The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks (2024) by Danro Kamosaki

Last year, I discovered Danro Kamosaki's "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" series, translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmmiicnana," which aims to push the limits of the impossible crime story by pumping it full of performance enhancing substances – results didn't disappoint. That is, if you're addicted to locked room mysteries to the point it has family and friends worried. But if you're a locked room addict, the premise of this series is a dream come true.

A suspect on trial for Japan's first ever, real-life locked room murder was acquitted, because the prosecution could not provide a solution or theory explaining the locked room. So, "if the scene is a perfect locked room, it's the same as the culprit having a perfect alibi," became a legal precedent over night as impossible crimes started to dominate Japan's crime statistics ("...a third of all murders..."). Along with the rise of locked room murders came a whole new industry of experts ranging from detectives and criminals specialized in impossible crimes to appraisal companies checking houses for secret passages or hidden rooms.

Kasumi Kuzishiro, an 18-year-old high school student, often feels like he's involved in half of all locked room murders plaguing Japan. Usually, Kuzishiro is dragged along by his childhood friend, Yozuki Asahina, to go hunt for UMA (Unidentified Mysterious Animal) in a remote, isolated place that becomes the scene of a series of impossible murders. Misshitsu ougon jidai no satsujin – Yuko no yakata to muttsu no tricks (Murder in the Age of Locked Rooms – The House of Snow and the Six Tricks, 2022) brought them to the former house of a famous mystery novelist hosting half a dozen locked room murder, which is incidentally also the most conventional of the three. The second title in the series, Misshitsu kyouran jidai no satsujin – Zekkai no katou to nanatsu no trick (Murder in the Age of Locked Room Mania – The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks, 2022), takes the isolated island trope, understandably popular in Japan, to the extreme and adds an extra impossibility to the tally – while maintaining a decent balance between quality and quantity. So every single one is a winner, but most show imagination, originality and some are so good they could have solo carried a locked room mystery novel. Even if they can be a little outlandish at times. Danro Kamosaki evidently wrote this series for the love of the game and the game here is a locked room extravaganza. The third title in the series is no exception.

Misshitsu henai jidaino satsujim – Tozasareto mura to yattsu no trick (Murder in the Age of Locked Room Fetishism – The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks, 2024) begins with Yozuki dragging Kasumi on another UMA hunt, but they get lost and end up in strange, remote village just in time to get embroiled in what came to be called "Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case."

Japanese detective fiction is littered with these strange, fictitious and isolated villages with their own unique history and customs. Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998) is always my go-to example, but Yatsuwako Village takes that concept and takes it to another extreme. Yatsuwako Village is tucked away inside a vast limestone cavern, "twenty times the size of the Tokyo Dome," shaped like a giant square with a massive fissure, dividing the village into east and west halves, connected by a bridge – where five hundred villagers lived and worked for generations. Stranger yet is its architecture and folklore. Every building in the village is a white, box shaped structure with steel doors and fixed windows. They're all plastered over until they're airtight. This is done to keep the kazeitachi, "a beast of the winds that can transform its body into air and infiltrate a house through the tiniest gap," out of their homes. Beside a wind yokai, Yatsuwako Village is also the home of a family of mystery writers dominating the locked room genre in Japan.

Zerohiko Monokaki, family patriarch, multimillionaire, all-purpose genius and occasional mystery writer, whose children would go on to dominate the Japanese mystery scene by combining the locked room puzzle with their own specialized subgenre/category of detective fiction. Ryouichirou Monokaki (social school), Kyoujirou Monokaki (hardboiled), Isaburou Monokaki (forensic/medical), Tabishirou Monokaki (travel mysteries), Fuika Monokaki (sci-fi mysteries), Funika Monokaki (YA mysteries), Fumika Monokaki (historicals), Mei Monokaki (Gothic). There's also Camembert Monokaki, the fifth son of the family, who's not a genius mystery novelist ("...just a pretty face"). Lastly, Fuichirou Monokaki, eldest son of Zerohiko and former head of the family, considered to be greatest locked room artist the country produced and passed away several months before the story's opening. So the Monokaki family dominated the ranking of publications like This Locked Room Mystery is Amazing! for years, but not wholly unopposed. Teika Ojou, the Young Empress of Japanese Mystery, took the #1 spot several times during their reign ("...state of locked room mysteries was a battle between the Monokaki Family and Teika Ojou").

