The Decagon House Murders: And Then There Were None, Redone

"If only I could experience that for the first time again." It's one of the most human emotions in the world, one we feel about everything from Star Wars to seeing the ocean. Some experiences can never be re-lived and some might only be re-experienced with new perspective and older eyes. 

 

But The Decagon House Murders (by Yukito Ayatsuji, translated by Ho-Ling Wong) is that rarest of things - one that allows you to re-experience a classic all over again. It's a Japanese mystery novel, published in 1987 and released for English audiences in 2020. It became a cult classic in Japan, reinvigorating the literary appetite for puzzle-based mysteries.

 

The book revolves around members of a mystery book club at a Japanese university. They are fans of the 'golden age of detective novels', discussing the books, writing stories of their own, and going on trips together. Luckily for Western readers, and for readers who struggle with large casts, they only refer to each other by their club nicknames, all based on detective writers: Agatha, Doyle, Poe, etc.

 

(Interestingly this club actually exists at Kyoto University, and both the author and translator were members. The translator assures readers that they never killed anyone on a group trip; the author makes no such promise.)

Seven members of this club travel to an abandoned island, where they intend to stay for one week with no outside communication. The island is the site of a gruesome family murder, with only a decagon shaped summer-house left standing. They plan to relax, write stories for the upcoming club publication, and to 'investigate' the nearby atrocity. There is no electricity, no phone or radio, and (due to the shape of the house) nowhere to hide.

On the first morning, Orczy - a shy female member of the group - discovers seven decagon shaped plates on the central table. Five are marked 'victim', one is marked 'detective', and the final is marked 'murderer'. All deny being responsible, and paranoia begins to seep in. Is it a prank? A threat? Or the start of a silly game? Meanwhile back on the mainland, two members of the club who aren't on the trip have received letters accusing the club of a murder. 

And then, with these chilling final words, the chaos begins. 

They of course had no idea.

No idea that on the little island not far across the sea from the mainland, the parade of death was about to begin. 

If this sounds more-or-less like the plot of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, that's intentional. The book opens with a direct reference to the murderer in that novel, and the victims (and killer) are extremely familiar with the story. This means that every time you think you know how things work, you get tripped up. The characters on the mainland uncover facts that introduce new motives and possibilities, and the deaths in the house are less predictable, with many poisoned items planted in advance, being triggered by random victims at random times.

A knowledge of 'The Golden Age' of detective fiction enriches this story, but is not required. It basically covers the post-WW1 boom of detective fiction, when many famous authors banded together to form The Detection Club. They shared ideas, wrote together, and laid down the 'rules' of mystery fiction. The more famous of those rules are still quoted today - the reader must be given the information to solve the mystery, the murderer must be a character mentioned early on in the story, there can be no (real) supernatural elements, the detective cannot commit the crime, etc. Agatha Christie probably broke them all at some point.

I won't spoil whether this author follows them completely, but they certainly do in spirit. The killer reveal in this is so impossible, upturns everything we know so totally, that for a moment the reader cannot comprehend what they are being told. That said, as a magic-fan points out in the story, the 'reveal' of the nuts-and-bolts of a good trick is inevitably disappointing, even as you marvel at the ingenuity of it.

The writing is clean and fresh, and only a little dated in places (much attention is given to the mystery letters being written on a word processor). We learn a lot about the characters on the mainland but are intentionally given minimal details about the group on the island. We don't know their real names, or much else beyond their university subject and general appearance. Unlike And Then There Were None, these aren't selfish, in-fighting killers, but generally pleasant students who may once have done something thoughtless. We learn of them only through their interactions with the island and each other - yet I liked them enough to be saddened by their gruesome ends, and quite moved when their real names were eventually listed. In that moment, they stopped being pieces on a chess-board and returned to bright young people whose potential has been snuffed out.

At the start, I found myself thinking that the trip actually seemed quite fun, even as the reader in me shuddered at the foreshadowing. As someone who went on a group trip to a Swiss chalet in order to mourn the death of Sherlock Holmes, perhaps I could all too easily have been Victim One.