Honjin satsujin jiken (April-December 1946, Houseki aka “The Honjin Murders”) | Buy this book | Kindle it!.The winner receives a statuette of Kosuke Kindaichi and a substantial cash award–in fact, it’s one of the richest literary prizes in the world. The annual award goes to to a previously unpublished novel-length mystery. The Yokomizo Seishi Prize is a literary award established in 1980 by the Kadokawa Shoten publishing company and the Tokyo Broadcasting System to honour Yokomizo, who passed away the following year. He was best known for his celebrated Kosuke Kindaichi series, which ran to 77 books, many of which were initially serialized in Japanese magazines, and several were adapted for Japanese stage, film and and television. Born in Kobe, he spent his childhood reading detective stories, before beginning to write stories of his own, the first of which was published in 1921. Seishi Yokomizo was one of Japan’s most famous and best-loved mystery writers.
The books were wickedly clever, full of family secrets, false identities, forbidden liaisons, monstrous cruelties and plenty of bizarre–and often surprisingly gruesome–murders. Which is to say that Kosuke is a nice guy a humble man, a bit of a loner, perhaps, and not always the best dressed, but an ace detective, a fitting sleuth who dives deep into his cases. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, albeit without the raging ego or irritatingly smug sense of superiority. Yokomizo was a master of the impossible crime mystery, often refereed to as the “Japanese John Dickson Carr” for his inventive puzzle plots, and his detective, while no wimp, was definitely more along the lines of such masters of deduction as C. It won the inaugural Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1948, and was filmed as Death at an Old Mansion in 1976, and remains, at this writing, one of only a few of Yokomizo’s mysteries to be translated into English. It’s a brainstomper of a locked room murder, taking place in a huge family mansion surrounded by thick snow, which many people regard as one of the best Japanese detective novels of all time. Arguably the most beloved Japanese detective of all time, Seishi Yokomizo’s K ŌSUKE KINDAICHI first appeared in The Honjin Murders, which was serialized in the magazine Housekifrom April to December 1946.
0 kommentar(er)