Curiously, Teika Ojou is currently staying at the Monokaki mansion to dodge one of those pesky deadlines. The impossible crime lore of the village doesn't end there. The Eight Locked Room Masters of the Showa Era were "eight genius mystery novelists who appeared one after the other in the 1940s" and a collaboration between them was announced in 1953, which brought them to the village. And, of course, they were brutally murdered. A collection of their best locked room-tricks disappeared never to be found. So, in order to appease their spirits following a string of deaths and misfortunes, the murdered authors were enshrined as "a composite deity under the name Yazuwako Myojin" – dedicating a yearly festival to it. This festival is about to start when Kasumi and Yozuki wander into the village, just in time for the killing to begin. It starts out in a borderline cartoon-ish way.

During the festival, in the middle of a crowd, someone dressed as the kazeitachi, black cloak and a mask of a weasel, shoots Fuika Monokaki in the head, throws a smoke bomb and disappears alongside the body. However, this first murder is not the first impossibility of the story. That comes next! Nobody is allowed to enter or leave the village during the week long celebration and "anyone who violates this taboo will be killed by the curse of Yatsuwako Myojin" ("...the pain the curse inflicts as you die is beyond imagining"). Considering they have a shooting on their hands and murderer on the loose, they try to get out only to find the sole entrance cut-off. And then one of the villages, before bright red flames started streaming from his mouth and bursting into "an enormous pillar of fire." The man had burst into flames with nobody standing near him! From that point onward, Kasumi and Yozuki are confronted with apparently never ending series of locked room murders of various complexities.

There are more of them than the book title suggests. So the impossible crimes, like in the previous novel, are divided in more digestible lumps with the first five dominating the first-half. I already mentioned the spontaneous human combustion in the tunnel entrance, but soon they get confronted with four gruesome murders they dubbed "The Locked Villa," "The Locked Storehouse," "Locked Room of the Spiderwebs" and "Bloodstained Japanese Locked Room" – executed in both sections of the village. Kasumi and Yozuki briefly get separated when the bridge linking both parts goes down stranding Kasumi on the east side and leaving Yozuki on the west side. There some unusual detectives arise to give the first, mostly false-solutions to the locked room killings. You can argue this first badge of locked room murders can be paired, thematically speaking.

First of all, the murders in the villa (east village) and the spiderweb room (west village), which are first explained (independently) by a twin-switch trick. You see, three of the Monokaki daughters are triplets. While I normally detest "twin magic," the way they were used for the false-solutions here are perfectly fine or horrifyingly brilliant. Preferable to the correct solutions, especially the solution to spiderweb room. By the way, the spiderwebs refer to the spiderwebs blocking a secret passageway and provides a double-layered (false) solution. One with the kind of horror (concerning the body) you almost expect from Japanese mystery writers and the other feels like it belongs in a cozy mystery (involving the spiderwebs). The correct solution to the locked villa is certainly an inventive, very involved trick, but found it to be the least impressive trick of the bunch. My reaction to learning the answer was pretty much the same as Kasumi, "of course they did."

