I’ve enjoyed the Arisugawa novels I’ve read so far, and it seems that the Student Alice series is expected to have five novels, but Arisugawa has been sitting on four for almost two decades at this point. The Writer Alice series, however, keeps getting new entries. So I was very eager to see exactly what the books that have been delaying the final Student Alice novel was like! And, to be frank, I’m not impressed.
Alice is invited to spend Christmas at the home of Seiichi Makabe, a world-famous author known as the Japanese Carr due to the number of locked room murder mysteries he’s written. (45, to be exact.) This party is a tradition, with Makabe’s editors and a few junior authors invited every year. This time, Alice is allowed to bring his friend (who is a boy) Hideo Himura, a criminologist (or, as Alice likes to call him, a clinical criminologist) and our series detective.
The party mostly goes well, with a few small hiccups—the largest being Makabe’s proclamation that his 46th novel will be the last locked room mystery he ever writes. There are also some sightings of an old man who appears to be loitering near the house, which is in a relatively remote suburbs in the middle of winter. The mood is then slightly brought down by a double-murder, where the old man’s and Makabe’s corpses are each found in a separate locked room planted head-first in each room’s chimney and burned. There is also evidence suggesting that some of Makabe’s notes were burned in the fire.
Who was the old man? How were the locked rooms created? Why were the locked rooms created? Why were they murdered? Was Makabe’s own locked room trick used, and what is the connection to his decision to stop writing mysteries?
A lot of these questions have very plain answers, especially compared to how delectable of a set-up double locked rooms are. The locked room trick itself is fine, but nothing special. (There’s one piece of misdirection that really holds it all together.)
I think the main issue dragging the book down is that so much of it is pointless, and feels pointless. Mystery novels often have a lot of “pointless” components in order to obscure what’s important and what’s not. Some authors can manage to make almost everything in a story relevant in some way, but oftentimes red herrings and misdirection are necessary. And that’s not a problem—as long as they are fun, interesting, and feel relevant in the moment. Sure, if you look back you might realize that a lot of what you read maybe didn’t really matter, but the trick is to be engaging enough that the reader doesn’t do that when they finish.
So much of The 46th Locked Room doesn’t matter, and feels like it won’t matter in the moment. We spend page after page after page digging into everyone’s past to find motives to murder Makabe… except this inquiry completely ignores the other victim. Do we really think it’s likely that Makabe’s heir killed him to get his fortune when the mystery victim doesn’t factor into Makabe’s inheritance at all? Likewise, there is an extended discussion on where the killer would have gotten the locked room trick, which seems silly when they could just… think it up?
An okay trick, meandering pace, generic cast, and pointless inquiries all sum into a relatively bland book. Arisugawa’s previous books were slow burns, but they had large natural disasters to function as set pieces and escalated into grand deductions. The 46th Locked Room has one piece of evidence that serves as the focal point of a short Queensian logic chain, but otherwise pales in comparison to the previous books.
Alice and Himura have a much more dynamic and funny relationship than Student Alice and his friends, but I’d rather have a good mystery.
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