The Devotion of Suspect X
He is back. He has been resurrected many times. Different countries, different cultures, different personalities. But the DNA that enabled him to practice deduction as a science and logic as the ultimate criterion remains unchanged. But as the story progresses, another brilliant mind comes into focus, equally brilliant in deduction and inference. One may be reminded of Holmes and Prof. Moriarty of course, but unlike the original, they are best friends instead of enemies. And there is no Watson but Inspector Lestrade retains his post.
The book is The Devotion of Suspect X by Japanese author Kaigo Higashino. This was a best seller and not difficult to understand why after you read it. Tetsuya Ishigami is a mathematics teacher. Everyday, he goes to the school near his house and on the way, observes everybody and everything minutely. Yasuko Hanamakonda works in a restaurant near the school. Yasuko is Ishigami’s neighbour and lives with her daughter Misato. Yasuko is divorced bur her ex-husband still comes by and harasses her for money. One day he comes by, they fight and while fighting he is killed by the mother and the daughter. The murder takes place on page 20, you know who the killer is and how they did it. What’s left?
Ishigami comes by after hearing the sounds to enquire if everything is okay. Yasuko lies to him but he is not fooled. He decides to help her. In a normal murder mystery, the author would have shown Yasuko’s husband dead and revealed the killer at the end. Higashino turns the plot on its head. (Revealing the killer in the beginning is rare. A great example is the Alfred Hitchcock movie Frenzy.)
Ishigami is a mathematician. He forgets everything while solving maths problems. The Riemann Hypothesis (P versus NP problem ) in mathematics is quite well known. In simple terms, what’s easier? To solve a problem from the beginning or to check someone else’s answer to the problem? Whatever Ishigami does to protect Yasuko and her daughter is a puzzle meant for the police to solve. It is never revealed how exactly Ishigami managed to erase all traces of the murder. Two days later, a dead body is found near the river. Inspector Shunpei Kusanagi is heading the murder investigation. The dead body is identified as Yasuko’s husband.
Manabu Yukawa is a physics professor of physics at the university and is a close friend of Kusanagi. Prof. Yukawa has helped Kusanagi in solving murder mysteries many a times. Kusanagi calles him Detective Galileo. Kusanagi asks Prof. Yukawa for help this time as well. As it happens, Prof. Yukawa also knows Ishigami.
Now starts the cat and mouse game. Yukawa tries to solve the mystery and Ishigami guesses the next step of the investigation and tries to misdirect. Any more of the story would reveal the spoilers. Suffice to say that you will find traces of one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes stories here.
Ishigami likes to misdirect his students. What appears to be a problem of geometry turns out to be a puzzle in algebra. All those students who have simply memorised the steps are bound to fail. Ishigami uses the same technique in deceiving the police. His whole plan is based on anticipating how the police will react according to their natural tendency. He calls Yasuko everyday, instructing her on how to answer the police. The only one who can find the truth is Prof. Yukawa.
At the end, the novel reaches a philosophical level for a few moments. Is a prison sentence meant as merely a punishment for the prisoner? What is he finds the ultimate truth while in prison? But this is just a brief interlude before the narrative resumes its usual course.
Salvation of A Saint
In general, women are better at observing then men but this fact has rarely been used by authors in murder mysteries. Exceptions are Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia. Higashino’s second novel Salvation of a Saint is based on this idea. As a homage, he has named the female protagonist as Ayane.
Ayane and Yoshitaka Mashona have been married for a year. The novel starts with one of their fights, after which Ayane goes back to her parents. The next day, Yoshitaka is found dead in his bedroom. He has been given arsenic in his coffee that he made himself. Once again Inspector Kusanagi and Prof. Yukawa start unravelling the mystery. This time Kusanagi is accompanied by a female colleague Kaoru Utsumi. Ustumi often excelled in deduction, uncovering clues that Kusanagi clearly missed. Both Ayane and Utsumi are clearly based on the character of Irene Adler. Ustumi’s gut feeling says that Ayane is the killer but she was hundreds of miles away when Yoshitaka was murdered. And how did he get poisoned when no one was at home? Prof. Yukawa reveals the scientific principle behind the mystery in the end. Higashino manages to keep the reader at the edge of his seat till the last page.