The murders in the locked storage room and Japanese room are examples of that shin honkaku specialty, the corpse-puzzle. The locked storehouse involves a mutilated body found hanging in a curious position, unlikely in hangings, but somehow the murderer had evaded being caught on the security footage. This is perhaps the easiest one to solve, but a nicely done locked room puzzle and a typical example of the corpse-puzzle and what can be done with it. However, the murder in the Japanese room is a highlight of the book! A decapitated body is found inside a so-called Japanese room with sliding doors, doors without locks, but "an extremely unique locked room" is created by the spray of blood from the decapitation. The spray of blood splattered on the sliding doors, where the doors touched, "dried to the consistency of dry oil paint." So how could the murderer have left the room after the murderer without disturbing the blood pattern on the door? The visual image the solution conjures up is pure, undiluted nightmare fuel that makes grisly scene of the murder itself seem warm and cozy. It almost feels wasted in a novel crowded with elaborate, often technical locked room murders and impossible crimes.

Yes, this is a very densely-plotted mystery that's all about tricks and locked room obsessed characters, but there was a short, too short, reflection on the impact of locked room murders becoming a major social issue on the character-driven, realism obsessed social school of crime fiction – whose writers struggled with their new reality. Basically, "the positions of locked room authors and social school authors had been completely reversed." I thought it was an interesting side effect on society and culture from locked room murders becoming an everyday reality. Back to the onslaught of locked room murders.

At this point, another friend of Kasumi turns up to assume the role of detective and solve the case, Shitsuri Mitsumura, who was to nobody's surprise in the village all along. She's one of those locked room obsessed character with a talent for seeing right through every trick. Kasumi calls her "an apostle of the locked room," because "if there was a God of Locked Rooms in this world, and that God had to pick one person from Earth to be his messenger, she would definitely be the one he'd choose." Once she destroyed the false-solutions and resolved the previously discussed murders, the process begins with a whole new array of stranger, more elaborate locked room murders. These are "The Locked Temple," "Locked Room of Four Color Boxes" and "Locked Underground Maze."

The locked temple is the least complicated, most straightforward of this badge, conventional even, but the next few get really bizarre and progressively larger in scale. Like the body they found in a room crammed with boxes of various sizes and colors blocking the door opening inwards, which looks like a game of Tetris was interrupted when a body materialized. A locked room premise that tickles the imagination and liked the explanation, but, at this point, the plot gets a crammed while the story needs to hurry on – lessening the impact of the tricks a little. Same goes for the murder in a massive, watched indoors maze giving away Danro Kamosaki is a Yukito Ayatsuji fan, but it honestly needed its own novel in combination with the bonus content. Why stop at eight? As the plot unravels further, it's revealed there's a ninth and tenth locked room mystery hiding in the Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case. The ninth locked room, a truly gargantuan locked room, shows the advantages of a customized setting designed to host a series of impossible crimes.

So, once all the locked room-tricks have been revealed, there only a few characters left standing who could have perpetrated this small scale massacre. It's not the murderer's identity that makes the solution memorable, but the motive behind the murders and locked room trickery. A unique motive that could have only emerged in this strange, locked room obsessed world.

Danro Kamosaki created a plot technical marvel in the impossible crime genre with his three "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" novels, but, crazy as it may sounds, this series is not done yet! There's still the unresolved, ongoing storyline involving Kasumi Kuzishiro, Shitsuri Mitsumura and Japan's first unexplained locked room murder that started the locked room craze. So a fourth book is probably in the works, but no idea where Kamosaki could go from here. Maybe a locked room serial killer terrorizing an entire city or a trail of impossible crimes scattered across a hundred year period. Either way, I hope to get to read it. Let's tidy up this messy, overlong rambling review.

Like I said, The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks is overflowing with clever, often wildly original locked room-tricks and a buffet for impossible crime fanatics who want to read about ingenious locked room murders without storytelling and characterization distractions. However, the amount of tricks and ideas crammed into this novel is perhaps too much and came at the cost of the latter, much more elaborate and sometimes interconnected tricks – which needed more space to fully do them justice. That would have doubled the size of the book, but I would have taken a two volume treatment of the Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case. This simply packed too much in too short a novel making it harder to keep track of everything and detect along. Regardless, The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks is still a mind boggling achievement, technically speaking, even when compared to the previous novels. I stated in the past four impossibilities is magical number, or sweet spot, because you start running into quality control problems when trying to juggle five, six or more. You can't possibly deliver good, satisfying or even original solutions for each of them. Danro Kamosaki proved me wrong with this series. While overdoing it just a bit, I really shouldn't complain about a mystery giving me nearly half a dozen locked room murders littered with floor plans, diagrams and time tables.

