The Tragedy of Y

York Hatter had been missing for some time and is eventually found after apparently having jumped from a ferry and poisoning himself before that to commit suicide. Afterwards follow two attempts to poison his deaf, blind and mute step-daughter Louisa Campion. In the second case, her mother Emily Hatter, who is sleeping in the same room, is knocked down with York's old mandolin and dies from shock. The rest of the case isn't any less abnormal than the Hatter family itself and to make sense of the happenings, Inspector Thumm needs the help of Drury Lane.

本陣殺人事件

Ichiyanagi Kenzou was supposed to have a bright future as a university scholar, but became ill and since then withdrew in the mansion of his family. Suddenly, at the age of 40, he decides to marry the 15 years younger Kubo Katsuko. She is a respectable young woman earning her own money as a girls school teacher, but the marriage is not exactly tolerated from the Ichiyanagis. Even though they still believe in standing and pedigree instead of thinking of the present and future, the ceremony takes place eventually. However at 4 in the morning screams and the shrill plucking of a koto rouse the family and their guests. When they look after the newly wed couple in their annex, they find them gruesomely slaughtered by a katana that is found stuck in the snow around the rear entrance. What is more, the sliding doors were locked from the inside and no footprints of the culprit were found that could hint at the culprit's escape... Kindaichi Kousuke, a detective that became renowned recently, is summoned to call this locked room murder.

Till Death Do Us Part

During a garden party on Lord Ashe's estate in the village of Six Ashes, Dick Markham's fiancee Lesley Grant visits the tent of a fortune teller and leaves it rather unsettled. To see what the man told her, Dick pays him a visit himself, but before the fortune teller can tell him anything, he gets wounded by a shot from a rifle when Lesley is at a shooting range. Of course she claims she did it accidentally, but later that evening the injured fortune teller invites Dick over to his house to reveal his real identity. He is Sir Harvey Gilman, a pathologist and expert on crime, and tells him about his fiancee, her real age and her past husbands/lovers and how all three of them died through prussic acid in a locked room - apparently suicide, but Sir Harvey assumes Lesley got hold of her fortune by killing the men with some ingenious trick. And he wants to try a little experiment with Dick the next day, as Lesley invited him for dinner in her cottage. The following morning an unrecognizable caller summons Dick to Sir Harvey's cottage again and there he witnesses a shadow shooting through the window of Sir Harvey's sitting room. However the bullet does not hit him and it is not the reason for his death. He died through prussic acid injected with a hypodermic syringe while all the windows and doors of the room were locked. But then why did someone shoot through the window with the same rifle Lesley used when she accidentally shot through the tent the day before - or wasn't it accidentally after all?

She Died A Lady

Dr. Luke Croxley, the narrator of this novel, gets a visit by one of his son's patients. Rita Wainwright's worries are not of medical nature though. She has an affair with a younger man called Barry Sullivan, a young American actor, while being married to her older husband Alec. The latter however is more interested in radio broadcasts about recent war developments than what his wife does behind his back. Rita is fond of Alec and does not want to hurt him, but at the same time she feels the urge to run away with Barry. One night when Croxley is over at the Wainwrights Rita and Barry vanish, leaving two sets of footprints leading to the end of a cliff and not coming back. Later the dead bodies are found, but they did not die from the fall or from drowning. They were shot at close range.

46番目の密室

Mystery writer Arisugawa Arisu and his friend and clinical criminologist Himura Hideo are invited to the mansion of locked room writer genius Makabe Seiichi, who during the Christmas party announces that his next novel and therefore his 46th locked room is going to be the last one. The invited writers and editors are shocked but the topic soon changes when strange presents are found in the guests' rooms and an unknown man is seen prowling around the mansion. The situation comes to its peak when Makabe and (apparently) the unknown man are found in two different locked rooms, both burned in fireplaces. In one of them the police finds the remains of what seems to be (now rendered unreadable) notes of Makabe's last locked room trick. Was the Japanese Carr murdered with his own idea?

The Dutch Shoe Mystery

Abigail Doorn, benefactress of the Dutch Memorial Hospital, is due for operation, but when her comatose body is wheeled into the operation theatre, she is already dead. She must have been strangulated in the anteroom next to the amphitheatre. The anaesthetist Francis Janney, the strongest suspect who benefits from Doorn's death and was witnessed being in the anteroom by several persons, has a rather insufficient alibi since he had a meeting with an unknown person called Swanson, whose identity he does not want to give away. Was Janney impersonated? It takes a second murder for Ellery Queen to deduce the murderer from a set of various clues - most prominently a pair of white canvas shoes.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room

Professor Stangerson's daughter Mathilde is attacked and almost killed in her room, which was locked and bolted from the inside at the time of the attempted murder. Footprints lead out of one of the windows in the pavilion, but the shutters were closed and all the other windows of the building are barred. How did the attacker enter and leave the hermetically sealed room without being noticed by the professor and his servant? It's up to journalist and amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille to solve this classic in detective fiction.

謎解きはディナーのあとで 「ドラマ版」

Any avid dorama viewer will already have seen this by now and surprisingly I also regret not watching this right away, as it's actually better than I expected. Nazotoki wa Dinner no ato de is an adaptation of two novels of the same name written by humor mystery author Higashigawa Tokuya and while there's a lot of comedy in it (apparently even more so in the TV version), it also entertains with solid mysteries.

Carr so far

I used to think it would not be of much use to blog about English detective novels that are actually available via print on demand or Kindle, unlike many other classics. But then again, you could also see it the opposite way and think the mention of these novels is even more important considering efforts are made to make these available again. And since I knew I could not make a somewhat meaningful post on my recent reading of The Plague Court Murders without mentioning the other Carr novels I've read so far, I figured I might as well sum them up together.

木製の王子

World-famous painter and sculptor Shirakashi Munenao and his family finally appear in the media after Munenao began accepting interviews and building their strange mansion in the depth of Kyouto's Mt. Hiei. The Shirakashi were mostly living in secrecy before and their inbred family tree draws the public attention. When journalists Kisaragi Uyuu and Anjou Norisada visit their mansion for an article about Munenao's new painting, Shirakashi Akika's severed head is found on her piano. Due to unbroken snow surrounding the mansion, only one of its inhabitants could be the murderer. However, due to huge digital clocks in every room making their movements perfectly rememberable, all of them possess alibis for the hour in which the murder must have been committed!