The Decagon House Murders
Ratings42
Average rating3.6
15
Ratings42
Average rating3.6
Discover the classic Japanese locked-room murder mystery, hailed as one of the best mystery books of all time by Town & Country and Esquire—now available in English!
“A thrilling homage to [Agatha Christie’s] And Then There Were None,” a detective fiction club gathers on and isolated island—the site of a 10-sided house and a spate of unsolved murders (Guardian).
Taking its cues from Agatha Christie’s locked-room classic And Then There Were None, the setup is this: The members of a university detective-fiction club, each nicknamed for a favorite crime writer (Poe, Carr, Orczy, Van Queen, Leroux and — yes—Christie), spend a week on remote Tsunojima Island, attracted to the place, and its eerie 10-sided house, because of a spate of murders that transpired the year before. That collective curiosity will, of course, be their undoing.
As the students approach Tsunojima in a hired fishing boat, ‘the sunlight shining down turned the rippling waves to silver. The island lay ahead of them, wrapped in a misty veil of dust,’ its sheer, dark cliffs rising straight out of the sea, accessible by one small inlet. There is no electricity on the island, and no telephones, either.
A fresh round of violent deaths begins, and Ayatsuji’s skillful, furious pacing propels the narrative. As the students are picked off one by one, he weaves in the story of the mainland investigation of the earlier murders. This is a homage to Golden Age detective fiction, but it’s also unabashed entertainment, leading to a jaw-dropping reveal you won’t see coming.
Reviews with the most likes.
From the newly-revived school of Japanese puzzle mysteries. The writing is flat and the characters are uninteresting and a little weird.
this had me shaking in terror but unable to put it down because i was so confident i knew who the killer was... READER, SHE WAS WRONG
One sentence synopsis... Members of a university detective club visit a deserted island which was the site of a quadruple murder-suicide the year before and start being picked off one by one.
Read it if you like... Agatha Christie: the book is loosely based on ‘And Then There Were None'. Fair play detective stories: the answers are there all along if you're paying attention, no stupid twists at the last minute to reveal disappointing murderers. Or cult-classic Japanese mystery fiction: the characters are one dimensional, the writing is sparse, and it's all completely intentional. The book belongs in the shin honkaku genre of Japanese mysteries, a genre defined by the reader's ability to plausibly solve it.
Dream casting... Will Sharpe as Ellery and Yōsuke Kubozuka as Shimada.
Oh my gosh, I loved this. It was such a fun tribute to the Golden Age mysteries while being completely different. I was guessing the entire time and even with the first reveal I figured it was something else. This was so well done. I hope my library buys more of these Honkaku mysteries.
Featured Series
2 primary books館シリーズ is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 1987 with contributions by Yukito Ayatsuji and Ho-Ling Wong.