Highly recommended for locked room fanatics, but to be avoided, like the plague, by everyone with a low tolerance for locked room and impossible crime fiction.

Note for the curious: here's my idea about what could be behind the first locked room murder that kicked off the locked room craze. Having now read all three, there's an increasing madness surrounding the locked room phenomena. From the rise in crime in the first novel to the religious sect in the second and finally descending into real madness in the third. An obsession manifesting in complex physical and technical locked room-tricks. So wouldn't it be ironic if that was first locked room murder was a non-impossible crime disguised and made to look like a locked room murder from fiction. A disguise protecting it from the then most well-known solution from fiction and forcing the police, prosecution and any amateur detective to chase a phantom trick. Not sure how it was done and, technically, it would count as a locked room-trick, but one subtle enough be overlooked in this universe obsessed with physical and technical, science-based tricks.

By the way, the phrase "phantom library" is used in reference to a fictitious library said to contain "every locked room mystery ever written" ("...2,628,000 locked room mysteries...").

The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks (2022) by Danro Kamosaki

So I was perusing the blog-posts and reviews from the previous two, three months when I noticed it had been about that long since I came across a good, hefty locked room or impossible crime novel – going back to late February. That substantially-plotted impossible crime novel in question was Danro Kamosaki's Misshitsu ougon jidai no satsujin – Yuko no yakata to muttsu no trick (Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms – The House of Snow and the Six Tricks, 2022). You can't always pick a winner beforehand, but sometimes you can steer a bit in the right direction. When I say steering a bit in the right direction, I mean going for the blindingly obvious.

Danro Kamosaki's Misshitsu kyouran jidai no satsujin – Zekkai no katou to nanatsu no trick (Murder in the Age of Locked Room Mania – The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks, 2022) is the second entry in the "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" series translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmmiicnana." Like its title suggests, it has even more locked room murders than the impossible crime extravaganza that's The House of Snow and the Six Tricks.

The premise of this series is basically a glimpse of what feels like my home universe/native timeline. A real-life locked room murder lead to the murderer being acquitted, "proof of non-resolution of a locked room is equivalent to proof of absence from the of a crime," which "was the same as acquitting a suspect with a perfect alibi" – not without consequences. The number of people murdered in locked rooms increased at an alarming rate alongside new kind of professionals and professions. There are specialized detectives tackling cases that can't be explained by one of the well-known tricks in the Ministry of Justice's Locked Room Classification List and appraisal companies who examine houses for secret passages and other nooks or crannies with ultrasound and x-rays. In the criminal underworld, "hitmen who specialized in locked room murders" ("they were called locked room agents") who for the right price would end their targets in a perfectly locked room. Not to be overlooked is the Tower of Dawn, a religious cult, dedicated to worshiping the scenes of locked room murders.

So that's background of The House of Snow and the Six Tricks in which 17-year-old high school student Kasumi Kuzushiro is dragged by Yozuki Asahina to house of a celebrated, but dead, mystery writer. A house that would soon host a series of grisly, seemingly impossible murders and reunion with an old school friend, Shitsuri Mitsumura, who has a knack for solving complicated puzzles. Particularly locked room puzzles.

