Rasdhar

 Japanese honkaku (tr: orthodox) mysteries are structured around rules of deductive reasoning. Through the strategic disclosures of clues, the author leads a careful and attentive reader to the book???s conclusion, sometimes around a twist as well. Honkaku novels emerged in the 1920s, in direct response to the western ???Golden Age??? of detective fiction (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, etc). Pushkin Vertigo has been translating these to English of late, and last year I read several of them. This book, The Aosawa Murders, by Riku Onda, is part of a newer generation of shin honkaku novels, which advocate a return to this classical style of mystery novels, with ???fair play to the reader??? as a guiding principle. 

In The Aosawa Murders, the identity of the killer is made clear quite early on; you are told that they were identified but killed themselves before they could be convicted. Initially it looks like the mystery we???re untangling is not who did it, but why they did it ??? but by the end of the book, you???re once again asking, was it really that person???s fault? Or was another hand involved? 

This complex story is also narrated in the form of a book about a book about the murder. We are told early on that the crime being investigated is the mass murder of the rich, well-known Aosawa family, through poison delivered in the form of a gift of bottled drinks at a multigenerational birthday celebration. Twenty-seven people are killed, leaving only a housekeeper, who swallows some poison but survives, and young Hisako Aosawa, the beautiful, visually-impaired daughter of the family, who didn???t drink anything. The delivery man, thought to be the killer, is tracked down by detectives, but not before he has already committed suicide. Decades later, Makiko Saiga, a neighbour and one of Hisako???s many admirer-friends, writes a book about the murders, trying to uncover why a seemingly unconnected man would want to kill so many people in an apparently motive-less crime. Her book, The Forgotten Festival, is the only thing she ever publishes, a deeply-researched nonfiction account that has since been forgotten. A few decades later, the Aosawa Murders is purportedly a book about this book, looking back at the events of the murder, the book that followed, retracing Makiko's steps, and re-examining the clues that have since emerged. 

If this sounds too complex, it doesn???t feel that way when you read it. Each chapter is in the form of an interview with the nameless author, who talks first to Makiko about her book, and then to various people involved, including the detectives, a friend of the killer, the housekeeper Kimi, the book's publisher, and finally, the beautiful Hisako herself. On first reading, the end of the story might seem ambiguous ??? but if you???ve been paying careful attention, and you go back, all the little clues fall into place, and you???ll know exactly what happened, even if the author hasn???t laid out explicitly in so many words. The careful, attentive reader is rewarded (which explains so many discontented Goodreads reviews). I enjoyed it. 

This book is about the healthcare industry, medical care, and wellness, chiefly in an American context.

I should clarify that I personally, staunchly stand by scientific research in this regard, and am dismayed by the rise of anti-vaccination movements, and the general distrust of medicine during Covid. Having said that, I do understand that the way healthcare is structured in the US, and more globally, the history of discrimination on gender, race, and sexuality in health care, do provide grounds for doubting the industry as a whole. There's a tension between these two concepts in Ehrenreich's book that she can't quite resolve, so she goes back and forth between “the insurance companies are making you take medicines you don't need” to “stop believing junk you read on the internet”. I believe the goal was to establish nuance, but her style is very anecdotal, and so easy to be skeptical about in itself. Even when she's debunking points, her tendency to draw conclusions based on singular examples that range from op-eds to twitter posts is very disconcerting. I'm not saying all writing should be data-driven, but surely claims about scientific research should be somewhat better sourced.

On the plus side, there's a lot of interesting fact and detail in the book that I wanted to follow up on. In particular, she discussed the work of Robert Trivers, a scientist, member of the Black Panther Party (they later ex-communicated him), and one of the first to identify the genetic stakes in parenthood. She referenced his book, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, which I immediately wanted to read. 

The book in general is quite glum. Her theme seems to be largely, ‘death is inevitable, why even bother'. Consider this excerpt: “So much then, for the hours - and years - you may have devoted to fitness. The muscles that have been so carefully sculpted and tone stiffen when calcium from the dead body leaks into them, causing rigor mortis, and loosening only when decomposition sets in. The organs we nurtured with superfoods and supplements abandon their appointed functions.....Everything devolves into a stinking pool, or what may sound even worse, a morsel in a rat's digestive system.” She wrote this book at 76, after surviving cancer, and deciding for herself that she was done with scans and checks and probes. I understand that she was tired. But this isn't a model for everyone, especially the young. While we are all going to die, we do have to live until death. The inevitability of death is no reason at all to give up on living, or living well. In an NYT review, Parul Sehgal wrote, “It???s reasonable, even honorable to so coolly make peace with the inevitable. But I confess wanting a bit more raging against the dying of the light.” I agree! 

