MY GRANDFATHER, THE MASTER DETECTIVE

Konishi updates the century-old trope of the armchair detective in this debut novel, a collection of six interlinked short stories featuring a most unusual sleuth.

Elementary school teacher Kaede loves classic mystery fiction, but in solving contemporary mysteries, she can’t hold a candle to her nameless grandfather. His keen observational skills and razor-sharp mind (along with several needful maps and diagrams the author provides) make it unnecessary for him to visit the scenes of the crimes Kaede describes to him. And that’s a good thing, since his Lewy body dementia has made him a fabulist who frequently entertains vivid images and invents untrue memories like the belief that his long-dead daughter visits him every day. In half a dozen stories, Konishi shows how Grandfather’s unique combination of disabilities and skills make him a master detective who specializes in impossible crimes. Beginning with a relatively elementary puzzle, he moves on to a locked room murder, the disappearance of a teacher from a closely watched swimming pool, the unaccountable appearance of a 33rd person inside a classroom of 32 students, the arrest of Kaede’s friend and colleague Iwata for a violent attack that was witnessed by a “power-walking” woman who can’t testify on his behalf because she’s vanished without a trace, and the stalking of Kaede herself by a threatening man. Allusions to classic mysteries from Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” to Cornell Woolrich’s Phantom Lady are sprinkled liberally throughout, promising even greater pleasure for readers with a taste for puzzles whose solutions demand pages and pages of explanation.

Think of brain-teasing mysteries presented in something like a fairytale framework, and you’ll be on the right track.