The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks follows a similar setup, except for the opening pages. A notorious, nameless assassin-for-hire, known as "The Living Locked Room Library," receives an assignment to wipe out an entire group with one particular condition – eliminate the targets inside a locked room. One of the targets is a reclusive business tycoon, Aoi Otomigawara. She lives on an isolated island in the Pacific Ocean known as Wire Mesh Island. A solitary island that was once the home of the last living Golden Age mystery writer, Richard Moore, who died in 2010 aged 111. Yes, Moore's name is a Case Closed/Detective Conan reference. Anyway, Wire Mesh Island, formerly known as Full Moon Island, is encircled by a high wire mesh fence and the only gap, or entrance, is the gate at the dock which is under camera surveillance. Everything that happen to pass over the island is monitored by cameras on top of the fence pointing straight upwards. So a island tailored to the backdrop of a good, old-fashioned whodunit with its fortress-like appearance and dotted with strange, custom-made cottages. Even before Otomigawara took it over, the island was the scene of two impossible murders that became known as the "Decapitation Chamber of Wire Mesh Island" and “One of Japan's Four Great Locked Rooms."

Otomigawara is hosting a "Locked Room Trick Game" on the island and invites a number of experts like a Youtube detective, a singer-song writer detective, a Tower of Dawn executive and a former judge. Kasumi Kuzushiro, Yozuki Asahina and Shitsuri Mitsumura are also present. Similar to the first novel, Kuzushiro didn't expect to find Mitsumura among the guests. Furthermore, there are two butlers, a chef, a doctor and a woman, Emiri Sotodomari, who claims to be a 1000-year-old vampire camping on the island. The first locked room problem to solve is part of the game and won't go into the game rules, because the game is abandoned when the real murders begin. A lottery picks the player who gets to be the culprit and has to stage a locked room murder somewhere in the mansion for the others to solve with the victim being a large, stuffed polar bear. This also mirrors the first novel in which the first problem under investigation was the stabbing of a doll inside a perfectly sealed room.

This first locked room "murder" of the plushy is not terribly relevant to the plot of this story, however, something tells me it might be very relevant to the main storyline of the series (ROT13: "V'yy unir lbh xabj V'z dhvgr cebhq bs gung gevpx"). When the first real murder is discovered, things really begin to kick off. Note that the Chapter 4 is already titled "Too Many Locked Rooms."

So where to even begin? There are seven locked room murders and a problem of these impossible crime extravaganzas is maintaining a balance between quantity and quality. The House of Snow and the Six Tricks managed to keep a fairly decent, overall balance with only two, out of six, locked room-tricks being less than impressive – even if they were mostly excises in technical prowess. The locked room-tricks in The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks can certainly be deemed technical, Kamosaki found some wildly unrealistic imaginative ways to put them to use. And, more than once, the locked room-tricks ventured into being entirely original. You really, really need to have an unhealthy love for locked room mysteries to go along with all of them. Even I had to draw the line at one of them. But I'll get back to that one.

The second locked room is the first that stands out, a stabbing in a locked and bolted cottage, which has a bonkers way to do the job, but rather conventional compared to what comes next. The cottage where previous victims were decapitated claims a third victim and the solution is brilliantly original, fantastically nightmarish and unbelievably impractical. Loved it! While the trickery is borderline insane, I think these two impossible crimes could have easily carried a whole novel by themselves. That only makes three impossible murders with the next, another stabbing in a locked basement room, offers both a simple and elegant false-solution and correct solution – both very good, solid locked room-tricks. However, I don't think the correct solution would work (ROT13) orpnhfr, fheryl, gur plyvaqre bs gur qbbe uvatr vf abg jrvtug rabhtu sbe gur cva gb whfg qebc jura gur vpr unf zrygrq. Vg'f gbb gvtug n svg sbe gur cva gb or “nssrpgrq ol tenivgl naq snyyf vagb gur plyvaqre,” evtug? Lbh unir gb sbepr vg vagb cynpr. Much better is the trick used to leave body in yet another cottage with the door securely locked by a key card and the only two key cards lying right next to the victim. I remember coming across one, or two, locked rooms involving key cards in Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, but Kamosaki came up with a grand idea. So another one that easily could fueled an entire story by itself. Great stuff!

