Scan barcode
A review by littoral
The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji
2.0
For full disclosure, I picked up The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji for one proximal reason - I saw an e-ARC for The Mill House Murders by the same author become available, and thought I’d read the two together (look out for that review tomorrow). But further than that, our family is a great fan of Golden Age mysteries, particularly of the locked room variety - my childhood copy of And Then There Were None has been read at least 10 times - and I was curious how the locked room mystery would translate across cultures and time.
At its surface level, The Decagon House Murders is an homage to that same spirit of Golden Age mystery, and self-consciously references it. The premise: members of the K- University Mystery Club, each named after some of the great mystery writers (Agatha, Carr, Ellery, etc) venture for a retreat on an island on which four unsolved murders occurred, only to start themselves turning up dead, and they must work together to solve the mystery before it’s too late. The plot includes the common tropes - an isolated island, locked rooms - and even does this in duplicate - with the readers and the Mystery Club solving both the four unsolved murders of the past, and the ongoing murders of the present in parallel.
Ultimately, though, the author’s vision for this book appears to exceed his ability to execute it. The homages to the Golden Age writers feels like the author is winking knowingly at the reader. While this could have worked with a playful tone, the author is serious - perhaps too serious throughout, for a book marked to adults about young adult detectives. More damningly, the identity of the murderer (the whodunit) is predictable and yet the final solution (the howdunit) strains credulity, and I found the ending to be unsatisfying.
In the end, I can recommend The Decagon House Murders only to a true completionist fan of locked room mysteries or Japanese locked room mysteries. There are better examples of the genre out there - including Ayatsuji’s next installment, The Mill House Murders.
At its surface level, The Decagon House Murders is an homage to that same spirit of Golden Age mystery, and self-consciously references it. The premise: members of the K- University Mystery Club, each named after some of the great mystery writers (Agatha, Carr, Ellery, etc) venture for a retreat on an island on which four unsolved murders occurred, only to start themselves turning up dead, and they must work together to solve the mystery before it’s too late. The plot includes the common tropes - an isolated island, locked rooms - and even does this in duplicate - with the readers and the Mystery Club solving both the four unsolved murders of the past, and the ongoing murders of the present in parallel.
Ultimately, though, the author’s vision for this book appears to exceed his ability to execute it. The homages to the Golden Age writers feels like the author is winking knowingly at the reader. While this could have worked with a playful tone, the author is serious - perhaps too serious throughout, for a book marked to adults about young adult detectives. More damningly, the identity of the murderer (the whodunit) is predictable and yet the final solution (the howdunit) strains credulity, and I found the ending to be unsatisfying.
In the end, I can recommend The Decagon House Murders only to a true completionist fan of locked room mysteries or Japanese locked room mysteries. There are better examples of the genre out there - including Ayatsuji’s next installment, The Mill House Murders.