Hello World: A Farewell to Introductions

Me standing in a random Seattle bookstore, looking at an all-in-one collection of five Ellery Queen novels, isn’t much of a story-opener. For that matter, this isn’t much of a story, but there’s a start somewhere in there, I’m sure, and a start is what I need right now.

There were five novels: And on the Eighth Day, The Player on the Other Side, Inspector Queen’s Own Case, Cat of Many Tails, Double, Double. I’d already read And on the Eighth Day (and kinda loved it), but I’d wanted to read at least two of the other four, so I got the book.

I read The Player on the Other Side the next morning, while on the train back to Portland. The story is about Walt, a handyman acting under the direction of Y, the true mastermind behind the crimes Walt is about to unleash upon the family he works for.

The plot never really felt like it got more interesting than that synopsis. Your opinion of the book probably comes down to your opinion on Y’s identity. I didn’t think much of it – so there you go.

Then again, I couldn’t think at all. I was barely keeping my eyes open. As ridiculous as it sounds, I’d actually spent the night before reading a completely different novel – Kie Hojo’s “Delicious Death” for Detectives. That book certainly has a lot more going on.

You got a bunch of detectives trapped and forced to play a murder mystery VR game, you got a real-life killer among them picking off people who give incorrect solutions to those crimes, and you got a protagonist who is in a unique position: being the one forced to come up with and execute the virtual crimes. If the detectives solve them, he dies, but if they don’t try to solve them, everyone dies.

The only hope, therefore, is for the protagonist to stop the real-life murderer and put an end to the game before he’s caught.

This is the third Kie Hojo book in the Ryuusen family series. I haven’t read the previous two; this is just the first one of the bunch I came across. I’m more than happy to go back and read the rest, though, because this was pretty great.

It’s definitely a variation of a Death Game scenario I hadn’t seem before. The VR setting is used to the maximum, leading to some really original tricks. I will leave this point understated,

The story moves along very fast, its main concern being the mystery. No scene is taken for granted – everything is a piece of the puzzle. The characters are simple, but have distinct enough personalities to where you can at least pretend to care what happens to them.

There’s also a bit of a cat and mouse game going on – it isn’t shown how the protagonist, Kamo, actually pulls off the crimes, and a part of the cluing ends up being watching how Kamo covers up his virtual crimes after the fact.

Now, talking even more about the book would be all well and good, but given that the work hasn’t been translated from Japanese, I have to consider how bad I want the reader to feel for missing out.

You may wonder when I learned Japanese myself. The bad news is that I didn’t – but I can read the books, anyway. The news is bad, because the machine translations that I’m running these books through aren’t particularly great.

The news is also excellent, though, because I’m a maniac and find myself enjoying them regardless – because they’re just so fascinating.

Obviously, reviewing books under such conditions isn’t exactly fair. I’m experiencing an undeniably inferior version of it. That’s why, if I do write about untranslated Japanese books on this blog, I’ll probably stick to its plot and general feel, and only write about them if I fully understood everything I’ve read. Negative reviews in this category will probably be rare, since there’s always a chance that I would’ve liked more if I hadn’t read it in the manner I did.

I don’t feel guilty about this arrangement. After all, I’m paying for all the books, I’m using the translation for personal purposes, and I’m fully conscious of the drawbacks. Experiencing the books in their original language would’ve been great, but as a friend of mine put it best – why should I have to, if the nature of the hobby doesn’t inherently require it?

I can live with that. Because Japanese mysteries should really be talked about more. Reading the descriptions of the novels Ho-Ling reads on his blog was a huge inspiration for me as a writer in its own right. Even if you don’t read the book, the premise of it can still awaken imagination in reader and writer alike, I feel.

It may even drive a man to perform the machine translation exercise about 43 or so times.

The good news is that this hypothetical man is terribly efficient – of the 43, 20 or so have been read within the past month and a half. The full number was likely avoided because the man was generous to the western classics, devouring about a quarter of Ellery Queen’s canon.

I suspect you can see, Dear Reader, that there is also bad news.

I have completely lost my mind.

It’d started as an honest experiment, but reading Yutaka Maya’s Wings in the Dark: The Last Case of Mercator Ayu was a gateway drug. I was hooked by the first encounter and never stopped.

Even if the book’s premise is, in theory, simple – a detective arrives on the scene to investigate the decapitation of a man and his son, trying to find the murderer hiding in the household – the story quickly grips you.

Its almost perfect deconstruction – and downright destruction – of what it means to be a detective in fiction, its super-fun reveals and overall great atmosphere made me a lifelong fan of the man behind it. Even though, at this stage, I have seen quite a few deconstructions in other works by this point, this one still feels special. Because for all its destructive power, it’s also a celebration. It’s dark and moody, yet also fundamentally goofy.

In that sense, it’s pretty representative of the genre as a whole.

Yutaka Maya’s short story collection Thus Spoke Mercator was even better – but I suspect I’ll talk about it separately. I may have to re-read it first. It was so many books ago. It’s just book after book after book now.

At one point, I was worried I was a boring person for spending so much of my day reading mystery novels. My girlfriend reassured me that I was, in fact, “just a weirdo.”

This kind of binging comes and goes for me. Its duration varies in length and intensity, but the fall down is always the same – unfortunate and unavoidable. It’s a shame, because these binges are usually when I’m at my best – most focused in my own interest, more willing to write and in an overall better mood.

My next novella, The Gospel of V, is currently in proofreading. Following it, I have three more story ideas in the bank. I’m hoping I’ll be to use them all. I sometimes get carried away with planning to do more and never doing it, but I feel like the next few months will be some of the most productive ones I’ve had in a long while.

The only real remaining question is what I should actually blog about. Writing about mystery fiction feels difficult. What can I say besides a general premise and my vague feelings on it? I’m the type of person that’s more likely to just rant about things I don’t like, but that’s definitely what I don’t want the blog to be about.

How do I go about it, then?

I’ll have to think on it.

There will be some value in this madness.