The Red Widow Murders

Michael Tairlaine is invited to a strange kind of gathering at the Mantlings' house, where Sir Henry Merrivale will also show up as an impartial witness. The partakers draw cards, which will determine who stays in a supposedly haunted room. Well, not exactly haunted by a supernatural force, but the room itself seems to be killing people as soon as they stay alone in that room and supposedly it does so by poison, since that seems most likely considering the records of the cases in the past which reach back to the time of the French Revolution. After someone is decided to go into the Widow's Room, he is to answer the others' calling every 15 minutes. And he does so just until the time is over and the others barge through the door to find out the victim must have already been dead for an hour! He died of curare, but no wounds for the poison to enter are found on the body and nobody could have entered the room anyway since it was under constant observation. And how did a dead man answer their calls?

鍵のかかった部屋 「防犯探偵・榎本シリーズ ドラマ版」

Kagi no kakatta heya is the TV drama adaptation of Kishi Yuusuke's series of locked room mysteries featuring young attorney Aoto Junko and security consultant (professional thief??) Enomoto Kei. The stories were collected under the name of the third book/second short story collection in the series and Aoto's boss Serizawa was added to the main cast. Each episode is about a case where Enomoto has to explain a locked room scenario so that Aoto and Serizawa can prove someone's innocence in a murder case or find the culprit in what at first seemed like a suicide. So yes, a whole series that deals solely with locked rooms! How awesome is that? Pretty much, but due to time restraints and the relatively continuous theme and structure of the episodes, I'll just illustrate my Top 3 and give a final opinion of the whole series.

The Fourth Door

After the suicide of Victor Darnley's wife in a locked attic room, the Darnley house and especially said room became to be known as haunted and none of its tenants stayed for long. But when mediumistic Alice Latimer and her husband Patrick move in, things take a sudden turn. Alice suspects that Victor's wife had actually been murdered in that locked room and that the footsteps and noises at night symbolize her spirit's manifestation and the wish to expose her murderer. Consequently an experiment is planned in the attic: Patrick will stay in the haunted room to confirm Mrs. Darnley's manifestation and the door will be sealed with wax and a rare coin while somebody knocks on the door every half an hour to see whether Patrick answers and everything is fine. When Patrick ceases to answer and the seal is removed, Patrick is not in the room and instead the corpse of another person lies on the floor!

The Gold Solution + Deadline

Alexander and Norma Gold are asked to help prove their friend Pearl's niece's fiance innocent after he was found bent over his employer's dying body with the bloody knife in his hands. The victim is Roger Talbott, one of America's most famous Architects, and the crime scene is his studio floor atop his brownstone mansion, which was as securely guarded as a fortress by various devices. With the date of the trial getting closer, Alexander is forced to solve this puzzle quickly, which isn't exactly the most appropriate activity while recovering from a heart attack...

Alexander and Norma are invited by billionaire Max Baron to join him and his family during a performance of the Boguslav Ballet. Baron suspects someone "reading his mind", or simply put the leakage of information, and the request for Alexander to solve that issue is the original purpose for the invitation, However Alec and Norma are soon hired for something entirely different, when Viktor Boguslav is stabbed in the theatre box adjoining the Barons and the Golds, only parted by a curtain and with Baron's son Jeffrey as Boguslav's assistant sleeping right behind his employer in the cloakroom in front of a locked door! The Golds have a mere deadline of less than three days to prove someone else than Jeffrey could do it.

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?

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 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.

青い密室 名探偵・星影竜三全集 (2)

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.

エコール・ド・パリ殺人事件 レザルティスト・モウディ

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?

ｆの魔弾

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...

赤い密室 名探偵・星影竜三全集 (1)

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.

金雀枝荘の殺人

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.

1990: One year after 5 of their siblings/cousins and the mansion's caretaker were found dead after they seemingly killed each other while all of the mansion's exits were locked, Tamiya Anna, Rui, Otohiko, Touma and 2 uninvited guests meet at the crime scene to figure out what tragedy actually brought forth this strange incident.

メルカトルと美袋のための殺人

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.

i(アイ)鏡に消えた殺人者

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...?

姑獲鳥の夏

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.

孤島パズル

Invited by their club's first female member Arima Maria, Egami and Arisu go on holiday on her uncle's solitary island resort. Her grandfather, from whom her uncle inherited the island, loved puzzles and also created one before his death, which lets you find his heritage in the form of diamonds once you solve it. While the students ponder on the meaning of the numerous Moai statues scattered over the whole island, 2 guests are found murdered in a locked room and the 2-way radio, the only way to inform the mainland, has been smashed up...

『瑠璃城』殺人事件

1989, Japan: A corpse in a locked library. 1243, France: 6 knights suddenly vanishing from a castle. 1918, Battle of Verdun: 4 corpses vanishing from the front. And endless cycle of impossible crime situations and the predestined demise of 2 lovers.