Finished this weeks chapter! ….I might just keep on reading….(but I’m really slow at reading this so it will still probably take me until Sunday anyway )
Very fun getting to click on all of the spoilers now! After reading @omk3 ‘s big speculation post I hadn’t really considered one of the murdered ones actually still being alive but now you have me thinking . Poe and Orczy were set up as close friends right? Maybe they suspected the others and so Poe helped her fake her own death and she is the actual detective? This is a very far out theory hahah but like others I’m not 100% buying Ellery as the detective.
It it makes yall feel better I realized I have to open the thread Friday night my time (rather than Sunday night my time) because I’m going to be traveling and don’t know for sure when I’ll be at a computer. Typing replies on mobile is fine, but opening the threads is a bit involved with lots of copy/paste and linking
It makes me feel a tiny bit worse, since I won’t be able to start reading before Saturday at the earliest, so I expect to finish later than most. Still, I guess it doesn’t matter much now. We’ve arrived at the final solution, so no more fun speculation, only comments on how much or little we expected it.
Just finished part 8. Dang it, why did Poe have to die? I was kind of hoping it would be Ellery…
And I’m kind of wondering now (after reading a page of part 9), just how easy it is to smear all this deadly poison over everyday objects. Like, how long does it keep? Wouldn’t it be difficult to put poison on a cigarette? I guess you’d only need to put it on the part you stick in your mouth, but I’m surprised it apparently gave off no odor? Unless the the smell of smoke was covering everything up, I suppose, but I would’ve thought the odor would be all over the container now.
Ellery theorizes the perp used a syringe to get the poison in the cigarette, but… would that work? Can you actually poison someone that way? Not sure if I want to Google this or not.
Reading through your big theory/thoughts post was really interesting, @omk3. There’s definitely some food for thought there. I totally agree that Van is suspiciously un-suspicious, same as 守須. Man, wouldn’t it be fun if they were the same person? Completely undoable, sadly. I’m also wondering if, along with your observations on why seemingly-specific people’s hands were taken, the fact that the vast majority of our college victims were poisoned is important. Like, is it just a a matter of convenience? Or is there a deeper reason? I don’t recall any of the original victims of 青司’s massacre dying via poison, so maybe not?
Did anyone else find it morbidly funny how Ellery was just like, “oh yeah, you don’t remember 千織?” Like, you couldn’t have brought that up before? And speaking of, I guess 中村 is supposed to be a really common name, given that no one else besides him and オルツィ made any connection between 千織 and the brutal massacre at the island they’re staying at?
I didn’t consider the gardener to be the dead body when reading, but that would clear up his disappearance nicely. The only thing I’m wondering is if the timeline works out. How long ago was the massacre? A couple of years? The body was only partly skeletonized, when I would have expected complete skeletonization by this point, but it was apparently shut up in a concrete room for probably a while, so that could’ve slowed things down.
Probably gonna start next week’s reading tomorrow, as per usual. Basically the same number of pages as this week, but I’m hoping it’ll feel a little faster with more chapter breaks. The little mid-chapter ones don’t do it for me, for whatever reason.
It’s right when 江南 walks in 紅次朗’s house and 島田 hears he’s from the mystery club. He stands up too fast and the rocking chair hits him in the foot. Of course it may be there just for comedy, not that there’s too much comedy in the book otherwise
No, but all of them (I’m pretty sure) had been given a dose of sleeping pills. I’ve been suspecting that the students are also being similarly drugged, because they keep getting up late and not noticing any comings or goings during the night. Of course, students getting up late is only normal, but they keep commenting on it, don’t they?
Six months only. September last year, and now it’s March. 千織 was January last year.
I thought it looked just right for its age, but I’m not very well versed in such stuff (or the good question you asked about poisons). However, I think @cat might be our resident expert, what with having read Stiff and similar books if I remember correctly?
(I would google for an answer but no way am I wading through the horrible results that are sure to come up)
I’m known for reading books on corpses I doubt the author did any particular research, but iirc there was no smell prior to opening the door? Plus it’s underground which means a bit cooler, no animals, and it was there roughly 6 months. IMO it should still be pretty well decomposed and dry and likely not a ‘lump of meat’ or however they described it, but with artistic license, yeah, I imagine the goal is to point at this being someone from the original massacre.
This is all guesswork off what I remember from reading about the decomp process though. Grain of salt and all that, and well, artistic license for the author
[quote=“eefara, post:18, topic:1498”]Ellery theorizes the perp used a syringe to get the poison in the cigarette, but… would that work? Can you actually poison someone that way?
[/quote]
I don’t know if it would work in the real world but I’ve definitely seen it used in detective novels/shows etc! So plausible enough for this at least
True, if it was a cool, well sealed room like it was described, I’d expect it to be more mummified than horribly decomposed. If there was soil around though, it probably checks out. Either artistic license, or the author is trying to imply that the body was moved from elsewhere?
PS. I’ve been wanting to read Stiff for the longest time, but I never got around to it. Which is why I noticed when you mentioned it
Ok so I had to research this and this is gonna be kinda stream of conciousness while I do so:
Hydrogen cyanide, which smells like almonds (which btw, my favorite smell is almond extract. Dunno what that says about me ) is a liquid which boils at a measly 25.6C / 78F. Immediately the cigarette one is suspect for two reasons:
Wouldn’t you notice if your cigarette was wet?
Wouldn’t igniting the cigarette cause the cyanide to boil off? It’s lighter than air too so it’d just float off and away
Also re: the cup - wouldn’t pouring coffee on it cause it to boil off?
