Apple Pie and Gunsmoke

In the pursuit of c), I've been playing Ace Attorney, but I've also been reading whatever Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers I can grab off Project Gutenberg. Since it's exclusively the ones in the public domain, it's their oldest stuff- pre 1924.

And the thing about all of these 20s murder mysteries is that they're incredibly haunted by The Great War, in the same way that most mysteries from the 2000s are haunted by the War on Terror or many mysteries coming out now are Haunted by COVID.

Lord Peter Wimsey has screaming dissociative PTSD flashbacks from the trenches. In Murder on the Links, Poirot is a displaced person- Belgium isn't a safe place to be an aging police inspector at the moment- the narrator has been discharged with an injury, and one of the main suspects is working as an army nurse.

And like... you can pull a couple threads through here. But if we're talking about the stereotypical Country House Murder Mystery- the two big ones are a) the end of the Old Order, and b) you always find the body and know the cause of death.

A) is pretty obvious- the death of a patriarch (or matriarch) is a microcosm of the slow decline of the British nobility. It's a way to give the sense of "Everything Your Worldview Depended On Has Fallen Apart" a face. Every dirty secret we don't speak of has come to light, all at once; every lie that supported The Way Things Are is revealed for what it really is. (Dulce et decorum est, anyone?) The local lord is dead, and no one is going to replace him. The world has irrevocably changed.

B) is something that @bespokeminutiae pointed out to me when I mentioned this- in a country house murder mystery, you always know where the body is, and you always know what happened to it. In a world where a lot of people lost loved ones in some far off place, without getting to see the body or say goodbye? That's a hugely comforting fantasy.

I say during and after because that's when Edogawa Ranpo was active, by far the most famous and prominent Japanese mystery writer of the era. Ranpo started in the 1920s and wrote well into the 50s. He's best known in the west for his recurring detective character, Kogoro Akechi, who's basically the Japanese Sherlock Holmes -- complete with being mostly an urban character who lives and works in and around Tokyo.

Though I'm personally more familiar with Yokomizo Seishi and his Kousuke Kindaichi mysteries, which started in the aftermath of the war and hew very close to the Country House Murder Mysteries, with the twist that said country houses tend to be former samurai estates on tiny isolated islands or in rural mountain villages. Kindaichi himself is also a detective much more in the vein of Dame Agatha, being a young war vet with some odd ticks that make people underestimate him (he has a stutter and always looks frumpy because he scratches his head really hard when he's thinking) but nonetheless solving his cases with keen observation and patient deduction.

And in the same way, you can feel the haunting presence of the war and the dissolution of old social orders. In place of declining British nobility, you have the crumbling remnants of samurai families. There's a nine-year timeskip between Kindaichi's first and second novels, during which he gets drafted and winds up in a POW camp; he stumbles into like the next three cases just trying to bring his dead war buddies' last messages back to their families. And there's this looming specter of westernization, what it means for the old traditions, which should be preserved and if it might not be better to let some of them die.

One thing honkaku-ha introduced to the mix that sets them apart from the western tradition is a tone and aesthetic taken from Japanese horror. Where western mysteries can be familiar and almost comforting enough to earn the label 'cozy,' honkaku-ha are often stark and cold, with murders defined by their violence or grotesque stagings and the stories themselves seeped in elements of supernatural or erotic overtones (Edogawa in particular had a fascinating friendship with an anthropologist known for his research on the history of homosexuality in Japan). The two best-known Kindaichi novels, The Inugami Curse and Village of the Eight Graves, toe the line between classical whodunnits and gothic horror.

From Ursula Vernon: Screaming at these people works. They’re fundamentally wimps, we just have to actually DO the screaming instead of preemptively admitting defeat.

I am talking about my fellow Americans, not the Democrats. We actually need to scream, gang, not just complain that Schumer isn’t.

In other words: