Characters also geek out over mysteries our first introduction to the students has Ellery talking about how strongly he prefers mysteries that are intellectual puzzles, and Carr accuses him of being elitist. The character names are based on famous writers the students have taken on mystery writer nicknames, like Ellery, Agatha, and Poe. The book is a love letter to Golden Age Detective Fiction. And then the deaths proceed from there.Īs a piece of literature, it’s top-notch. The island was then sold to someone whose nephew is in the mystery club, and the students decide it would be a great spot for their get-together.Įxcept that the second day of their trip, they wake up to find seven plastic nameplates with the labels First Victim, Second Victim, and so on to Fifth Victim, with the final two plates labelled Detective and Murderer. Six months before the students go to the island, the architect, his wife, and two servants are all murdered, and the Blue Mansion is burned down. The house, so-called for its shape, was built 20 years ago by a reclusive architect as an annex to his own home, the Blue Mansion. Seven university students, who all belong to a club of mystery-lovers, travel to a remote island to spend a week at the Decagon House. It’s a locked room mystery that clearly takes its inspiration from Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Crime Reads has a great primer to the genre.įor my first honkaku mystery, I selected The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji. Like Christie and her peers, these Japanese writers followed the principle of ‘fair play’ - they crafted intricately woven puzzles, but provided all the clues within the text, so that the reader had everything they needed to solve the mystery themselves. Writers within this genre take their inspiration from Golden Age detective fiction. Seriously, though, I’d heard of a Japanese literary movement called honkaku (and later, shin honkaku) mysteries. After all, I didn’t want to get so used to Christie’s style that I could pick out her storytelling tricks and solve her mysteries with my eyes closed. So I decided to take a mini-break from Agatha Christie and try my hand at solving a case from a different writer.
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