I haven’t subscribed to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for years and years, mainly because the short mystery has undergone the same transformation as the modern novel: puzzles and problems have been replaced with anger and ennui. But the local library has a large, comfortable magazine room, and every two months, I pick up the newest copy of EQMM on the off chance that something in the Table of Contents will stir my imagination. Most likely, I will find this in the magazine’s “Passport to Crime” series, which features mysteries from around the world. Many is the time I have found a new Paul Halter story (translated by the late lamented John Pugmire) or a tale from Japan or China, where the Golden Age traditions that have been discarded by modern Americans are still practiced and, indeed, revered.

Today was such a day: I found a name I haven’t come across since 2016, when Mr. Pugmire’s publishing house Locked Room International released The Moai Island Puzzle by Alice Arisugawa. This is one of the best examples of shin honkaku (or “New Traditionalist”) fiction that we have had the good luck to see translated into English (by Ho-Ling Wong). As much as I enjoy the glimpses into mid-20^th century Japanese culture that one finds in classic honkaku, I think I might prefer the new traditionalists, with their combination of puzzles and pop culture. I’m thinking of Masahiro Imamura’s Death Among the Undead, where the suspect list includes a horde of zombies, or Szu-Yen Lin’s Death in the House of Rain, where classic architecture combines with modern technology to produce a twisty horror show of a mystery.

This time, Steve Steinbock has done the translating honors with a meaty short story called “The Tragedy of Black Swan Lodge.” As with Moai Island, “Black Swan” is narrated by a successful mystery author named Alice Arisugawa and centers on three friends from college. Years earlier, Alice, Amano and Himura sat in their dorm room and dreamed of the future: Alice wanted to write, Amano to paint, and Himura to study the criminal mind. Since then, all of them have fulfilled their dream, and yet Alice and Himura haven’t seen Amano for seven years. Now, the mystery writer and the mystery solver are heading to a reunion with their friend and a new mystery, for the body of a recently killed man has been discovered in an old well in Amano’s back yard, and the police are baffled as to how the victim was killed and ended up there. 

The house Amano lives in is called Kokucho Tei – “Black Swan Lodge.” “Weird name for a house,” Alice remarks, since most swans are white; “Sounds like a setting for a murder mystery.” (This is honkaku, man – of course it is!) The weirdness increases as the men’s car winds up a dark wooded mountain road, leaving civilization behind, all to the smoky sounds of Sarah Vaughan singing “Misty” playing on the car radio. When they arrive, they find a dilapidated old mansion painted charcoal black “(like) you’d see in old American movies.”  I think I know which house they mean.

Now a widower, Amano lives in Black Swan Lodge, which he inherited from a beloved aunt, with his small daughter Maki and a deaf myna bird named Kyu. He struggles as a painter and wishes he had the wherewithal to move his daughter out of this creepy house to a thriving community and send her to school. Even worse, the Lodge suffers from bad karma due to its violent history: the previous owner, a banker, murdered his wife and then disappeared, leaving a suicide note in his car. And now at least one mystery has been solved: the banker did not kill himself because it’s his body that has been found in the well. Why did he return to the Lodge? And who killed him, and why? 

One of the chief pleasures of reading honkaku is to observe the influence of classic British and American detective novelists on these works. Since LRI specialized in locked room mysteries, we certainly got to see the influence of John Dickson Carr on writers like Arisugawa and Yukito Ayatsuji. The latter writer also freely channeled Agatha Christie in the translation that seems to have started this delightful avalanche of newly available Eastern crime fiction, The Decagon House Murders. 

But here we are firmly under the influence of Ellery Queen. “Black Swan” contains the charm and atmosphere of an early Queen story, and the humanity of his later work. Like the Wrightsville novels, we’re dealing with the complexities of the human mind rather than a fiendishly clever puzzle, but Arisugawa manages to pack a lot of cool stuff into twenty pages. As Himura and Amano put their heads together to solve the mystery, Alice is assigned to entertain Maki-chan by reading and discussing Aesop’s Fables. This results in interesting side conversations, including one comparing the art of magic with detective fiction and another discoursing on the true meaning behind “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” 

The whole mish-mash of mystery story and family fun weaves together into a climax that manages to shock and satisfy. Fans of Queen will shake their heads, reminded of a similar ending to one of his later novels. Like that book, this is ultimately a simple tale, light on clues but still a delightful read. It made me look up Arisugawa’s bibliography and wonder why more of his work hasn’t been translated since the welcome response to Moai Island. I hope that this new story is a sign of more to come.