Should great detectives be test smarters?

Now, Veronica Mars has got it going on in Japan. I like this series in that each episode not only introduces one single mystery to be solved but also one big mystery to be solved in the final episode. I think that Veronica Mars, the heroine of this show, really looks like Nancy Drew. Both of them help their fathers who are professional detectives.

By the way, Japanese people really like mystery novels whose detectives are high school students. Jimmy Kudo (a.k.a Shinichi Kudo) in "Case Closed" is a highschooler. Also, Hajime Kindaichi, another popular detective in Japan, is also goes to high school. But, Hajime Kindaichi is not a top student. He often takes an F in class. One of my friends who love to read mystery
novels insists that great detectives be good at high school subjects as well as crime cases. Now, I would like to refute him, because I think that skills to solve crime cases are not related to those to get high scores in academic subjects of Japanese high schools. I will make three points below.

The first point is that knowledge to solve crime cases are hardly learned in school. Sometimes, great detectives may need knowlege of chemistry for cases in which some poison is used, but it won't be learned in highschool chemistry class. Although you may need language skills to understand dying message written in foreign languges (Nobody leaves a dying message in a real crime), you won't get high scores in tests of foreign language class in Japan, which is mainly occupied with fill-in-blank grammar questions. Social studies and math also seem to be irrelevant.

The second point is that in Japan, problem solving skills is not required to get high grades in any academic subjects. If you can cram, you can get high grades.

Now, you may insist that they try to cram if needed. In Japan, getting higher grades at school is very important to be successful. Great detectives are smart enough to know it. So, they will try to become top students to be successful. The answer to it will be my third point. Grate detectives in any mystery stories do not have any common sense. They are not interested in becoming a winner. They show up for any crime scene even when they are not asked
to come, which is unlikely to ordinary people in the world.

Therefore, great detectives are not always good at academic subjects, especially in Japan.

Higuchi and Higashino

I'm reading One-way Love by Keigo Higashino. When I read his other book for the first time, I felt that his style was very monotone and kind of boring. Now, I feel his style is just fine.

I've also felt that the style of Yusuke Higuchi is n't satisfying any more. Maybe my preference has changed unless their styles have changed.

You can't learn anything about your life from detective stories.

I finished reading Yusuke Higuchi's A Good-For-Nothing Fellow last night. Not bad. However, I didn't find myself obsessed with his novels as much as I used to be. I don't know why. Probably people around me would say it is because I has become too old. Yeah, people can't stop getting old and becoming old means giving up a lot that excites you.

Anyway, this book was based on his other book, which is written ten years ago. However, he changed the main character into one of the heroes he created, Sohei Yuzuki. Anyway, Yuzuki is kind of a girl who appears in the novels of Raymond Chandler, Micheal Z. Lewin, and so on.

I am a fan of detective stories, and I know that there's a kind of group of people who are fond of hard-boiled mysteries. I don't say that I hate to read those novels, but I don't want myself to be like heroes in those novels, which don't seem to be cool.

Murder based on a story

This is like a movie or a novel. A mystery writer commited a crime based on his own story.

According to the Independent

Guilty of murder, the author who based novel on his crime

By Peter Pophamin Rome
Published: 06 September 2007

A Polish author, travel writer and intellectual whose best-selling novel described a grisly murder has been jailed for 25 years for committing the crime he had so vividly portrayed. The killing of Dariusz Janiszewski in 2000 was notably gruesome. The victim – a successful, popular professional – was humiliated, starved and tortured, before having his hands bound with a rope that was looped around his neck in a noose.

When fishermen scooped the body out of the river Oder, it was stripped to shirt and underpants and the limbs had been distended and bore marks of torture. The police had no leads and after six months the search for a culprit was abandoned.

But the murderer could not resist gloating over his cleverness. During the investigation, anonymous emails were sent from South Korea and Indonesia to Polish television's equivalent of Crimewatch, describing the killing as "the perfect crime".

Those were just straws in the wind. But fully five years after the killing, the detective in charge of the investigation, Chief Inspector Jacek Wroblewski, received an anonymous call suggesting he take a look at a novel entitled Amok, written by Krystian Bala and published two years earlier. Ch Insp
Wroblewski read the book several times. The similarities with the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski were too strong to be ignored.

In the book, a group of bored intellectuals finds distraction from the monotony of their lives in sex, drugs, alcohol – and murder. Their victim is first tortured, then has her hands and wrists bound with a length of rope that is then passed round her neck. Details of the Janiszewski murder that were never publicised were duplicated in the novel.

The victim's body was dragged from a river in Wroclaw. The Oder, where Mr Janiszewski was found, flows through the city.

After Bala's arrest in 2005, friends and supporters launched appeals on the Web, claiming he had been "kidnapped and physically abused" by police and falsely accused of murder. Amok, they said, was "strong" in language and content, and "there are several metaphors that might be considered against the Catholic Church and Polish tradition."

