Gah, I’m still missing a few authors. @.@ Carr and Agatha. Although does anyone really need me to do a write-up on Agatha Christie…?
Very cool! How did you come to know Ho-Ling?
Is 水車館の殺人 a true sequel? I don’t know much about the books in the series, sadly.
Dang, I haven’t thought about those books in forever. It’s eye-opening to hear them called children’s books; I felt very proud and grown-up when I was reading those in middle school. XD
I’m not sure if they’re actually meant for children, but my parents had no issue with me checking them out endlessly from the library I think it’s similar to how when doing the informal book club for 三毛猫ホームズの推理 someone mentioned a Japanese person saying they read it in middle school (…was that person me? I vaguely remember talking to a woman about that book series… ) Despite the plot including a prostitution ring and abortion
The moral of the story is that if you don’t want kids reading your books, don’t put cats on the cover.
Might have been me? I had once made a thread asking for mystery recommendations and this person told me about the book and how they loved it in secondary school. The cover is quite misleading too.
I’ve never read them, I’m afraid, but now I’m curious. Would they be appropriate for an 11-year old who loves cats and mysteries? I may know someone
Ah yes, it might have been you! I talk about books with so many people and read book reviews on top of it so after awhile details like that get blurred
I read it at around that age, I don’t recall it being graphic. There’s questionably legal read alouds of several of the books on YouTube if you want to quickly scope out the content.
It’s been so long since I read them; I don’t remember being horribly scarred by anything, at least. My mom, a middle school teacher at the time, was also reading them, and probably would’ve stopped me if there were anything inappropriate in them.
We’re not super close, but since we both blog about Japanese mysteries (to varying degrees) we talk sometimes on each other’s blogs and I sometimes ask him for some notes or recommendations on Twitter! I’m probably the only mystery blog in existence (or in our own little circle) besides his own that has covered video games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, the only mystery blog besides his own to cover Japanese mystery drama like Furuhata Ninzaburou and アリバイ崩し承ります, and one of the only mystery blogs aside from Ho-Ling’s and another friend of ours to cover manga like Detective Conan, and Kindaichi Case Files, so I imagine it was just our mutual appreciation for inter-media mystery fiction. We also met in the Ace Attorney Discord server, where we talked about The Great Ace Attorney 2’s habit of flagrant plagiarism. He put me on his blog roll, and there are very few blogs on there so honestly I’m honored!
While Christie is the only one of those who are the Golden Age (Doyle is pre-Golden Age and not puzzle-oriented, and Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys are post-Golden Age), they’re all good mysteries! Agatha Christie always holds up, so I’m glad you fell back in love with the genre!
Guilty pleasure watching That and 警視庁・捜査一課長 are my go-tos for formulaic crime shows.
I mean this says it all...
If you watch many JP dramas I’m sure brandon (creator of this site) would like your input on perceived difficulty. The next major feature for Natively is audio/visual difficulty media ranking.
Oh sorry, should have been more clear. Didn’t mean to say they were all golden age, just that it’s my favorite as well. Was sharing my own scattered introduction to mystery.
No, I’m sorry. Pointing that out made me feel like an absolute know-it-all. It was unnecessary and I felt bad immediately. It’s a very good way to get introduced to mystery, that’s for sure!
I’m afraid the dramas were all watched with subtitles (embarrassing, I know!), but I do watch a lot of them and can try and go back and watch them with no subtitles, but I wouldn’t be a lot of help in gauging difficulty!
Here are the dramas I have on my Plex server right now! I wish there were more original honkaku mystery dramas that weren’t adaptations of popular story series, but I’ll take what I can get for the time being… There are a few others I intend to add at some point.
Not at all! Before I got my listening up to a level I could manage native content at I certainly didn’t stop watching the things I liked!
I’ve read the book the after-dinner mystery is based on, and I saw Galileo a long time ago, obviously a fan of Furuhata, but the rest I haven’t seen! I tried watching Criminologist Himura at one point but couldn’t get into it unfortunately. I’m not familiar with Plex, but googling it looks like a streaming service and/or a place to host your own media? Are you familiar with Viki already? They’ve currently got ミステリーという勿れ and one or two other Japanese mystery/crime shows right now, and a whole bunch of non-Japanese ones. It seems like you’ve been around the Japanese fan web a lot already so might be old news, but always like to mention just in case
有栖川有栖 is a fantastic author, but it seems like Student Alice is where he does his best work. Writer Alice seems to be a lot less consistent, sadly. There’s a few really good episodes in Himura, but overall it’s pretty inconsistent.
Yeah, it’s essentially Build-a-Bearing your own personal streaming service! And yes, I am familiar with Viki, but I don’t use it often! I’ve heard of ミステリーとい勿れ from, of all people, my Japanese professor! She was aware of my fascination with mysteries and my interest in becoming a Japanese-language mystery author, so she sometimes recommends random mystery media she knows.
This is getting off-topic, so you can feel free to dm me if needed, but I’m extremely curious about this. I really enjoyed my time with TGA2’s English release, and hadn’t heard of accusations of plagiarism.
Yeah, I’ll DM you and anyone else who might be interested. I wonder if Ho-Ling was just relieved to find the single other person who recognized the stories being pilfered. By the way, 1-1 (game 1, case 1), 1-4, and 2-3 all also borrow heavily from different stories!
Prooooobably not the way you’re thinking of it. Ayatsuji has an entire 「館」mystery series. The recurring detective is Shimada, and they all take place in 館 built by Seiji Nakamura. The plot involving the students in Decagon is not continued.
Wait, what? The (spoiler for Decagon)same Shimada we’ve spent the whole book suspecting? And all the buildings in the series are built by Seiji Nakamura, you say? What a strange device to build you series of mystery novels around. Kill off your architect in a freak mass murder, still not completely solved as far as I’m concerned, then make all his strange buildings a scene for more (murder) mysteries. Now I’m extremely curious to see how this manages to not get extremely repetitive. Is the mystery of Seiji’s death revisited at all in later books, or should we consider it solved?
Ho-Ling publishes with/through Locked Room International. I can certainly understand thinking they’re self-pushed based on the quality of the covers, but… they’re not, they’re ‘official’
It’s eye-opening to hear them called children’s books; I felt very proud and grown-up when I was reading those in middle school. XD
I think it’s similar to how when doing the informal book club for 三毛猫ホームズの推理 someone mentioned a Japanese person saying they read it in middle school (…was that person me? I vaguely remember talking to a woman about that book series… 
) Despite the plot including 
That and 警視庁・捜査一課長 are my go-tos for formulaic crime shows.
It’s a very good way to get introduced to mystery, that’s for sure!
There’s a few really good episodes in Himura, but overall it’s pretty inconsistent.
