Despite its focus on STEM, the S&M series sure seems to have an aversion to formula. While the previous book broke the mold by moving from a lab to a more traditional manor, Jack the Poetical Private instead breaks free of the closed circle. Unfortunately this didn't quite work out, and Jack the Poetical Private is the weakest entry in the series thus far.
Definitely no underlying reason for that...
The book opens with not one, but two locked room murders! (Hard to believe I don't particularly like it, right?) However, they aren't at (or even connected to) Saikawa and Moe's N University. One victim is a student from S Women's College and the other is from T University—except each victim is found at the other school. Each victim is found inside a locked room, stripped of clothes (but not sexually assaulted), and with a strange symbol carved into the stomach—what looks like an "I" in one and a "Z" in the other. The victims don't appear to have any connection, but the similarities in the crime scenes essentially prove the murders were committed by the same person.
And... Saikawa just happens to be teaching a course at S Women's College as a guest lecturer, and learns of the case that way! Of course Saikawa (a stoic assistant professor of architecture and our detective) has absolutely no interest and doesn't want to get involved, but Moe (an excitable university student whose late father was Saikawa's mentor) can't resist.
And... Moe promptly solves both rooms! (Well, Saikawa figured them out first, but he didn't feel like telling anyone.) Each room was created with a simple mechanical trick—which gives no clue towards the culprit's identity. So the rooms are solved, but the case essentially hits a dead end. However, they soon realize that the scenarios of the crime scenes are oddly similar to a recent song "Jack the Poetical Private" by rock star Minoru Yuuki.
And... Minoru just happens to be a student at N University, who also happens to have Saikawa as a staff advisor! On paper, at least. The role is purely administrative. In fact, the first time Saikawa ever meets with Minoru is to "advise" him to drop out. (University policy. A few years prior Minoru stopped taking classes in order to focus on his music career but never officially unenrolled, and the university forces students who don't graduate within eight years to drop out.) But the song puts Minoru on the police's radar.
Anyway, another murder happens, but I'm going to cut off the synopsis here, because watching the case unfold is part of the fun.
While I think there are some good ideas in this book, it felt like Mori didn't know how to tie them together, and just settled for anything that got the job done regardless of quality or effectiveness.
This is going to be a bit of an odd word choice, but the solution felt disconnected from the clues. That's not to say it was inconsistent, because it wasn't, but that I just see no way to go from the clues to the solution. It didn't feel like Saikawa deduced the solution, it felt like Mori was done writing so he had Saikawa just dump the solution. Heck, Saikawa literally assumes the existence of the key piece of evidence. Which is particularly bizarre because it would have been simple to actually obtain it. But no, no need to check your work, just assume you have the necessary evidence, and all will be fine because this is a mystery novel. (This piece of evidence would have been extraordinarily easy to fake as well, but I suppose Mori didn't feel like exploring the Late Queen Problem. The evidence is also clued in one of the most opaque ways I have ever seen.)
The motive is whack. It can be divided into two parts, neither of which functions properly. The issue with the first part is that the motive, and the crime generally, needs to comport with the psychological profile of the culprit. I'm not going to start proselyting for "psychological deductions" like Philo Vance, but, for example, it would feel quite strange for an ascetic to murder for money. And here we have what is essentially a murder of a stranger for nothing. Which could work, but just doesn't psychologically fit with an intelligent, educated, well-adjusted adult. (That's not a spoiler since it describes literally every character in the series.) Or, rather, it does not fit with someone who is able to maintain the appearance of an intelligent, educated, well-adjusted adult, since well-adjusted adults do not typically murder people. (Before you conjure in your head the image of a Hannibal Lecter-style psychopathic serial killer, murder for its sake or for the thrill or to prove superiority over the police is not murder "for nothing.") The motive is typically the least interesting and least important part of a crime, and that's fine. You just need to give me something, and murder over nothing is basically the opposite of that.
The second part of the motive fails for a different reason. It's completely ridiculous, but that's not the issue. The reason is abnormal, but that's also the point—the murderer committed the crimes because they were operating on an abnormal set of logic and principles. I could accept someone being mentally unstable enough to believe these things and act upon them. The issue is that we don't get to see this. We're just told at the end that that's why they did it, without any indication of their psychology during the story. If the culprit murders people because they feel compelled to murder anyone they see wearing red, I'd want at least one scene before the reveal showing their discomfort with the color.
The lack of a closed circle also left the story feeling a bit unfocused. There was never any particular reason to narrow the list of suspects to the characters the story focuses on. Yes, there's the "Jack the Poetical Private" song, but I felt that reason was flimsy from the first time it was introduced. The parallels between the crime scenes and the song were so vague it felt much more like coincidence than intent. It's just like how The Simpsons appears to be able to predict the future. (Remember that the probability to be considered is not the chance of this song matching the crime scenes, but the chance of some song matching the crime scenes.)
I know the police need to be a certain degree of ineffectual for these stories, but that still needs to be bounded by the suspension of disbelief, which this book broke. The police overlook something utterly obvious, which in turn makes it feel like a clue was unfairly hid. Imagine the police searching for hotdogs and completely ignoring suspiciously long pigs in a blanket out in the open.
The culprit's plan in Jack the Poetical Private uses a certain element from The 8 Mansion Murders that I absolutely did not like (specifically, (rot-13) pensgvat gurve cyna nebhaq gur qrgrpgvirf znxvat n pregnva qrqhpgvba naq pbapyhfvba), although here it was a much smaller component so I did not actually mind it as much.
The window of time some people had to do certain actions seemed awfully short for what those actions were.
Lastly, but also what is definitely my most important complaint, I didn't like the title. In my review of the prior book I explained how the books in this series have different but related English and Japanese titles, and that Mathematical Goodbye did something really cool with its titles. The Japanese title of Jack the Poetical Private directly translates to "poetic private Jack." So it's the same words in English, but "private" is used as a noun in one and an adjective in the other. A subtle but significant distinction. So what will this gap between the titles entail for the story?
Nothing. The English and Japanese titles are intended to be transactions of each other, with the Japanese title of the book also being the Japanese name of the song. So it's either a meaningless play on words or a translation mistake. Either answer is disappointing after Mathematical Goodbye used its dual titles so cleverly.
But, like I said, there are good ideas in here. The locked rooms are simple mechanic tricks that are easily exposed, so the question becomes why the culprit bothered with them, since (1) the deaths were clearly murders (and not suicides or accidents), (2) there were no particular suspects, and (3) anybody could have done any of the tricks. So none of the typical reasons for creating a locked room seemed to apply, and the solutions to the rooms were revealed early. Jack the Poetical Private is a mystery that involves locked rooms but is not a locked room mystery—a unique designation!
(As an aside, in detective stories, whenever a locked room shows up they always say that the most common reason to create a locked room is to create the appearance of a suicide, but does this ever actually happen in mystery novels? Most locked room murders are pretty clearly murders.)
Saikawa actually spends most of the book at a conference in China, which was a bit odd, but this gives Moe some room to shine on her own. The relationship between the leads also progresses, with a cute and hilarious scene near the end of the book.
Jack the Poetical Private ends up doing basically the opposite of Bury Your Gays, which I found impressive for a book published in 1997.
Still, while these positive points exist, they aren't enough to redeem the sloppy lines connecting them. When I read The Perfect Insider (the first book in the series), it wasn't enough to get me to commit to the series, but was enough to get me to read the second book, and I decided I would use that book to determine whether to stick with the series or not. While I don't think that Jack the Poetical Private is worth skipping if you're reading the series, I will say that if Jack the Poetical Private had been the second book, I probably would not have read the third.
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