“It has all the ingredients that thrill fans of golden-age British and American mysteries,” Seton adds, “an old country house, a feuding family, mysterious noises in the night, a macabre murder and a brilliant sleuth with an ingenious solution. It “just seemed obvious” to publish it in English. Now the independent press is publishing Yumiko Yamazaki’s translation of Kindaichi’s second outing, The Inugami Curse, in which a series of disturbing murders begin after a wealthy man’s will is read to his family.Īt Pushkin, Daniel Seton says editors were surprised to find that the Kindaichi mysteries had hardly been translated into English before (apart from one small-press US edition), putting it down to the “traditional reluctance of British and American publishers to take what they see as the risk of publishing books in translation”.īut The Honjin Murders “is one of the greatest murder mysteries in Japanese crime-writing history, starring and introducing the country’s most famous fictional detective,” he says. The first English translation of The Honjin Murders was published 73 years after it first appeared in Japan, when Pushkin Vertigo released Louise Heal Kawai’s translation at the end of last year.
But Japan’s answer to Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr – writers Yokomizo greatly admired – never made it to the UK.
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