To be honest, I find the title of Hercule Poirot's Christmas a bit strange. It features Hercule Poirot and takes place around Christmas, but it's not about Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Oh well, the fact that the mystery is decent is more important than the title Christie chose for it.
Knock-knock.
Who's there?
If I just told you, it wouldn't be a very satisfying mystery.
A boy and a girl. They're from worlds as different as can be—
No, really, they're from actual different worlds. Rime lives in a world of frigid winter, while Ember hails from a land of fiery summer, and they're separated by a magical, transparent barrier. But when they fall down the chasm separating their homes, they need to work together to figure out how to return.
Trick is hands-down my favorite mystery TV show, and a serious contender for my favorite piece of mystery media ever. The leads are entertaining and have great chemistry, the world of Trick is silly but enthralling, the tricks—a component so important the show is named after them!—are wonderful, and the show manages to achieve a near-perfect balance of mystery and comedy. There are some points where Trick goes out on a limb which promptly snaps, but it's Trick's willingness to take things as far as it needs to, even if it doesn't always quite work out, that makes it so great.
Of course, you've probably already noticed that this post is not about Trick, but a book called The Demon-Mask Village Murders, which is not a Trick tie-in novel or anything of the sort, but has what I can only describe as big Trick energy.
In my Village of Eight Graves review, I mentioned how one of the reasons I felt I didn't find it majorly compelling was because other works have done the "creepy rural Japanese village" thing better. Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits was one particular work I had in mind. It's a book about a creepy rural Japanese village (shocking, I know) but goes all-in on that premise, blending orthodox murder mystery with Japanese horror.
Hand of Fate 2 is a fantasy-themed deckbuilding roguelike game where everything (but you) is represented by cards. The encounters you experience on your adventure? Cards. Your weapons and equipment? Cards. The damage you take when something goes wrong? You guessed it, cards. If you've played the original Hand of Fate, Hand of Fate 2 is just like that... but more.
The game does deliver the sense of adventure and discovery that its fantasy aesthetic promises, but has some of the aggravations and annoyances of luck-based card games.
Seishi Yokomizo is one of the most famous and prolific Japanese mystery novelists, and The Village of Eight Graves is one of his most famous works, with countless adaptations in various forms of media. It's filled with death, as one might hope for a murder mystery, yet it feels like it might be trying to make up for quality with quantity. I found the book... underwhelming. It wasn't bad, but it felt more like a spooky suspense story than an orthodox detective plot, and a lot of the more distinctive plot elements have been better utilized in other works (although I acknowledge that The Village of Eight Graves might have been the book to pioneer those plot elements).
Mystery fiction presents an interesting challenge. There are certain conventions or "rules" governing the genre—including a literal set of ten commandments (and another ruleset double that)—and yet, from one point of view, the ultimate goal is to surprise and shock the reader, while remaining within the "rules." Obviously, no one is putting a gun to someone's head to obey these rules (well, maybe in a story they do), and some of mystery fiction's most famous and celebrated works break these conventions. So they're more like guidelines. There's no reason you can't just say a wizard did it, but doing that will result in an unsatisfying resolution. (Usually.)
The Eighth Detective is a short story collection that aims to expand the "rules" of mystery fiction by providing a comprehensive definition of a murder mystery and a series of stories that illustrate this definition. It's pretty underwhelming. I think this is because the central conceit suffers from a critical flaw: the formula that The Eighth Detective is built around tells you whether a piece of fiction is a murder mystery or not, but has absolutely nothing to say about whether it's good.
Mysteries should take advantage of their premise. If the story takes place in a unique setting, then the solution should involve a trick that's only possible in that particular location. If the hook of the crime is a unique or bizarre state of the crime scene, then there should be a compelling reason the crime scene was in that state.
In The Eight of Swords, the culprit leaves an Eight of Swords at the crime scene. Quite easy to understand, no? That tarot card is one of the main draws of the book; after all, it's what the novel is titled after! And yet... there's no compelling reason for that card to be there. Heck, I have absolutely no idea why the culprit left the card there, other than to provide a clue to Dr. Fell to use to deduce their identity.
The title of The 8 Mansion Murders is way too generous; there's no way I'd rate it anywhere close to an eight. It's not particularly clever or inspired, but seems to think it's some sort of epoch-defining masterpiece.
The Argyle family has gone through a bit of a rough patch. The mother, Rachel, had been brutally murdered in their home. Jacko, the black sheep of the family, was convicted of the murder, and died in prison six months later. The family learns to accept the sad truth and move on.
However, the old wound is torn open a year and a half after Jacko's death by a visit from a man named Arthur Calgary. Calgary is able to provide Jacko with a perfect alibi for Rachel's murder, proving him innocent. Thus, the Argyles must face the terrifying truth: the murderer is still among them.
It's a catchy hook, so it's too bad the book isn't actually that exciting.
Do you like mysteries? Actually, no, that's not the appropriate question to ask. Do you love mysteries? Think carefully about your answer. I'm not asking if you think you love mysteries. I'm asking if you truly, with your heart and soul, love mysteries, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else. Because The Sekimeiya seems like it was made for somebody who does.
On paper, The Sekimeiya is very close to how I likely would have described my ideal mystery game before playing The Sekimeiya. There is an endless deluge of mysteries, plenty of content, an incredibly tight plot, and unique ideas taken to their logical extreme. Yet in reality the experience is difficult to unabashedly enjoy. There are a lot of things that The Sekimeiya does right and that it does great, and there are no immediately obvious technical faults, so exactly what went wrong?
Let's take a trip into the labyrinth to explore that question.
Takumi Nishijou is just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill reclusive socially anxious MMORPG-addicted anime-obsessed self-absorbed rude cowardly acerbic loner Japanese teenager that lives alone in a storage container on top of an apartment building. Y'know, the usual. One day weird things start to happen, and Takumi wants them to stop, and... that's pretty much the entire plot of Chaos;Head. (I'm not calling it "ChäoS;HEAd," sorry not sorry.)
I've already reviewed on this blog proprietary material from Whodunnit?, a mystery gameshow that was if nothing else an entertaining, rare mix of genres. But "rare" does not mean "only," and in fact Whodunnit? was preceded over a decade earlier by another murder mystery-based reality show: Murder in Small Town X.
This is a Bioshock game, but rather than continuing the story of Rapture, Bioshock Infinite takes us to new heights in Columbia. There are plenty of other differences to go along with the change in scenery, but the soul and many game systems remain the same. That being said, while Columbia is horrifyingly fascinating to explore and the plot is admittedly well-constructed, I just don't feel as charmed by Bioshock Infinite as I do by the original.
Once again, we have a Hercule Poirot novel written not by Agatha Christie herself, but the modern writer Sophie Hannah. Hannah's first Poirot book, The Monogram Murders, was well-written but over-plotted. How does her second Poirot story, Closed Casket, fare?
...Basically the same.
In the spirit of Valentine's Day, I thought I should review something with a bit of... romance. Unfortunately, all I had was Close Enough to Kill, and there's absolutely nothing to love about it.
Sometimes it feels like orthodox detective stories belong to a dead genre. The "Golden Age" came and went a century ago, and that really does seem like it was the perfect time period for classic puzzle plots. Forensics could provide basic information about a crime, but technology hadn't progressed so far that nearly any physical trace could blow a trick wide open. Plus, as the genre has developed and readers have become more savvy, it's become more and more difficult to develop original tricks that will surprise and delight readers.
But then every once in a while you get a work like Imamura Masahiro's debut novel Death Among the Undead which, through sheer originality and style, kindles hope that the genre can be reanimated.
