Taking that aspect away, focusing on the who and the how, The Decagon House Murders becomes an intense puzzle, the solution of which I would never have guessed. It's no surprise to me on reading several reader reviews of this book that noted the lack of character development, because that's pretty standard with this sort of thing, something I've come to expect after reading so many of them. With no possibility of leaving the island, and as more deaths follow, as the back cover blurb notes, "the survivors grow desperate and paranoid, turning on each other."Īs I've always said about this genre that really stands on its own within the genre of crime/mystery fiction, these stories are less character oriented and more about how the deed was done. Quickly followed by the mysterious death of one of the seven and the first of the plates having been tacked to the dead person's door. For the upcomng April club magazine, they were each asked while on the island to write one story based on the magazine's title, Dead Island, the name of the "first Japanese translation of Dame Agatha's masterpiece" known to everyone today as And Then There Were None.
Decagon House was to be their home away from home for the next few days together, each of the seven members - Ellery, Carr, Leroux, Poe, Van (short for Van Dine), Agatha and Orczy - comprised "the core writing group" of the club.
The murder culminated in a fire which had completely destroyed the main house, the Blue Mansion the "annex building" known as the Decagon House was left intact. Nakamura's gardener was thought to have been the killer, but it was never proven since he'd disappeared and never been seen again.
Tsunojima, located about five kilometers off the coast of Kyushu's Oita Prefecture, had been the site of a still-unsolved "mysterious quadruple murder" six months earlier, resulting in the deaths of Nakamura Seiji (last name first), his wife Kazue, and the "servant couple who worked for them. They had arrived on the island on March 26th, having been taken there via fishing boat.
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