![]() 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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