"The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances."- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, 1934)
The seemingly impossibility of making
something of an enormous size, such as an elephant, vanish from the face of the
Earth is one of the time-worn tricks of the stage magician, but not an act
often attempted by the members of the impossible crime movement from any era.
Of course, the magician has a marked
advantage in that he isn't obliged to point out the sliding-mirrors secreted in
the bars of the animal cage, concealing the elephant from the audience without
being moved an inch, but the mystery writer has to explain the trick at
the end of the ride – which makes it harder to find new ways to make a train
disappear between stations. The well appeared to have dried out with the publication
of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost Special," a short story from 1898, and
Ellery Queen's “Snowball in July,” collected in Q.B.I: Queen's Bureau of
Investigation (1955). However, I had been aware of a mystery novel from the
1980s with a different take on the problem and this particular item finally
fell into my hands.
What ensues is a chapter-by-chapter
struggle with shadows as Totsugawa and the J.F.N. attempt to find the hostages
and criminals, which makes for exciting (and fun) reading because every new
discovery and development brings a new set of problems for the police. The
shadows are due the vastness of the crime, the professional character of the
people who executed it and the uncertainty of the amount of people it took to
pull off. Totsugawa hopes to capture the criminals and retrieve the ransom
money before they can split with it, but they manage to unload the bulk of
money from a moving train, in which all the windows were locked and luggage of
disembarking passengers searched by the police. This impossibility was better
done and more convincingly explained than the disappearance of the titular
Mystery Train, however, I tended to still like it because I didn't expect a
polished diamond. I was also warned it had its flaws. The bit with the vanishing
train is basically text-book stuff, as Jonathan Creek would’ve remarked, but I probably
absorbed so many locked room mysteries that I can appreciate new ideas, even if
flawed, more than I used to.
If The Mystery Train Disappears faults,
it's lacking either a clear, definable opponent (caper-wise) or a pay-off at the
ending (mystery-wise), but the Nishimura gave the reader neither and the book ended
with a sudden whimper instead of a bang. Its weaknesses stands out especially
among the small crop of (better) Japanese detective-and mystery stories translated in
English. However, The Mystery Train Disappears is not a completely
unrewarding read and there is some genuine detective/impossible material
between its covers, but lower your expectations or you'll probably end up
feeling disappointed. It's somewhat of a cross between Hilary St. George Saunders'
The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) and Seicho Matsumoto's Ten to Sen (Points
and Lines, 1958) without reaching the heights of either, but an interesting
curio nonetheless.
Finally, I was surprised at the
cooperative portrayal of the train-passengers and media towards the police,
because I imagine nothing but sneers for the Nederlandse Spoorwegen
(Dutch Railways) for outdoing themselves by losing an entire train alongside a
few hundred people. And it would be a case of life imitating art, if they ever
attempted their own version of a Mystery Train. The US media would probably go in a
full, 24/7 meltdown and finally lose themselves in a courtroom, collectively frothing from the
mouth, demanding a photo-opt with the bloated corpse the police dragged from
the river.