I’m calling the book “The Black Umbrella Mystery” based on my hierarchy of naming schemes since that’s the English title on the cover, but the Japanese title is “Murder in the Gymnasium.” Because the murder happens in a high school gymnasium.
The protagonist is Yuno Hakamada, a member of the school ping pong team. After class Yuno and her friend go to the school’s old gymnasium to set up for team practice, where the diligent club president Sagawa is already warming up. Everything seems normal, except the curtains on the stage in the gym are closed. When the theater club arrives for rehearsal and lifts the curtains, a grisly corpse is revealed.
The initial investigation reveals the gym is essentially a locked room: there are only three exits, and each one was locked or observed during the relevant timeframe. Consequently Sagawa is suspected, as she was the only person that was ever alone in the gym with the victim during the potential time of the crime.
Yuno believes in Sagawa's innocence, and so needs someone to save Sagawa by solving the crime and finding the true criminal. Yuno learns that one student stored 900 on their midterms—that is, a perfect 100 in all nine subjects—and remembers a rumor that this student is living in the school, so she decides to ask him for help. The rumors are true, and the student is our otaku detective Tenma Urazome.
This set-up (as well as the marketing) makes it seem like the motivating force behind Yuno and Urazome’s investigation will be to save Sagawa, but Urazome ends up proving her innocence at the end of the first part of the novel. Which is fine, but does feel like a bit of a bait-and-switch, since the motivation for investigating the crime isn’t as strong after the introduction. To be clear, I don’t think the detective typically needs a particularly strong reason to investigate the murder in a murder mystery, but the absence is felt when you introduce a strong reason at the beginning but immediately resolve it without replacing it with another reason.
So Yuno and Urazome investigate. Coming up with your own theories is part of the fun of reading mysteries, but it felt a bit difficult to do that here since the book gives very little information on the most unusual pieces of evidence until right before the challenge to the reader. (Did you think Aosaki would earn the “Ellery Queen of the Heisei period” title without a challenge to the reader?) Most of the book is spent on alibis and witness statements, with information on the physical evidence coming in at the very end. So for most of the book I felt disincentivized from theorizing since I knew important information on the evidence would be presented. Eventually.
As a result, the pacing of the book is a bit odd. It feels like it goes quickly, since the entire book takes place over only a few days, yet at the same time the wait for the detectives to stop taking witness statements and get around to investigating the evidence makes the book drag.
While The Black Umbrella Mystery is a proper murder mystery in the Queen tradition, it also takes a lot of cues from light novels. Urazome is an otaku, so the book is filled with anime references. There are a lot of characters (and, hence, suspects), but most don’t have much more to them besides their school year, club, and one or two adjectives. The main cast is a bit more developed, but not by much.
Additionally, most murder mysteries at least pay lip service to police procedure (or sidestep the issue by locking the cast away in an isolated location), but The Black Umbrella Mystery just completely eschews such pleasantries, which was a bit jarring. I understand the necessity of incompetent police, but it still feels weird having a teenager leading the cops around by the nose and messing with evidence without consequence. I think this is a consequence of the light novel style the book is aiming for, but it creates an issue with verisimilitude. When the book is so far removed from realistic process I’m constantly reminded that I’m reading nothing more than a silly little story.
On the topic of realism, as I said in the intro, the solution strained my credulity a bit too much. Some parts of the solution are explained thoroughly, but others are glossed over, and I can’t help but feel like it’s because there isn’t a good or satisfying explanation for these latter elements. For instance, some of the culprit’s actions feel like they should have been noticed, and other actions could have been done stealthily if no one was looking but there was no indication of how the culprit knew when that was. “The culprit just had to take the risk… and it worked out in their favor every single time” is a possible but unsatisfying answer to a puzzle plot mystery. There’s one part of the mystery where the solution seems almost self-contradictory, and another where the solution to how a culprit did something is “they just did.”
That being said, even if I didn’t particularly like the solution, the path there is still intricately crafted. The denouement feels like it’s straight out of a Queen novel, and reminds me of The French Powder Mystery in particular. True to the name “The Black Umbrella Mystery,” Aosaki gets an impressive amount of deductive mileage from a single umbrella. One of the common issues with Queensian novels is that they rely on a long deductive chain, meaning if you don’t find the entry point, you have absolutely no hope of properly reaching the later conclusions. (The Tragedy of X is probably the foremost example of this.) However, what The Black Umbrella Mystery does is introduce clues in the beginning of the investigation that can be used to deduce certain facts, and then directly presents those facts later in the investigation. This is a great idea and is implemented well—it gives you a chance to play along with the full puzzle but doesn’t require you to do so in order to solve the crime.
At the same time, The Black Umbrella Mystery suffers from the same issue endemic to Queensian mysteries. Specifically, the strength of the logic chain. After all, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link. It’s typically impossible to state anything or make any conclusions with 100% certainty, as there are always edge cases and freak coincidences. Even if you’re 90% sure of each individual step, after six steps you’ll be wrong almost half the time. This means that Queensian novels need some “buy-in” from the reader where you accept that when you can reach a certain confidence threshold for a conclusion, you just take it and proceed in the deductions.
So my recommendation comes down to whether you like Queen or not. If you want character-driven drama, or are likely to provide all sorts of counter-examples in the deductive chain, you’ll probably have a better time with another book. Despite the anime references, The Black Umbrella Mystery is a puzzle plotter, so the only reason to read it is if you like those. And if you do like those, you probably should read The Black Umbrella Mystery.
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