The Intermittent LRI Blog

In February 1936, Heikichi Umezawa, a demented artist, is found dead inside his studio, barred from the inside. Paintings with Zodiac themes are stacked against the walls and a letter from him, filled with alchemy and astrology references, is found in a drawer. In it, he details his plan to slaughter his six nieces and daughters and create Azoth, the perfect woman, from body parts removed from each of them. Fortunately, it appears that he was murdered before he could execute his insane plan….

… But, in the weeks following his death, his stepdaughter is raped and murdered and the police begin to discover the corpses of the six Umezawa women buried all over Japan, each apparently poisoned by a different alchemic element and each missing a vital body part. A Japanese Dr. Frankenstein seems to have carried out Heikichi’s mad project, yet Azoth herself is never found and the killer is never unmasked, despite the outpouring of theories provoked by the nationwide revulsion to the crimes. On the surface, they were the fruit of a diseased mind, a serial killer, but were they really…?

In 1979, a young fortune-teller, astrologer and amateur detective, Kyoshi Mitarai, takes a rash bet that he can solve in one week a mystery that has eluded all efforts over more than forty years. He succeeds and unmasks the diabolical killer and the extraordinarily clever plot, featuring possibly the finest red herring in all detective fiction.

Despite its magical and horrific overtones, this is a work of classical detection and a locked room mystery. It launched a revival of the Golden Age style (honkaku) in Japan (and, incidentally, introduced the serial killer theme one year before Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon.)

LRI is privileged to republish “TTZM.” Take advantage of this unique opportunity to acquire a personalized signed copy of this acknowledged masterpiece, dedicated to whomever you wish: contact me at pugmire1@yahoo.com before June 15.

LRI continues its Spring Offensive with the second of the four books promised: Paul Halter’s The Invisible Circle. You can think of it as The Knights of the Round Table meet The Ten Little Indians….

Seven people receive invitations to a ‘singular experience’ during a weekend in Cornwall in a castle reputedly built on the site of King Arthur’s, and situated on an island tenuously connected to the mainland. The sinister host announces that a murder will be committed that night, shows them a sword embedded in a stone (which none of them is able to pull out) and a golden chalice which he claims is the Holy Grail sought by the Knights of the Round Table. 

Thus begins a nightmarish series of events including impossible murders, the disappearance of the Grail, and communication with the mainland cut off. Has the vengeful king indeed returned? And is there any connection to the recent release of the host’s homicidal half-brother? The plot, one of Paul Halter’s most convoluted, is great fun.

As is our wont, Paul and I conversed almost weekly on the text, because I needed to understand the layout of the island, which is crucial to the plot. Eventually, in desperation, the maestro sent me a hand-drawn sketch which I will include in every order of a signed and lettered (S&L) copy.

Now on to the Derek Smith Omnibus and The Tokyo Zodiac Murders….

Well, I did say this blog would be intermittent…. But a number of interesting things have happened lately and have only just reached the point where I can comment publicly.
First comes an amazing book featuring a drug-taking, misanthropic private detective who helps the police and who is notable for his keen gift of observation and his powers of logical deduction. He is a master of disguise and has a complete grasp of the chemistry and forensic science of the period. His audacious exploits are chronicled by his friend, a doctor. Who else could it be but…Maximilien Heller. This Parisian detective appeared in 1871— 16 years before Sherlock Holmes showed up. The Killing Needle will be out in May and readers may judge for themselves how much Conan Doyle might have been influenced. Incidentally, it’s also the first occurrence of a now classical locked room trick. Secondly, the great Paul Halter has produced a marvelous romp wherein a number of unsuspecting potential victims are lured to a remote island-peninsula claimed to have been built on the site of King Arthur’s original castle. Needless to say, the visitors start to get bumped off in impossible ways, the prime suspect being the ghost of the vengeful king–or perhaps a recently released homicidal maniac. You can rely on Paul to provide a rational–and fiendishly clever–solution. The Invisible Circle appears mid-June.

Thirdly, by kind permission of Douglas Greene, LRI will be publishing an omnibus of Derek Smith’s work. Derek is best known for Whistle Up the Devil, which appears in many lists as one of the very best locked room mysteries ever written. You can’t find a hardcover for less than $40, and the other two books in the collection aren’t even on the market: Come to Paddington Fair was published privately in Japan only, and Model for Murder was never published (it was written as a Sexton Blake story). Doug, who knew Derek, didn’t find out until late last year that he had been bequeathed the rights to all his literary works, because the executors neglected to tell him! (I know the I in LRI stands for International, but international doesn’t exclude English.) The omnibus will be out in July with a foreword by Bob Adey.

Fourthly, I was privileged this month to meet the great Shimada Soji who was visiting New York (more about that in another blog) I’m delighted to say that LRI will be reprinting his masterpiece The Tokyo Zodiac Murders in the late summer. Soji is credited with launching the revival of the classic Golden Age mystery style in Japan through the honkaku (orthodox) movement. Its success can be measured by the sheer volume of mystery novels (mostly impossible crimes) pouring out every year and the mangas. Even children and young adults have the bug (e.g. Case Closed). You can find plenty of copies of TTZM for under $10, which is fine for anyone reading French, Chinese or Vietnamese. It gets a little trickier if you want it in English. One hardcover copy is being offered for 2400 UK Pounds–postage not included! This will be the first English trade paperback edition. We also discussed a lot of future plans which could lead to some great reading in the future but cannot be revealed for now. 