However, the impossibility involving the disappearance of a prisoner and appearance of a body inside a strange architectural structure called the Tower of Heaven. I actually liked the intricate setup as the impossibility didn't concern the lockedness of the tower, but how the key was securely tucked away in a nesting doll of locked rooms. The "key was in a different locked room, whose key was in a locked safe, whose key was in another locked room." And the safe requires five keys, "each of which is being kept by a separate person." This premise filled me with hope as I initially feared the bizarre, cross-shaped tower was really a giant mechanical toy and rotated to flip around the rooms with the prisoner and body to make it appear like an inexplicable disappearance/appearance. Amazingly, the actual solution somehow turned out to be even more preposterous than a pirouetting, cross-shaped tower. Something so ridiculously, it's impossible to suspend your disbelieve and go along for the ride. Not just because it sounds and probably looks ridiculous.

If you go for such an overly complicated and involved trick, you should at least be shown why it could have only been done in that specific way. I mean, (ROT13) vs lbh trg gur xrl bhg sne rabhtu gb unaqyr vg, jul abg fvzcyl znxr na vzcerffvba be phg bss gur fgrz naq ernggnpu vg yngre? Gur bgure ybpxrq ebbz-gevpxf nyernql gblrq nebhaq jvgu zrgnyf naq nyybl znavchyngvba. The various murders in the locked cottages also require the reader to suspend their disbelieve, especially the decapitation cottage-trick, but they gave a reason – demonstrating the cottages were practically sealed. And, in comparison, their tricks have a degree of believability the nesting doll-trick simply lacked. So only one out of seven locked room murders missed the mark. Not a bad score.

And then there's the seventh locked room murder. An impossible murder, once again, flipping the script on the whole story. Not one I'll soon forget! It does everything right what the nesting doll-trick did wrong with not many pages left to go.

Similar to its predecessor, The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks is mostly about picking apart ingeniously-contrived, original locked room-tricks littered with diagrams and floor plans. Well, mostly. I would be doing Kamosaki a disservice not to mention how immensely satisfying it was to see how (ROT13) gur raqvat ybbcrq onpx gb gur bcravat. An unexpected artistic touch from a plot-mechanic like Kamosaki. Not to mention one plot-thread turned out to be a demonstration how to cheat fairly. Well played, Kamosaki! Well played. This, of course, comes at the expense of characterization and a weakly handled motive ("I'm the sort of person who doesn't bother reading the motivation scenes in mystery novels"). Even the only meaningful characterization, between Kuzushiro and Mitsumura, is dominated by trying to find a solution to the murder that started the locked room boom. If you're like me, hopelessly addicted to impossible crime fiction, The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks is another extremely well done, must-read love letter to the locked room mystery improving on The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks is and upping the ante. Hopefully, I'll get an opportunity to read the third and apparently best novel in the series. From what I understand, it has a classic village setting for a series of eight locked room murders and mysteries.

Only question remains unanswered: how did I end up with you lot in this shitty Berenstain universe? I could have been the Hercule Poirot to this version of Japan! Oh... and I wanted to highlight this little fellow from the cover.

 

 

The House of Snow and the Six Tricks (2022) by Danro Kamosaki

Last year, the first round of nominations for the updated "Locked Room Library," hosted by Alexander of The Detection Collection, introduced me to the fanlations from Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmmiicnana" – whose work got several novels on the nomination list. Kie Houjou's Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019) and Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022) became instant favorites, Takekuni Kitayama's Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002) is close on their heels. All three are modern masterpieces of the hybrid mystery with incredibly imaginative, visionary even, plots and original locked room mysteries. I also enjoyed their translation of Jun Kurachi's excellent, non-impossible crime mystery Hoshifuri sansou no satsujin (Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars, 1996). This duo also translated two novels from a series with a very alluring premise.

