castle shaped like a skull; a whole treasure trove of dark secrets… Bencolin can’t resist and, along with his friend (and the book’s narrator) Jeff Marle, he heads for the Rhineland to discover the full sinister history of Castle Skull.

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Shadows in Bronze (1990): Lindsey Davis

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★★★½

Marcus Didius Falco: Book 2

Time to head back to Ancient Rome, for some political skulduggery in the company of our overworked and underpaid Roman sleuth, Falco. This book slots in between The Silver Pigs and Venus in Copper, and follows Falco as he embarks on yet another over-complicated mission for his patron Vespasian. Falco is always great fun to read about: like Cadfael, he’s a vivid and lively character, whose world is meticulously historically accurate, but evoked with a light touch. Unlike Cadfael, he’s prickly, full of himself, and still young enough to be trying to find his feet in the world. In Shadows in Bronze, Vespasian orders him to mop up the loose ends left by the aristocratic conspiracy we saw in The Silver Pigs but, as Falco heads down to the opulent Bay of Naples to round up a couple of recalcitrant senators, he starts to get the uneasy feeling that he hasn’t seen the last of the plotters. Although his trip to Naples is dressed up to look like a family holiday, he swiftly realises that danger is never far away. To make matters worse, his cut-above-the-rest love interest, Helena Justina, is also enjoying a break on the Bay of Naples, and Falco’s personal and professional lives look set to collide once again.

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The Honjin Murders (1948): Seishi Yokomizo

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★★★½

Kosuke Kindaichi: Book 1

Strange times. I can only hope that none of you or your loved ones have been directly affected by coronavirus, and I send virtual hugs out across the ether to all of you. I don’t intend to dwell on the present madness, though: I’m here, writing this, because I’d rather forget about it for a few minutes, and I hope you’re here for the same reason. Let’s go somewhere else together instead. Somewhere like provincial Japan in the late 1930s: a world still struggling to free itself from the legacies of feudal hierarchies, in which a shocking crime offers a brilliant young detective the chance to make his literary debut. I didn’t recognise Kosuke Kindaichi’s name, but he has a devoted following in Japan and appeared in a whole series of Yokomizo’s novels after this, his first appearance, in 1946. Unfortunately, The Honjin Murders (deftly translated by Louise Heal Kawai) is at present one of only two Kindaichi novels available in English; the other, The Inugami Curse, is also available from Pushkin Vertigo. Let’s hope that these two books are successful and encourage Pushkin to get the rest translated, because on the basis of The Honjin Murders they’re going to be mind-scrambling, very entertaining classic crime stories.

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The Murder of My Aunt (1934): Richard Hull

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★★★½

Edward Powell is miffed. He’s fed up of the tiny Welsh town of Lwll, on whose outskirts he lives (‘How can any reasonably minded person live in a place whose name no Christian person can pronounce?’) and he’s bored of the tedious local company. Most of all, he’s on the verge of being driven to distraction by his Aunt Mildred, with whom he lives, and who seems to exist for the sole purpose of spoiling his life. Now, if only he could find a suitably artistic way to get rid of her! In this playful instalment in the British Library Crime Classics series, the conventional structure of a murder mystery is turned on its head. As we watch the ghastly Edward bumble his way through a series of clumsy attempts at murder, the question is not ‘whodunnit?’ but ‘will-he-do-it?’ Blessed with one of the most ghastly protagonists I’ve ever encountered, and peppered with throwaway comments so pretentious they’d put Anthony Blanche to shame, Richard Hull’s 1934 novel is also one of the most entertaining Golden Age crime novels I’ve read so far.

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Thirteen Guests (1936): J. Jefferson Farjeon

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★★★

John Foss, a young man in a state of distraction, gets his foot caught while leaving the train at the country station of Flensham. Badly injured, he providentially finds himself sharing a platform with the beautiful Mrs Leveridge, who is on her way to a house party at the nearby Bragley Court. She takes John along with her, so that he can receive the attention of a doctor and rest in comfort, correctly judging that their host Lord Aveling won’t mind stretching his hospitality to another guest. But, as John is warmly greeted and installed on a couch, he realises that his presence means there will be thirteen guests at this weekend’s party. And, as the other guests trickle in, John finds himself watching to see who will be the thirteenth to pass through the doorway. He swiftly sees that all is not well at Bragley. Secrets and dislike ripple beneath the polite surface and there are strange alliances and tensions between unexpected groups of guests. And he is right to be uneasy, for by the end of the weekend three people will be dead…

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