However! Sodium cyanide and potassium cyanide are also said to smell like almonds and they’re powders. I swear they’ve been saying 青酸 though which is hydrogen cyanide specifically.
But this aside I am super skeptical that you could get cyanide poisoning from the small amount that would go on your lips - you ideally shouldn’t be eating it, ya know? And if you do, only a tiny amount. But, technically, dermal absorption is listed as a method through which a toxic dose can be ‘consumed’.
So I looked up the LD50 and found this:
The LD50 of cyanide for ingestion is 1-3 mg/ kg of body weight in humans. The LD50 for direct contact is 100 mg/kg of body weight in humans.
So I then looked up the average weight of Japanese men and women. I had trouble finding something specifically for the 1980s in a casual search but per this page the current average for women age ~24 is 50.9kg and for men of the same age it’s 63.9kg.
So to kill アガサ via ‘direct contact’ we’d need her to apply at least 5090mg of cyanide (or: just over 5 grams) and ポウ would need to ingest somewhere between 63.9mg and 191.7mg. ポウ seems feasible, アガサ does not. 5 grams is a lot! Google tells me the average lipstick bullet (the actual makeup bit) is usually between 2.5 - 4.3 grams.
Anyways now my google search history looks major sus so hopefully no one around me dies from poisoning soon.
Very interesting. And thank you for doing all this research! About now is when I would usually say, “Oh, even more evidence ポウ is the murderer! He told them it’s cyanide when it’s really ____!” But that won’t work anymore…
… aand all caught up! Just in time. It’s currently the middle of the night and I’m seriously questioning my life choices So I’m just gonna preface this by saying that any incoherent ramblings might be a consequence of sleep deprivation
Honestly, I don’t dislike this Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve come across a ‘slow down your pulse enough to seem dead’ thing in fiction. Though I suppose it’s kinda hard to, like, look dead from up close. So maybe not. But on that topic - if I remember this right they all took a cigarette from Poe, right? So this is like the cup situation all over again. If the killer is someone from the group, how did he make sure to not pick a poisoned cigarette?
(Also, after the incident with the lipstick, it was just so odd of them to not even consider that other personal things might be poisoned too. Just… not very smart )
Just to add to this - There was this thing about 青司’s money being all gone already by the time he died. How come?
Re: the body in the hidden cellar - if that’s the gardener, why on earth was the body in that room anyway? Kind of a strange place for the gardener to be, assuming he was killed there. Or, alternatively, a strange place to put the body (if he was dragged there afterwards). Everyone else was killed over by the main building, so… what’s the point?
And one more thing - So, if the culprit knows about the cup and the secret passage and everything, they must have been on the island before. And possibly have had a connection to the people who were living there, since I’d assume not anyone visiting there would learn about something like that.
I also kinda still stand by my theory that at least one of the students’ (likely the killer’s?) real name is gonna be relevant in some way, possbily because of a connection to the people involved in the 中村 case. I feel like that tracks - a personal connection to the gardener/the housekeepers/青司 or his family/whoever could potentially be part of the motive while at the same time explaining the background knowledge about the island.
I have no specific theories, though
Anyway. I kinda wanna throw a name out there just because. Last chance and everything… but I’m so conflicted
At this point I’m equally suspecting エラリー、守須、and 紅次朗. I suspect 島田 of something but he seems unlikely to be the murderer. Also who is 東一？！We still don’t know.
Also I just remembered that a book instagram account I follow was doing a Q&A and they said this book for their favorite mystery. I’m very curious how I’m going to feel about the ending here. I feel like my favorite mystery in Japanese is 硝子の塔の殺人 but it heavily references this book (and like…a bunch of other mystery books, haha)
I thought the point was to make sure the body was never found, making people assume the missing person would have to be the murderer. I also considered the possibility that whoever it is may have been trapped in there, possibly while hiding. That’s rather anticlimactic though - we have all those carefully planned murders, and then someone who just couldn’t come out of his secret hiding place? Doesn’t sound right.
Now I wonder who would have knowledge of this secret room. The architect of course, but would his wife know? His staff? His brother? And as I always wonder when I read about cleverly hidden rooms like that, didn’t a horde of builders have to actually construct them? Surely more people should know than just the owner.
So IIRC in Devil in the White City (which has had its historical veracity challenged I think, but hey, it was good reading) it was alleged that H. H. Holmes would repeatedly fire and hire new contractors so that no one had the full picture of what his house contained or what the purpose of any given room was.
Same, except I would throw ヴァン into the mix… I think a part of me just doesn’t want it to be エラリー
If I remember correctly 江南 talked to Hajime’s mom back in the beginning, in that case it’s unlikely to be ヴァン, since his parents aren’t alive. So if it’s not エラリー, that would leave the guys who are dead by now, but then it’d be kind of irrelevant. Then again, maybe it is irrelevant
My guess is エラリー though. He kinda has はじめ vibes
Ah, I see I guess I would have assumed that if 青司 was the killer back then he wouldn’t have really cared about framing anyone. Since he’d be dead anyway.
But then again I’m not super sold on 紅次朗’s version of the story yet anyway…
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. Poe and Orczy were set up as close friends right? Maybe they suspected the others and so Poe helped her fake her own death and she is the actual detective? This is a very far out theory hahah but like others I’m not 100% buying Ellery as the detective.
See you all in next week’s thread!
So I’m just gonna preface this by saying that any incoherent ramblings might be a consequence of sleep deprivation 
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