High and Low

The connexions that crop up between Japanese and western culture can be surprising. I read many of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct books long ago, though I don't think I read anything published later than the early eighties. I didn't give up on them consciously; but in my memory the earlier ones are better (though there are things I don't care for in them, too). In a completely different world, The Seven Samurai (七人の侍, Shichinin no Samurai, 1954), directed by KUROSAWA Akira (黒澤 明), was the first Japanese work that interested me. It was only after I had got to know most of Kurosawa's samurai films that I learnt that he had also directed an adaptation of one of the 87th Precinct novels, King's Ransom (1959). The film is known as High and Low in English, an ingenious translation of the Japanese title 天国と地獄 (Tengoku to jigoku, Heaven and Hell, 1963). A police procedural sounds like an oddity for Kurosawa, but in fact he had already made one of the earliest films in the genre, Stray Dog (野良犬, Nora inu, 1949).

I've seen the film several times now, and I thought it might be interesting to reread the book and compare them. Neither book nor film pretend to be mysteries; but as I can't say much about them without discussing the whole plot, I'll put the rest after the break. If you haven't read the book or seen the film and you're planning to do either, then you'd better not read any further.

Agatha Christie's Confession

This is really a blog for Japanese books; I'm not going to have a review of one ready for a few days. So I thought that since detective stories are one of the blog's themes, I could just quickly note down an idea about Agatha Christie's famous disappearance. I imagine that thousands of readers have had the same idea; but I've never actually seen it written down. So here it is.

In 1926 Christie disappeared mysteriously for ten days. There was a massive search for her; and she was eventually found at a hotel in Harrogate. Some thought it was a publicity stunt, others that she had lost her memory under psychological stress. Her husband had just told her that he wanted to leave her for another woman. Until she was found, there were people who suspected him of having killed her. When I first read about it, the general view was that it was certainly a reaction to the stress of the impending divorce, perhaps with some attempt to embarrass her husband or his mistress, which is the line that Wikipedia currently favours.

In fact just four years after the incident, Christie published a short story, which reads like a confession to me; and it gives a picture of her actions much like what others have supposed. "The Affair at the Bungalow" (1930) is one of a series of short stories, later published in The Thirteen Problems (1932), in which guests at a party tell of mysteries they have experienced, and the other guests try their hand at solving them, with Miss Marple always finding the correct solution at the end.

For the rest, I can't avoid giving the plot to that particular story away. So stop now, if you care.

The Solution Depends ...

Pocket Books edition of The New Adventures of Ellery Queen from 1945.

Spoilers after the break.