And Then Were None is famous enough that the similarities in setting were obvious to anyone who’s a fan of the genre, but you don’t have to know the Christie’s mystery in order to solve this one. Now, will you need to be familiar with the classics of the mystery genre? I would argue, no. As the reader, I knew what they were thinking (as much as the narrator allowed me to), but I never felt what they were feeling. On the other hand, setting and characters are fleshed out only as much as needed, and you never really climb into the character’s heads. This means that as the reader, you will get all the clues needed to solve it and even if you can’t solve it, knowing who the murderer will make sense – at least that’s what happened for me. The Decagon House Murders is part of the Honkaku tradition, where the game of solving the mystery is the most important aspect of the story. These opening pages, by the way, are also a clue as to how to enjoy the novel. And of course, given the obvious homage to Christie, we have a character nicknamed Agatha.
If you’re familiar with the classics of the mystery genre, you will recognise that these nicknames refer to Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, and Gaston Leroux. Which is how you get a very meta-sounding opening where Ellery talks about how “mystery fiction is, at its core, a kind of intellectual game” with Carr and Leroux. What I found very interesting about the book was that the seven members of the murder club referred to each other by nicknames. Bored by endless rounds of mahjong, Kawaminami and his new friend, Shimada, decide to investigate the letters. The Decagon House Murders takes place in two locations – one is a deserted island, where seven members of the K- University Mystery Club are camping for a week, and where the murders take place, and the other is on the mainland, where a member of the mystery club who didn’t go on the trip (Kawaminami), receives a threatening letter, alleging that the death of a member of the club was actually a murder. It’s fitting that I read And Then There Were None a few weeks before I read The Decagon House Murders, because the latter pays homage to the former, and it was fun to have echoes of the original story in my head while reading it.
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