An audio book.
Shimada receives a book. It says it's based on true events that the police never resolved. Names have been changed. He was a respected whodunnit writer. He'd seen fashions come and go. He was a slow writer, not a best-selling one. He'd always wanted to do a murder. He'd moved from Tokyo into a strange labyrinthine house which is mostly underground. Rooms are named after mythical characters (there are Cleudo associations too). Previous houses by the same architect have been sites of crimes.
He invites 8 people to his 60th birthday party on 1st April, 1988 - his editor Otiyama and his pregnant wife Keyko (a shy ex doctor), a priest's son Shimada Kiyoshi (whose brother is a detective), a critic and 4 authors (one a pretty woman who'd early promise had faded, who'd been briefly married to one of the other authors). On that morning he kills himself (he was sick anyway). The guests are shown his body. In a recorded message he says he's leaving half his money to run a yearly competition, and half to the writer of the best 50k piece written in 5 days by one of the authors, judged by the editor, the priest's son and the critic. They mustn't leave the house, and their stories must be based on the house and their own demise.
The solvers are aware of story conventions. They know that in real life the obvious options (rather than the ingenious ones) are often true. People are murdered one by one. The killer might be trying to impress by using allusions to famous stories. The stories on the authors' word processors match events - why? The female author, realising this, doesn't start writing.
One story involves replacing the victim's head with a bull's head. Another's called "A year for poison". Someone's stabbed in the back - "The Ghost in the glass". "Killing Wings" might be the female author's piece. Each is a mini whodunnit. There'a locked room mystery in a locked-house mystery. The titles are a word-puzzle leading to the house owner. He wasn't really dead. The remaining people track him down to a room in tunnels beneath the house. He's dead. In a will he leaves all his money to his heir.
At the end Shimada meets the book's author who's at pains to show that he was playing by the rules of the genre in its Golden Age (Christie etc). The critic was in fact female. She'd had a child by the house-owner. She was the killer. In the story there was blood but nobody at the time was wounded or had had a nose-bleed. It was her menstrual blood (the only part of the plot that I'd worked out).
The are multiple stories within stories and twists - I had trouble coping with this audio version (the book version has a map, which might have helped a little). It's easier to admire the book than whole-heartedly enjoy it.
Other reviews
- shereadsnovels
- ahsweetmystery
- Vicki Weisfeld (Those classic rules also suggest a story should emphasise plot and not get bogged down with lengthy descriptions or character analyses.)
- theinvisibleevent
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