Murder in the Crooked House / 斜め屋敷の犯罪

At the northern tip of Japan lies an architectural marvel known as the Crooked House, a large mansion built at a slight angle. It is the home of wealthy businessman Hamamoto Kozaburou, his daughter and some servants. One Christmas he invites some business associates to spend the holidays at the Crooked House. Unfortunately, the festivities are brought to a halt when corpses start turning up inside locked rooms.

Murder in the Crooked House all comes down to one trick. There are three locked rooms over the course of the story, but one room is trivial and another has its solution revealed in the middle of the story, leaving only one room worth considering. That being said, this trick is a doozy. The core trick falls in a weird place where I don't think I would have ever gotten it, but the cluing was entirely fair. The book doesn't play coy with any of the pieces to the solution; it's just that the solution requires putting together the clues in an incredibly novel, innovative configuration.

As a result, I liked it. The trick sparked the joy of being surprised by something completely unexpected without feeling like the book ever played dirty. (For this particular trick.) The trick is absolutely ridiculous—while there are no technical faults, it feels like it would never actually play out correctly in real life—and I think the diagrams in the book could have been a bit clearer, but it's a satisfying answer to the puzzle.

Unfortunately, the other parts of the mystery aren't quite as polished. As I already said, one of the locked rooms is absolutely trivial, and trick for the last room, while itself fine, is revealed during the investigation. On top of this, Murder in the Crooked House has a certain detective fiction staple that I think may literally be the single worst instance of this trope that I have ever seen. It's unclued, overly convoluted, and self-contradictory. I'm purposefully being vague because the fact that this trope is in play isn't revealed until the denouement, but for those who have read the book, it relates to the first locked room.

Additionally, there is a certain mysterious event that happens that seems... improperly described. The solution is reasonable and makes perfect sense. But once you know the explanation for the event, if you go back and read how it was described at the time... there is a small but decisive incorrect detail. Technically, there is nothing explicitly wrong, but a certain detail regarding the mysterious event that absolutely should have been mentioned and that anybody who witnessed the event would notice is entirely absent.

Don't take this to mean that everything beside the main locked room trick was bad, though. There is a no-footprints-in-the-snow problem that is resolved elegantly, and I really enjoyed the way the culprit was taken down.

As for the book itself, it too is a mixed bag. I loved the first section. The cast is a group of rich jerks and their underlings, and watching them act horrible to each other is supremely entertaining. However, once the murders start, we instead follow the police officers and their investigators. This takes up most of the book and the police make absolutely no progress, which makes it feel like a boring waste of time. This wasn't even one of scenarios where it's entertaining in the moment but when you look back at the end you see how much fluff there was, because it's clear during the investigation that the police are getting nowhere. Things pick up in the final stretch when Mitarai Kiyoshi, the series detective, finally shows up, since he is ridiculous and constantly getting into shenanigans. Some of the characters are developed and entertaining, but a couple feel utterly pointless and ignored.

One other thing that Murder in the Crooked House does well is take advantage of the setting. If your mystery has something special in its setting or structure, that should be used to its fullest extent. You don't need an idiosyncratic setting for every single mystery, but if you do have one, you need to use it; if you have a murder on a ship, it should be a murder that could only take place on a ship, or if your book is two separate murder mysteries in one, they should tie into each other rather than being two discrete stories. While it isn't constantly shoved into your face, the slight tilt of the Crooked House does keep popping up from time to time (including in the solution). My favorite way the setting comes into play: there's an indoor window twenty feet up that the police think the culprit may have used—but all the furniture in the house has uneven legs (to account for the tilt), and therefore can't be stacked, so how could the window have been reached?

Lastly, the motive is handled a bit bizarrely. While you can have interesting motives, I feel like it's far less important than method or culprit; I'm perfectly fine slapping on some sob story about vengeance or money or whatever and calling it a day. But the motive here is unclued, disconnected from everything else, and keeps going for page after page following the denouement. If Shimada was going to make a motive this involved, why wouldn't he tie it into any other plot element? Or if he wanted to just tack it on after explaining all the mysteries, why make it so complex? The motive doesn't make the rest of the book better or worse, it just feels like a perplexing choice.

As far as locked rooms go, Murder in the Crooked House certainly deserves... something. This book lies somewhere in that nebulous region between genius and madness. The clues are presented relatively fairly, but the answer is so out there, it doesn't seem realistic to actually solve. Which might sound frustrating to you, but I found cathartic. Murder in the Crooked House almost feels like a joke mystery played completely straight. But I enjoy wild, zany stories, so I didn't mind. If only we could have done without the sluggish police investigation or mediocre other locked rooms.

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