• On Hayley, on Neeru,
• On Moira and Janet!
• On Aidan, on Stevie,
• Fly over the planet!
• On Bev and Mallika:
• It’s gonna be great
• To celebrate reprints – 
• We do it for Kate!!!

And that’s my miraculous little holiday rhyme to get you into the spirit of the occasion! (The real miracle would be anyone calling the Puzzle Doctor “Stevie!!!”)

Every year, Kate Jackson, my friend, fellow blogger and fellow Book Club sufferer, er, celebrant, hosts a contest over at Cross-Examining Crime of all the re-publications of classic crime fiction that have made the current year so special for GAD mystery fans. Kate invites her crew – bloggers from all over the world – to take part. She provides us with an enormous list of all the books that came out from January to December and asks us to select two of them to highlight. You can read Kate’s explanation of the whole event here – and you really should check it out because you get to participate in this project as well. 

This is all in celebration of the genre we love and a fun activity for the holiday, but I must admit that some of us get into a mildly (yeah, right!) competitive mood. By the end of the month, Kate will announce how you voted and name the Top Mystery Reprint of the Year, and we who deliver the nominees to you all get to wondering . . . which of us will WIN?!? This can make picking out our two books a challenge because, as much as we look for titles that have a personal appeal, we also looking to back the winning, er, horse! Sometimes there are one or two titles that everyone wants because the book has become so rare that the reprint of it is genuinely exciting (koff *koff The Death of Jezebel koff *koff), but just as often the sheer size and variance of the list makes it nearly impossible to whittle down our choices to just two. 

This year, I didn’t see any stand-out rarities, but there was one title that I really really wanted to write about. And that’s . . . next week’s book. For my first selection, I thought it would be nice to highlight one of the several honkaku mysteries that we were fortunate enough to see translated this year. I already covered Akimitsu Takagi’s The Noh Mask Murder here, and I could easily have tossed that title back into the mix. But two other noted Japanese mysteries were heading down the pike – The Little Sparrow Murders, another Kosuke Kindaichi whodunnit by Seishi Yokomizo, and The Labyrinth House Murders, the next in Yukito Ayatsuji’s Bizarre Mansion series. It made sense to me to pick one of these, even if I only had time to read one of them before I had to write my review. But Kate deemed Ayatsuji’s novel ineligible because it was first published in the 1980’s, well after the Golden Age. 

Which brings me to The Little Sparrow Murders. I had high hopes, as no less august a personage than TomCat over at Beneath the Stains of Time gave this one a great review, saying that “(it) features no corpse puzzles, dying messages, impossible crimes of narrative trickery. The book is a straight up whodunit with a sprawling cast of characters, village setting and a succession of bizarre murders patterned after the lyrics of a temari song (nursery rhyme).” The name “Agatha Christie” appears more than once in TomCat’s review, both because he found the style of plotting here similar to work that Christie herself was publishing in the 50’s (he cites both After the Funeral and A Pocketful of Rye, the latter containing a similar theme of “old sins casting long shadows”) and because of the attraction that nursery rhymes held for Christie (for better and for worse) throughout her career. However, TomCat lets us know that Yokomizo’s inspiration for his novel lay not with Christie but with The Bishop Murder Case (1928) by S. S. Van Dine. 

Village mystery, traditional whodunnit, Christie influences, bizarre murders patterned after a nursery rhyme . . . frankly, this all seems right up my alley. And after finishing it, all I can say is . . . . . . oops!

This should’ve been terrific! It takes place in the summer of 1955. Kosuke Kindaichi has asked his old friend Inspector Isokawa to suggest a quiet village in the Okayama region (the scene of several of the detective’s past cases) where he can take a long rest. The Inspector recommends a stay at the Turtle Spring, a spa owned by a friend of his, Rika Aoike, that is nestled near the small town of Onikobe. But Isokawa has an ulterior motive: twenty years earlier, he was been sent to the village to assist in the investigation of the murder of Rika’s husband Genjiro, ostensibly by Ikuzo Onda, a devastatingly handsome travelling salesman who had perpetrated a huge con on the townspeople involving the manufacture and sale of Christmas tinsel. 

