Short story collection of 8 works by Ayukawa Tetsuya and compiling all his short stories featuring the detective character Hoshikage Ryuuzou together with the first volume 赤い密室.
After the famous art dealer Georg Khalkis dies caused by illness, his will turns out to be stolen. When the police, including Inspector Richard Queen and his son Ellery, arrive at the scene, Ellery suggests the will could only be found in Khalkis' coffin. However what turns out to be there is not the will but another corpse - and an obvious murder at that!
Student Taneda Shizuma visits the secluded hot spring village Sugarumura to commit an allegedly romantic suicide. Before his awaited first snow falls though, he encounters the detective-in-training Misasagi Mikage, a 17 year old girl who wants to succeed the name of her deceased mother, a rumored and famous great detective. Soon they wind up in serial murders in the Kotosaki family, the religiously rooted governing family of the village. Mikage sets out for her first case and points out the correct culprit at last. Or so it seems until Shizuma visits the village once more 18 years later...
Famous art dealer Akatsuki Hiroyuki is found stabbed by an army knife in a locked room of his own mansion/gallery. Door and window are locked, but a streak of the victim's blood is found on the window's lock and footprints in the sand of the garden below suggest an intruder's work. What would he gain from creating this locked room though? Is the key to solve this mystery concealed in Akatsuki's art book about the École de Paris?
Hamasaka Kazuya is found in a completely locked apartment together with two corpses; the gun lying beside him and with gunpowder residue on his clothes. Even though Kazuya seems to hide something, he claims false accusation and asks his advocate to call for his old friend Minami Mikikaze whom he expects to solve this case. However after seeking out a person in America who seems to be related to the two victims, Mikikaze himself gets caught in a similar locked room scenario...
Collection by Ayukawa Tetsuya who set the standard for the orthodox renaissance movement. This is the first of two volumes which gather all of the short stories featuring classical detective Hoshikage Ryuuzou; works that made me realize Ayukawas huge influence on late 80s and early 90s writers once again and even more.
6 students visit Villa Lilac to spend their summer vacation when suddenly superintendent Yuki shows up and informs them about the corpse of a man wearing one of the students raincoats who was found under a cliff near the mansion with an ace of spades lying next to him. This incident is only a forewarning of a series of murders yet to come, each one attached with a new card and clouded in alibis. The police find themselves in a dead end which forces them to get the help of "amateur" detective Hoshikage Ryuuzou.
Tamiya Yasaburou brought his german wife Elisabeth over to Japan during the Meiji period and built a whole mansion for her. Their shared happiness did not last long though and she left him and their daughter returning to her homeland. Ever since the mansion has become a baneful stage for 2 murders with numerous victims.
Mercator Ayu, who himself says his suberb and rapid skills as detective make him tend more towards short stories, and his friend Minagi Sanjou bring the reader 7 of their shared experiences. Most of these are indeed, as the title already hints at, crimes that are constituted the way they are due to Mercator's and/or Minagi's relatedness.
Novelist Sunamura Etsuko is found murdered in a locked room situation in her own apartment. Bloody footprints are left leading from her corpse over to a full-length mirror and disappearing in front of it on the very spot. What is also found at the crime scene is a manuscript of her autobiographic short story dealing with her fear of mirrors. Is her supposedly dead cousin Ai staring at her from inside the mirror...?
Being related to the principle's family tree and therefore taken from her adoptive parents, Izumi Saeko becomes a transfer student of the reputable Seishin Girls' Academy and starts living in its dorm. Her roommate Takatori Kei seems like a kind person to get along with, but Kei herself thinks it would be better for Saeko to not get involved with her, leaving her with the mysterious statement "I'm a witch" before she is found burned to death in a forbidden room of the dorm where another girl died the exact same way 35 years ago. From that night on fear and suspicion prevail among the students and what was regarded by the teachers as possible suicide finds its continuance in clear murders afterwards. The scarlet whisper crawling up from Saeko's forgotten inner self and her continuous sleepwalking and strange dreams make her doubt herself. Might she actually be the culprit...?
Kuonji Kyouko, the daughter of a family-run obstetric clinic in Tokyo's Zoushigaya, has been pregnant for 20 months. 3 months into her pregancy her husband Makio vanished from a locked room in the clinic. Her sister Ryouko wants to unravel the mystery around her family's clinic and contacts detective Enokizu and his "assistant" Sekuguchi.
On a late autumn day dramaturge Yarinaka Akisaya, his 7 actors and his friend, the novelist Rindou Ryouichi, have to take shelter from a snow storm in a western mansion that suddenly appears from the depth of mist that ascends from a lake. They don't seem to be welcomed by the inhabitants but each get their own room designated. Even so they are continuously reminded by the servants that Kirigoe Mansion is not a hotel and that they shall not sneak about too much, especially they shall not enter the 3rd floor at all...