Her characters remain absolutely insufferable as usual - they are largely one-dimensional (her heroines all have anxiety and complain a lot, her heroes have no personality but nice voices and nice eyes and many muscles). Look, I understand that the function of books like this is to let the reader project their own fantasies onto the minimally-developed characters, but having read good romance, I have a very low tolerance for bad romance. However, I have no one but myself to thank for subjecting myself to this, and cannot in all fairness, accuse her books of excessive whining (whinery?) if I am here whining about them too. 

I do think that she did try to tackle the typical ‘city girl goes to small town, falls in love with local carpenter, abandons evil career, discovers love and babies' trope, but the problem is that she keeps telling you how she's about to subvert it, and then she barely manages to. It would be really interesting to see the trope actually subverted by an author who understood that you can show without telling. 

 Earlier this year I read Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton, which is about a nurse named Hilda Adams. Perceptive, organised, and efficient, she occasionally assisted the police with delicate inquiries, enabled by her work providing at-home care, usually to the very rich. Her usual partner in these efforts was Inspector Fuller, a policeman who vociferously defended her talents to all doubters, insisting she was as effective as any of his policemen. Fuller affectionately calls her ???Miss Pinkerton??? for her detection skills.

The Haunted Lady is the fourth, and last of Rinehart's Hilda Adams novels. She did have a small run of short stories to follow, but the series ended here. It really is a shame that we got so few of these, because they are quite charming, and on the whole manage to avoid the common pitfalls of mid-century mystery novels such as overt anti-Semitism, classism, sexism, and racism. I say “on the whole” because these books are, after all, a product of a certain time and era and it's a bit hopeless to expect them to reflect our sentiments today. But problems, as there are, are less obvious than those I encountered in books by Ngaio Marsh or Agatha Christie, for example. Really the only jarring note in this book is when Inspector Fuller says he'd like to take Hilda over his knee after she does something that puts herself at risk - the kind of thing that might happen in I Love Lucy. I know it's meant playfully and is supposed to show how he's concerned about her and also, that it doesn't actually happen (she'd kick his ass) , but I still didn't like it, even as a joke. What I did like most about these books is Hilda's inner conflict: she's constantly torn between feeling revulsed at poking around the private lives of people she's meant to care for, and at the same time, her strong commitment to seeing justice done in the face of crime. It lends the books a nice depth and tension that a boilerplate mystery might lack.

In The Haunted Lady, an elderly, wealthy woman named Mrs. Eliza Fairbanks is perturbed by a series of occurrences in her house. She hears odd noises, finds rats and snakes released in her chamber, and finds her belongings disturbed despite locking her door. Given her age, most people assume that she???s approaching senility, or is paranoid. Mrs Fairbanks, though, is strong-willed, decisive, and firm, and insists she isn???t imagining things. When the sugar for her strawberries is found to be laced with arsenic, she is finally taken seriously. Inspector Fuller of Scotland Yard calls up Miss Hilda Adams, the efficient, observant nurse, and asks her if she will stay at the Fairbanks residence and keep an eye on the old lady, while they try to find out what is happening. 

At the Fairbanks House, Hilda finds a whole cast of suspects. There???s Marian, Eliza???s daughter, who divorced her unfaithful husband, resulting in scandal and ire from Eliza. There???s Frank, Marian???s husband, now married to their former governess, Eileen, who is broke and still paying alimony. There???s Jan, their daughter, seemingly the only guardian of Eliza???s welfare, but Jan is in love with Eliza???s doctor, and they both need money to get started in life. Of course, there???s the doctor too. And then there???s Eliza???s son and daughter-in-law, weak-willed, impoverished Carlton, and Susie, his gauche, ill-mannered wife, who need money as well. When Eliza Fairbanks, who holds the purse strings, is stabbed inside her locked room, Inspector Fuller and Miss Hilda Adams have to figure out who it was that killed her ??? and how? 

The mystery is of the ???had I but known??? variety, combined with a standard locked-room setup, with plenty of clues sprinkled in to aid the reader, but still a satisfying twist at the end. It???s actually Hilda who does most of the detecting, putting herself at risk sometimes, and amassing a series of clues. When she explains it at the end to Inspector Fuller, he is mixed with frustration and admiration and perhaps something more. ???Oh, subtle little Miss Pinkerton!??? he tells her. ???Lovable and clever and entirely terrible Miss Pinkerton! What I am to do about you? I???m afraid to take you and I can???t leave you alone.??? The reader may well agree. I really enjoyed it.