Since body had been damaged beyond recognition, and after the killing Onda had disappeared Isokawa wonders if perhaps the identities of the two men have been switched for some reason and that Genjiro, a former silent movie announcer who lost his job after talkies came into fashion, was now hiding out somewhere in Manchuria. But the family claimed that the victim was Genjiro, and his murder has remained unsolved until this day.

Kindaichi frankly has no interest in solving another mystery! The weary sleuth would rather soak in a tub several times a day, but on behalf of his friend he questions his hostess. Rika fills him in on what happened and then suggests he talk to Hoan Tatara, the village chieftain, an eight-times married rascal who over time has lost his power in the village and now dwells in a nearby cabin conveniently situated near dangerous marshland. Tatara barely has time to some of the blanks before he mysteriously disappears, with signs in his cabin suggesting he has been murdered. That this would occur on the eve when the lonely old man was to be reunited with his much-missed fifth wife is especially tragic, but this woman, O-Rin, might also be a dangerous figure, a harbinger of more tragedies to come. 

Sure enough, a series of murders begins: several beautiful young women in the town, daughters from the finest families are killed in bizarre fashion. Each murder is preceded by a glimpse of the crone-like O-Rin, and the bizarre arrangement of the bodies corresponds to the verses of an old temari song, a nursery rhyme that children used to sing as they bounced a temari ball. If that doesn’t sound like a set-up worthy of Agatha Christie, I don’t know what is!

But folks, here comes my warning: this is no And Then There Were None. It’s not even One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Despite really fine translation work by Bryan Karetnyk and the division of the text into thirty-two short chapters bookended by a prologue and epilogue, this book dragged me down. To make things more difficult, there are thirty-one characters listed at the top of the novel. I had to keep an extra bookmark at this page to remind myself to which of the five families each character belonged. (A sixth family, that of Dr. Honda, the town doctor and medical examiner, isn’t even listed.) Because there are several murders and wakes and funerals – and all of this takes place during the annual O-Bon Festival, flocks of people kept showing up together, like this:

“’Hey, is that you, Satoko? You don’t have to hide away, you know!’

“The voice belonged to Shohei. The other three were Kanao, Goro and Fumiko.

“’Satoko, are you there?’ her brother Kanao, called out in a plaintive tone. ‘You haven’t seen Yasuko, have you, O-Miki?”

So many names, and that is just the tip of the iceberg! As often occurs in Japanese crime fiction, the root of all this misery lies in the past, but as open as I am to a certain level of craziness in classic detective stories, the history that links the present victims is utterly ridiculous – and the idea that the inhabitants of this timy village were so ignorant of so much was impossible for me to swallow.

The nursery rhyme doesn’t help. I’ll be the first to admit that Christie doesn’t always get this trope right, either – few authors can manage it well! (Sit down for a minute with Scott Ratner to hear his thoughts on The Bishop Murder Case!) But there are extra problems here, such as Yokomizo notifying us about the rhyme in the prologue and then dropping it for two thirds of the book. When it resurfaces, its purpose is made problematic by the rhyme’s minor significance in the lives of the characters. It takes an elderly woman to notice the parallels and tell everyone about this long-forgotten song. And then it’s very odd that Kindaichi, who knew nothing about this rhyme, manages to use his general knowledge of the structure of temari songs to predict not only that there will be another murder but who the likely victim is to be. 

So here I am, in the most tenuous of positions: writing about a Reprint of the Year that I I can’t really recommend. But look – I’m a big fan of honkaku in general, even if I have with Yokomizo’s work over the past several titles. So if, based on my experience, you can’t cast your vote for Little Sparrow, cast it for honkaku in general and for the lucky renaissance of translated Japanese crime fiction in which we are living! Or wait until you hear about my choice next week because that one is a true classic!

In fact, next week is a rarity in that I’m publishing TWO posts in one day: my second Reprint of the Year pick and my third entry into The Poirot Project. And it happens to involve two of my favorite authors tackling a similar subject in their own inimitable ways. I couldn’t ask for a more delicious pairing!