I have never been a fan of detective fiction – I didn’t understand why anyone would spend hours searching for clues, wondering what I might have missed, or trying to guess who had committed the crime. But one day, by accident, I picked up a novel by one of the most famous writers of this genre, Seishi Yokomizo, translated by Louise Heal Kawai… and got lost in the plot for the rest of the day.
The story begins quite simply – a wedding is to take place at the Ichiyanagi family residence. Or at least there was such plan – the would-be bride and groom are brutally murdered the night before the big event. When detective Kindaichi enters the scene, it turns out that the room they spent the night in was locked from the inside, and the only clue is a bloody handprint and a bloody sword found in the snow.
We follow Kindaichi’s way of reasoning and are not allowed by the author to look around, even for a moment. The narrator sets traps for us, which make us miss details that at the end will turn out to be the key to solving the puzzle. In all of this we are accompanied by less and more eccentric members of the Ichiyanagi family, who are presented at the beginning of the book like in a theatrical play. The pace of the narrative and the way it is structured – but mostly the fact that everything happens in a very defined and described in the smallest detail space, makes reading The Honjin Murders similar to watching a staged play.
And the ending totally blew my head off – I spent a lot of time trying to get myself together, going back to the key bits and looking for the moment when the thread fell out of my hands. The Honjin Murders is an amazing treat for fans of detective stories, especially in the retro style – so if you like works of Ranpo Edogawa, you simply cannot miss Seishi Yokomizo’s work.
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