Danro Kamosaki wordily titled Misshitsu ougon jidai no satsujin – Yuko no yakata to muttsu no trick (Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms – The House of Snow and the Six Tricks, 2022) is the first entry in the "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" series. I'll simply refer to it as The House of Snow and the Six Tricks.

Three years previously, the first ever, real-life locked room murder was committed in Japan. Fortunately, the murderer was arrested, put on trial and acquitted, because nobody could break down the killer's locked room-trick – protecting the murderer like an unbreakable alibi. So the locked room murder and impossible crime, "that common fiction trope so looked down upon for its unreality," became "preeminently practical" over night. Just a month after the trial, the police were faced with four more locked room murders and the numbers climbed over the following months ("locked rooms spread throughout society like a disease"). The counter stands at 302 at the opening of the story meaning "30% of the total number of murders committed in Japan in an average year are locked room murders."

Over the course of the story, the reader learns just how much this epidemic of impossible crimes have changed police work and given rise to new jobs. There are now specialized detectives to handle complicated locked room murders that do not involve any of the routine tricks, "like using string to turn the key in the inside lock or hiding inside the room," but a murderer with a fresh idea or using new, cutting-edge tricks. The so called locked room detectives aren't the only newly created experts to combat the rash of impossible crimes. Locked room appraisal companies specialize in finding secret passages, hidden doors and other such hiding places with ultrasound and x-rays. A service provided to both the police and private citizens to make sure their crime scene or house they intend to buy is free of any hoary, nineteenth century plot device. That and much more you have to read for yourself.

So that's the country 17-year-old high school student, Kasumi Kuzushiro, finds himself in when he's dragged along by his friend, Yozuki Asahina, to the famous House of Snow. Apparently, the hunt for UMA (Unidentified Mysterious Animal), but the House of Snow, currently a hotel, used to be the home of the celebrated mystery writer, the late Byakuya Yukishiro. A locked room specialist who was years ahead of the locked room boom when he created one of his own. However, the locked room was a challenge, not a crime, thrown down during a house party.

Ten years ago, Yukishiro hosted a party where his guests, comprising of some well-known mystery writers and critics, were surprised with a mocked murder – which they would declare later that night a perfect locked room mystery. A doll with a knife in its chest is found a room with the door locked from the inside, windows either do not open or have lattices to prevent them from being used, but the finishing touch is that the sole key to the room was inside a bottle with the lid closed tight! This prompted a lively, all-night debate and "an impromptu deduction competition," but nobody that night had been able to solve the mystery. Nobody else had since. So the House of Snow Locked Room Case, "Yukishiro's true masterpiece," became an attraction when he died and his home was turned into a hotel.

 

 

When they arrive, Kasumi Kuzushiro and Yozuki Asahina find an odd collection of guests gathering at the hotel. Eiji Sagurioka, a Locked Room Detective, who came to the hotel to try and find a solution to Yukishiro's mystery for a magazine. Riria Hasemi, a famous teenage actress, who's accompanied by her downtrodden manager, Toshiro Manei. Fenrir Alicehazard, a British woman, who claims to have come to the hotel to hunt for another UMA ("I heard there are skyfish near here"). Satoru Kanzaki, a priest of the Tower of Dawn, representing a religious sect who worship and purify crime scenes with prayer ("...one they held in highest regard was the scene of a locked room murder"). Dr. Hironobu Ishikawa and Haruki Yashiro, president of a trading company, are the more normal guests. Kuzushiro is surprised to find a familiar face among the guests, Shitsuri Mitsumura, who was his classmate in middle school and were the only members of the literature club. She has talent for solving locked room puzzles. Something that comes in handy when people begin to turn up dead under seemingly impossible circumstances.

The first of the murders is practically a copy of Yukishiro's locked room challenge, but, instead of a doll, the knife is now sticking out of a corpse and a unique, hand painted playing card is found – linking the murder to unsolved case known as "The Playing Card Serial Murder Case." On top of that, the murderer cut the phone lines and torched the bridge to trap them in the remote hotel during the dead of winter.