Fifthly, as can be seen from the home page, The Lord of Misrule, the first LRI publication, is the only book without a cover illustration, which irks collectors. We shall be rectifying that in the Fall with a typically crude-and-clunky LRI style cover. What is the method behind the madness, I hear you ask? I sketch out a suggested cover layout in stick-man form and the illustrator, the other great contemporary impossible crime master, Paul Halter, creates the cover. Quel homme! Truly a Renaissance man. 

Sixthly, I’ve penciled in a plan for fourth quarter release of an impossible crime anthology including 20 or so short stories from around the world. I’ve been working on it with a friend and drinking partner for quite a while and hopefully this will be the year. One obstacle has been rights issues which, as you can well imagine, get pretty complicated if you’re dealing with overseas rights organizations–and I don’t mean Amnesty International. Most of the stories have never appeared in English-language anthologies.

Seventhly, I have an agreement with Paul Halter, to translate and publish two novels a year, the next one in the series beingThe Blurred Image. Twist and Hurst fans will be pleased to learn of their return. The first Halter book in 2015 will be The Phantom Passage, featuring Owen Burns.
Turning to another publisher, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, two noteworthy stories are due out later in the year. The Ghost of the Badminton Court by Szu-Yen Lin is set in Taiwan and is planned for the August issue. The Lure of the Green Door by Norizuki Rentarou is frequently cited as one of the best Japanese impossible crime short stories. Hopefully it will appear in the November issue, but there have been contract issues and it is not a foregone conclusion. I recently submitted a brand new Halter short and another Shimada story and hope to be able to report on them in another blog.

Paul Halter’s collection of short stories came out in 2006 in hardcover and trade paperback format, published by Wildside Press, to whom I shall be eternally grateful for taking the risk and allowing the Anglophone world to finally appreciate his work. Despite critical acclaim, and one of the stories (“The Flower Girl”) being short-listed for the Barry Award for best mystery short story, Wildside declined to publish any Halter novels.

After many more rejections from publishers, I learned about self-publishing and print-on-demand from a Wall Street article and decided to have a go with The Lord of Misrule. I chose that novel because, even though I like it a lot, it doesn’t get rated as one of Halter’s best and I was still nurturing the hope of a ‘real publisher’ picking up his novels: anything I had just published myself would obviously be ruled out. That turned out to be irrelevant, because the mainstream publishing houses still didn’t believe there was a market for Golden Age locked-room mysteries (see the interview with Little Brown in Miles Jupp in a Locked Room. (When The Crimson Fog appeared ahead of Little Brown’s books in Publisher’s Weekly’s Top Mysteries of 2013, I emailed Dan Cole and asked him if they were now considering publishing Paul Halter. He hasn’t replied and I’m not holding my breath…)

The Lord of Misrule had a really tacky cover, but when Paul and I decided The Fourth Door would be the next novel in English, he came up with a great cover picture. I selected a different cover template, one in which the title did not obliterate the image, and the resultant LRI style has been used for all the subsequent novels.

When we met in Paris, we decided it was time to republish The Night of the Wolf (a) to create an e-book version and (b) to re-issue the tpb in the same style as the novels. The great thing about print-on-demand is that you can make this kind of decision with almost zero up-font cost (and the books never go out of print.) So, voila! (Actually, not as voila as I would have liked because technical problems delayed publication until three days before Christmas–there, I wrote the C-word)

Incidentally, Paul now has his own self-publishing company Eurydice, and we are going to try and synchronize publication of English-language and French-language titles, including some that weren’t written by Paul Halter. That will probably include republishing The Lord of Misrule in the LRI style. For those who are interested, I usually produce a rough sketch for the cover and Paul,who is adept at Photoshop creates the finished article.

The February 2014 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine is out already and contains one of his very best:
Jacob’s Ladder. A religious fanatic has periodic dreams of ascending Jacob’s Ladder to heaven. One day, his brother, inside the house, hears him cry that the moment has arrived. When the brother hears a heavy thud, he rushes out and finds his brother’s crushed body on the ground. The medical examiner says the injuries are consistent with a fall from a great height, yet there is not a tree or a building within miles high enough to explain the injuries….

I’m currently translating Paul Halter’s contribution to the Jack the Ripper canon: Le Brouillard rouge. Normally, I do two Halter books a year, which appear in June and December. This one will also follow the same pattern, meaning the book will come out in December, but I am working on an accelerated schedule in the hopes of getting a review in Publisher’s Weekly to coincide with the publication of the novel. To do that, I have to submit a preliminary copy of the whole book to PW by early September. The reason I’m hopeful something will come of it is because of the fine article that Lenny Picker wrote for them back in April: Ripping Yarns which effectively pre-announced the book.

However “Rien n’est simple” as the French say (nothing is simple): in the rush to meet the deadline for the article and include a cover shot, I had to go with a literal translation of the title, namely The Red Fog.

Now, as it happens, I don’t like that title. The French title has four syllables and a certain ring to it. The Red Fog has only three and sounds flat and pedestrian to me. Alternatives could be The Crimson Fog, crimson being chromatically the closes color to blood, or The Scarlet Fog which sounds slightly more sinister.. Or even The Vermilion Fog?

Suggestions are welcome.