Ah, nothing like some good ol' S&M, right? I'm obviously talking about Hiroshi Mori's Saikawa and Moe series. The series stars associate professor of architecture Souhei Saikawa and college student Moe Nishinosono and their run-ins with various scientifically themed murder mysteries. The first book in the series in the series is The Perfect Insider, but I read that before I began this blog, so we're going to start with book two, Doctors in Isolated Room.
Saikawa has a friend who works in their university’s extreme climate laboratory, and he invites Saikawa and Moe to watch them conduct an experiment. The experiment takes place in a special room that can be chilled to sub-zero temperatures, and can only be entered while wearing a special cold-resistant suit. Considering this is a murder mystery, I’m sure you can guess how the experiment goes...
Without a hitch, naturally!
To celebrate the successful experiment, the research team brings the experiment area up to room temperature and hosts a small party there. However, after a few hours, they realize one of the side room is locked. When they open it up, they discover the murdered corpses of two grad students. (This will not be good for recruiting...)
While a lot of locked rooms only have one viable method of exit and entry (a sole door), this crime scene has not one, not two, but three possible escape routes—and yet each one seems impossible to have been used.
First, there is the door into the main experiment room. This door can be locked by hand from the inside, but requires a key to lock from the outside. This seems like an obvious choice, but they have camera footage—which started during the experiment and continued to the discovery of the bodies—showing that, while several people passed in front of the door, nobody entered, exited, or even stopped in front of it.
Second, there is a fire exit. This door can also be locked by hand from the inside, but is automatically locked from the outside in the evening, which is when the experiment took place. Oh, and this door automatically sets off the fire alarm if it’s left open for too long, so don’t even think about just propping it open in advance.
Finally, we have a large shutter that’s used to allow delivery trucks into the experiment area for loading and unloading. The motor that operates the shutter was broken on the day of the murder, and the shutter is in full view of the lab’s security booth. So not only was it impossible to operate the door, but if it had been operated the security guards would have noticed.
So there you go: three different doors, and each one has its own unique challenges in trying to use as the culprit’s method of entry or exit. The variety in the options for doors provides ample room for theorization, making it a fun problem to think about.
Even though there are multiple doors and the crime takes place in a high-tech research laboratory, the solution is slick and easy to understand. In fact, the answer is so straightforward, it’ll probably make you wonder why you didn’t immediately see it.
(Of course, the answer to that is pretty obvious: the solution requires multiple people to take very specific actions, and the natural tendency of the murder mystery reader is to pin everything onto one singular culprit. While the reader may be willing to admit an accomplice, they’ll rarely introduce a conspiracy of their own accord.)
Doctors in Isolated Room is a scientifically-themed murder mystery so technology is pervasive throughout the story, and it holds up surprisingly well considering the book was written in 1996. They still use floppy disks and don’t have smartphones, but the characters can access their computers remotely, encounter a mystery involving an extra admin account on the lab’s computer system, and communicate extensively through email. Even though technology is entwined within the fabric of the story, the solution doesn’t hinge on obscure or over-complicated scientific concepts, which gives the book a modern atmosphere while providing an orthodox detective fiction experience.
The characters, for the most part, feel like they’re simply specimens to be examined, rather than real human beings. In most detective novels, the core of the investigation focuses on the detective questioning—sometimes repeatedly—the various suspects and witnesses. In Doctors in Isolated Room, however, most of that investigation happens off-camera, and what we see is Moe or Saikawa telling the other what they discovered and then discussing what this entails for the mystery. As a result, Moe and Saikawa get the lion’s share of characterization, and while a few of the side characters, such as Saikawa’s friend at the lab and Moe’s prefectural police chief uncle, get some development, most of the suspects are reduced to a dossier emailed from Moe to Saikawa.
If you read mysteries for the characters or psychological component, you probably won’t like this. Focusing on the detectives nearly to the exclusion of the suspects can easily backfire; it gives the feeling that the suspects are just autonomous dolls whose job is to simply perform whatever actions they need to perform to make the author’s intended murder mystery function. But in a series like this that’s focused so heavily on science and technology, this sterile characterization that makes the novel almost feel like a pure logic problem works. This isn’t a messy human drama, but a mysterious phenomenon meant to be observed and understood.
This illusion of a logic puzzle is further reinforced by the fact that the motive is fairly weak and essentially non-clued. In fact, during the denouement, Saikawa explicitly says that the motive he provides is mostly just speculation. But these are pieces meant to act out a murder play, not real humans, so does the reason behind their actions really matter that much?
Doctors in Isolated Room is a solid follow-up to The Perfect Insider, presenting a decent locked room in another science-based setting. While it doesn’t have the sheer brilliance of The Perfect Insider’s central trick, no part of it is as nonsensical as The Perfect Insider’s auxiliary tricks.
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