The Seven Great Detectives / 7人の名探偵

Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders was published in 1987, and is credited with kick-starting the shin-honkaku (new orthodox) movement of murder mystery writing. Three (and a half) decades later, the genre is still going strong! There were several pieces and events in 2018 commemorating the 30-year anniversary of the influential work, and one of those was The Seven Great Detectives, a collection containing short stories from seven shin-honkaku writers.

Wings in the Dark: Mercator Ayu - The Last Incident / 翼ある闇 メルカトル鮎最後の事件

Wings in the Dark is phenomenal. But before I gush about it, I must proceed with the airing of grievances.

Why does it have to have “Mercator Ayu The Last Incident” on the cover?? I actually have a fairly rigid hierarchy for how I select the English titles for Japanese works in my blog. First, if there’s an official English translation, I use that name. Then, if an English title is presented by the book itself, I’ll use that. If someone else (read as: Ho-Ling Wong) has covered the book, I’ll use their translation of the title for consistency in the English-speaking Japanese mystery fiction blogosphere. (Well, unless I don’t really like that translation. Sorry, Ho-Ling.) Finally, if there’s absolutely nothing else, I’ll use my own translation.

So I need to title this post “Wings in the Dark: Mercator Ayu - The Last Incident” because as you can see for yourself that’s what it says on the cover. Which is stilted in English! Without that I could easily translate the Japanese title into “Wings in the Dark: the Final Case of Ayu Mercator,” which works perfectly fine. But noooo, I’m stuck with “Mercator Ayu - The Last Incident.”

To add salt to the wound, an earlier edition of Wings in the Dark apparently has “Messiah” as the English title. That would’ve been fine too! But they just had to go and change it. (As I've previously discussed, for my posts I try to use the actual cover of whatever version I experienced, so I can't just use the "Messiah" cover for this post, either. And yeah, there's still that little tiny "Messiah" on this cover, but it's clearly beaten out by the other English.)

Anyway, that’s my biggest grievance with this book.