More than anything else, Murder in the Crooked House is a puzzle, a tease, a game between author and reader.

On a snowy plain in northern Hokkaido stands the Ice Floe Mansion: a peculiar glass house with sloping floors, a leaning tower, and a maze-like interior. The reclusive owner invites eight guests to spend Christmas with him - a number that dwindles with murder…

I’ve always loved books in which the author breaks through the membrane of the fictional world and directly heckles the reader. In Soji Shimada’s Murder in the Crooked House the explicit challenge to the reader is: solve the murder before the grand reveal. “The clues are all there. Can you solve this case?”

This is not a multi-level novel with rich characterisation, raw socio-politics, and a winsome hero. Not at all. Murder in the Crooked House is foremost a puzzle; a game between author and reader. It’s a classic locked-room mystery with clues cunningly presented and an old-fashioned air reminiscent of the inter-war whodunits. It requires the reader to pay careful attention, exercise imagination, and suspend disbelief. Like a true armchair sleuth, I read the whole thing with pencil and paper on knee - jotting down clues and theories while slipping on red herrings.

As a reader who relishes metafiction, the most enjoyable aspect of the novel for me was the self-awareness of the narrative. There are references to Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, and Edgar Allen Poe. There are warm-up puzzles before the murder. The detectives liken their perplexity to fiction: “…it’s starting to get a bit like a murder mystery novel.” And the narrator makes numerous comments on the progress of the narrative: “To bring it to anything but an extraordinary climax would be insulting to the artist who created it.” The resolution is appropriately far-fetched.

Murder in the Crooked House is part of a contemporary Japanese revival of the classic whodunnit and will appeal to fans of Golden Age detective fiction, locked-room mysteries, and cryptic puzzles.

Published by Pushkin Press, the English translation of Murder in the Crooked House is out on June 25, 2019.

Many thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for the advance reading copy.

Details

• Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada

• Published by Pushkin Press, June 2019

• Originally published by Kodansha Ltd. in 1982 as Namame Yashiki no Hanzai

• ISBN: 978-1-78227-456-8

• Genres: crime fiction, whodunnits, locked-room mysteries