Kuzushiro and Mitsumura have all the time to pick both locked rooms, past and present, over the course of several chapters. Mitsumura pieces together the correct solution and her reconstruction sets the tone for what's to come. The locked room-trick is a complicated, but original, one in both presentation and resolution coming with a clear cut diagram to show the trick worked. Danro Kamosaki loves technical and physical tricks, which is here on full display, but this merely the first of half a dozen impossible murders.

I commented before on these multiple impossible crime mysteries and that they tend to run into one of two problems. They either have one, or two, good locked room-tricks with the remaining being either filler, to put kindly, or downright bad and disappointing. Or they feel to crammed with all the good ideas not given enough room to breath. The magical number to perfectly balance quality and quantity appears to be three or four. The House of Snow and the Six Tricks goes over that margin, however, it maintains a pretty decent quality overall. Only two of them failed to impress me.

There's a rather gruesome stabbing in the dining hall at the time the only entrance was under constant observation. The solution is, visually, unintentionally hilarious and should have been used in a Takemaru Abiko story or some dark, comedic-style mystery (what a way (ROT13) gb hfr n uvqqra, nhgbzngvp qbbe gb n frperg cnffntr!). I hated the third locked room murder, a shooting in a bedroom, which is bad enough to actually slightly detract from the story's overall quality. One of the clearest examples of smearing lipstick on a pig trying to make it look more impossible than it really is. Had the trick gone off as planned, it would have still posed a similar problem in distance. The fourth impossible situation places the body inside a locked room surrounded by "a square arrangement of dominoes" extending towards the door continuing right up to the last one. So nobody could have left the room without toppling the stones. A clever enough solution and the situation demanded a dash of originality, but found the trick contrived and unconvincing.

Even after all they explain all the locked rooms and apprehend the killer, another murderer strikes with a fifth and final impossible murder. A truly ingenious variation on Yukishiro's masterpiece with added difficulties. This time, the only key to the room is found inside a jam jar and the thumb turn, "used to lock the door from the inside," covered with a gachapon capsule ("...the lid of a capsule toy from a gachapon machine") – which immediately eliminates several potential tricks. Kuzushiro, not Mitsumura, finally gets to solve one with a fresh treatment of John Dickson Carr's "Locked Room Lecture" (see The Three Coffins, 1935). Kuzushiro uses the Locked Room Classification List, created by the Ministry of Justice, which lists all "fifteen different types of locked room tricks in existence.” One by one, Kuzushiro's Ellery Queen-style reasoning eliminates every trick on the list, before revealing "an extremely simple trick that doesn't fit into any existing category." I think this fifth is the best of the half a dozen, or so, impossible crimes with clues to its solution dropped throughout the story and doesn't need a diagram to provide a clear visual image of the trick.

If you haven't had your fill of miracle crimes, the murder that started the locked room boom comes into play as it's linked to one of the characters. That murder is revealed to have been something of nestling doll. Locked rooms within locked rooms! A murder in a mansion surrounded by a high wall with the only entrance under CCTV surveillance. The body was found in the customary locked room with the key to the door locked away in a drawer and the key to the drawer was found in the victim's pocket.

So, yes, the love of locked rooms and physical tricks is front and center of The House of Snow and the Six Tricks, but it's not all tricks, tricks and tricks. Just mostly. There's the intriguing backstory of the Japan's first locked room murder and how it's linked up to the main characters, but also a bit of gruesome meta-playfulness with the playing cards and their true meaning. It helped to make this densely-plotted, very technical and detailed locked room mystery fun and readable. Even though the story sometimes tried to be a little too clever for it's own good, The House of Snow and the Six Tricks comes highly recommended to rabid locked room fanatics and everyone who simply enjoys a meaty puzzle plot. You can expect a review of the sequel sometime in the not so distant future.