Bala told police his inspiration for the story came from press reports, while the bits not mentioned in the media, which happened to be the most gruesome, came straight from his imagination. After three days, the author was set free. In outrage, Bala told his supporters that the detectives "seemed to know my book by heart. The police were treating the book as if it was a literal autobiography rather than a piece of fiction."

Ch Insp Wroblewski and his team of investigators were unconvinced. Digging further they found new links between the crime and the author. Bala, an experienced diver, had been on diving trips to South Korea, Indonesia and Japan when the mystery emails describing the murder as "the perfect crime" arrived in Poland . Investigators found the victim's mobile phone had been sold on the internet four days after his disappearance, from an account in Bala's name. The author had no answer to that. Bala acknowledged he used the name Chris when outside Poland –the name of the murderer in Amok.

Judge Lidia Hojenska said Bala was driven to kill Mr Janiszewski because he believed he had had an affair with the novelist's estranged wife. There was insufficient evidence to prove that Bala carried out the murder himself, she said, but sufficient to prove he "committed the crime of leading the killing ... He was the initiator of the murder; his role was leading and planning it."
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2934346.ece

Softboiled!?

Everybody seems to like Raymond, but why?

I rent a book from the library near my house. The book is written by Yusuke Higuchi. I was somewhat influenced by his style. It seems like he was influenced by Raymond Chandler.

However, I don't think that he is my favorite author any more. Why? It is hard to say, but probably I'm not that romantist any more. It is kind of sad, but at the same time I feel kind of proud although I don't know why.

Mystery stories or detective stories?

Scarlett has got it going on!

よく，最近何読んだ，とかどんな映画を観た，とか云われるが，ぼく自信としてはストーリーを楽しむということでとりたててこの２つを区別することはあまりない．本はベッドの中で寝ながら読めるし，映画はヴィジュアルの要素があるから，ストーリーはあまりよくなくても，「この女の子はかわいい」とか考えることはないでもないが・・・・・・．

そういう意味では，スカーレット・ヨハンソン主演の『マッチ・ポイント』という映画は良かった．この子は，『ロスト・イン・トランスレイション』で人気がでた．この映画は，アメリカに住んでいた時，大学の先生に何度も見たか，と訊かれた．その先生は，日本文化に興味があるのか，「おれは『ラッショマン』が大好きだ，としょっちゅう云っていた」．『羅生門』ときちんと発音できるアメリカ人はあまりいない．

話がそれた．ぼくがスカーレットが好きなのは，そのふっくらとした（curvy）肢体もさることながら，英語の発音がすごく自然でかつ聴き取りやすいこともある．案外，映画俳優の英語というのは，わざとらしい抑揚をつけたりする（アメリカの舞台俳優はにせのイギリス英語をしゃべる）のでわかりにくかったりするが，彼女はけっして演技がへたなほうではないとは思うが，きれいなアメリカ英語をしゃべる．この映画をぼくが実際見ていたとき，他の登場人物は何を云っているかさっぱりだった．まあ，イギリス英語に慣れていたらそんなことはないんだろうけど・・・・・・．

『マッチ・ポイント』自信はミステリーというよりサスペンスで，ファムファタル（運命の美女）であるヨハンソン演じるアメリカ人女性にはまっていき，最後は殺人を犯してしまうイギリス人青年の話．ぼくがこの映画は好きなのは，この青年の上昇志向の強さをうまく描かれていることである．

どうせ，アメリカもイギリスも大きくは階級社会である．テニス選手だったものの上流階級出身ではない青年はテニスの先生になる．そこで出会った上流階級の人々の中に入り込んでいくんだが，はやりギャップを感じる．本当の本当のことを云えば，そんなギャップ（「格差」ともいう）なんかどうでもいいことなのだが，それを埋めようと必死になる．ストーリーではこれだけでは終わらないが，この階級差がストーリーの一翼を担っているのは事実だと思う．どちらかといえば，女の子向きの映画だと思うが，聡明な男の人にも見てほしいと思う．ヨハンソンだけじゃなくて．さっき立ち読みした近所の本屋にあった雑誌によると，DVDも出たみたいです．

ミステリーについてはまた別の機会に述べてみたいと思う．

I like mystery stories. People often ask me like, "What's your favorite movie?" or "What kind of books do you read?" But, I rarely try to make a huge distinction between the two in that both of them give me some pleasure with their storylines. If I would, maybe I would say that I could read a book in the bed. Also, since movies are visualized, I could enjoy some movies even if their storylines are horrible at times. For example, an actress in the movie is beautiful.

My latest favorite movie is Match Point, which stars Scarlett Johansson, who is pretty. I like her curvy body and the way she speaks. Unlike some Holywood actors who speak very classy English, she speaks naturall, which is good to me, who's a non-native speaker of English.

Another reason I recommend "Match Point" is that it describes a English youngster who belongs to the working class and wants to go to the upper class in an excellent way. To be blunt, I belive that any country including the United States and England is a class society and that there is a huge gap between have and have-not. I also think that, though, when it comes to having a romantic relationship, the gap may not be essentially important. But, not everybody can think that way. That's the point and makes this movie better.