The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I read three of Seishi Yokomizo's translated works - The Honjin Murders, Death on Gokumon Island, The Inugami Clan. Thus far, I'd describe his style as "murder as a performance" - in each of these books, the murderers spend a great deal of time and effort staging the bodies as a way to "show off" to the audience and the other characters. This is true for other mystery writers, I think, but it's especially prominent here, and Yokomizo's culprits often have a sense of "fair play" in terms of their relationship to the detective; on some level, they want to be caught, I think, even when it's not conscious. Yokomizo is also keenly aware of Western detective conventions (explicitly discussing them in the first book) and responding to them, although he gets way less self-conscious about it after the first book. Anyway, it's a very different vibe from the Nero Wolfe novels, to say the least.

I would also say that The Honjin Murders very much has "first novel" vibes, and Yokomizo gets more comfortable as a writer and with the premise as he goes along. He is also not great with female characters, and has his own biases and stereotypes, but this is not unique, alas.

The cover art for the Pushkin Vertigo editions is memorable and striking, and includes character glossaries, all of which I appreciate. They've published at least two other translations, but I don't know if I'll be able to get a hold of them without taking additional steps. (Worldcat revamped their catalogue so you can't see what libraries hold what without making an account, and it's so irritating, ugh.)

Also apparently Seishi Yokomizo is a character in Bungou Stray Dogs, which makes him effectively unsearchable on tumblr without having to sort through pages and pages of his anime namesake. There is also a Steam game based on The Honjin Murders, although I don't think I have the capacity to play it right now until I get a new computer, which is true for most games at the moment.

On the Nero Wolfe front, I read Gambit, which is ostensibly about chess (but really isn't) and In the Best Families, which unexpectedly broke with the usual formula. One of the hazards of reading a long-running series out of order is that I missed the earlier books in the Arnold Zeck continuity, but he's basically the Moriarty to Wolfe's Holmes, so I figured it out pretty quickly.