One winter day, Reiko asks her friend Rika to pick up some butter on her way over for dinner. But due to a product shortage, this simple favor turns into a trip to several grocery stores and results only in the purchase of a tub of margarine, setting the stage for a story where just one ingredient can change everything.
Crime
Detective fiction in the West is often grouped with crime fiction and thrillers; but in detective fiction, the focus is on a puzzle and the process of solving it. It’s a game with the reader in which a mystery needs to be unraveled before the detective figures it out. In some places, the detective becomes a figure of interest in himself—detective figures have been, traditionally if less so at present, more often than not, men—a complex personality whose story is interesting and deserves an independent treatment of its own. It is a genre that solves problems, finds answers, holds the culprit accountable: all very attractive attributes for those who just like a good story.
Seicho Matsumoto was one of Japan’s most celebrated mystery writers —with two dozen novels to his name from the late 1950s, at a time when Japan was rebuilding after the war until just before his death in 1992—but only in recent years his work has been translated into English. Point Zero, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is one of his early novels. The story, set in 1958 and the first part of 1959, takes place mainly in Tokyo and the western port city of Kanazawa and is defined by both the hope of the new era and the agonies of war.
It’s the Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival and debut author Ernest Cunningham is one of the participating writers. Cunningham arrives at the festival—hosted on the Ghan, the famous train that goes from Darwin to Adelaide—following the publication of his memoir Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (also, the title of author Benjamin Stevenson’s novel that first introduces Cunningham) and is, having signed a six-figure advance, now stuck trying to find an idea for a novel.
It’s difficult not to compare Kotaro Isaka’s third novel in his loosely connected trilogy to Bullet Train, the book and film that put the series on the map. The Mantis, translated by Sam Malissa, centers around a veteran hitman and includes the same lightheartedness and plot twists of Bullet Train, but stands on its own as a touching father-son story.
Edogawa Rampo (or Ranpo) was one of the most prolific Japanese mystery and crime writers of a century or so ago, and his work has remained in the public eye, whether in Japanese film, manga, video games, or translations. Born Taro Hirai, in 1923 he made his literary debut under a pen name chosen in homage to his literary hero, Edgar Allan Poe. He went on to write dozens of novels, novellas and short stories.
Art imitating life, or is it the other way around? Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character so popular and ubiquitous in popular culture that he almost seems real; many, indeed, have thought him so. Samuel L Clements, by contrast, was a real man so flamboyant, omnipresent and iconic that he can seem almost fictional, a character far better known, of course, by an entirely fictional name: Mark Twain. Anuradha Kumar’s interleaving of fact and fiction in her recent “Bombay mystery”, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, seems somehow fitting.
Four people at a Hyderabad newspaper publishing company drop dead from heart attacks on the same day. It’s not impossible that people could have heart attacks on the same day, but the timing seems suspicious to the police, namely the lead investigator, Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mona Ramteke. This is the lead-in of Aditya Sinha’s mystery, Death in the Deccan, a fun and quirky whodunnit that at times could also be used as a cardiology and toxicology primer.
Offered the chance to run his twin brother’s A.I. company, Anthony Wilson ditches his failing screenwriting career to start anew in Macau. The job turns highly lucrative when Anthony’s new client, Cash Cheang, a pompadour-topped and Johnny Cash-loving casino operator, hands him a bag full of cold hard Yuan to implement a facial recognition system in his casino.
Amid the scorching heat of August 1947, the Edo Tattoo Society hosts a spectacle that captivates the city: a competition to crown the person with the most exquisite body art. Held at a garden restaurant, their first post-War meeting draws a large crowd. Among the attendees is Kenzo Matsushita, recently returned from the war where he served as a military medic. He has only a passing curiosity about tattoos yet becomes completely swept up in the excitement of the evening.
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