Continuing to mainline mysteries. This time, it's The Father Hunt by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #whatever), one of the later books, and Archie even references this by wondering how long he'll be able to keep going in New York. This is one where I wonder if paternity tests would have changed the plot, as the technology wasn't really developed until after 1968. The Wikipedia article says that Human Leukocyte Antigen testing, which was developed in the '60s, has a 80% success rate, but it's not something that's even discussed in the text. It doesn't really matter because Nero Wolfe figures it out the old-fashioned way - and they would still have to do some sleuthing to know who to test - but it's something I think about.

I only have ~11 more Nero Wolfe books left in the library collection, which only gets me to about 27 out of 44 total, but it turns out there are some ebooks available, so I should probably be able to finish the whole series if I'm dedicated to it.

The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a cult classic locked-room mystery heavily inspired by Golden Age detective fiction, especially And Then There Were None (which makes it VERY easy to guess the culprit if you've read that book). Even so, the set-up and red herrings were very clever, and I'm really curious to see how the recent live-action adaptation handled it because it depends heavily on obscuring certain details from readers that would be much more obvious in a visual medium. It's very self-aware in the same way The Honjin Murders was self-aware but much less self-conscious and confident in its borrowings - even the characters taking on the names of mystery writers servers an important purpose.

That said, while I admire it on a technical level, as a puzzle and a narrative structure, I don't actually like it for itself... books where almost everyone dies violently and horrifically where there's no one to root for really do not appeal to me on an aesthetic level.

But I find the ending fascinating in that it suggests once again that it's not enough to commit the perfect crime; there is also a burning human need to share stories and experiences, to brag/boast/confess what one has done, and thus the murderer will always slip up, either consciously or unconsciously, in order to reveal the truth eventually. (The villainous monologue has the same roots, I think.) The irony is that this happens IRL, but by definition, we only know the stories where the criminal was caught/confessed or the truth was eventually revealed in some other way, because otherwise the true cause wouldn't be known to us. The "perfect" crime is not the one that has never been solved, it's the one where no one realizes a crime was ever committed in the first place.

Also after reading so much Seishi Yokomizo, which are post-WWII reflections on the rapidly shifting social order and the decline of the old aristocracy in the modern age, it was kind of fun to shift to something a little more "modern", too.

I will say that the Pushkin Vertigo's cover art and design for their translated Japanese mysteries continues to be iconic, representative, and memorable all in one.

By some coincidence, Yukito Ayatsuji is married to Fuyumi Ono, whose Twelve Kingdom series is getting reprinted in English, the first volume of which I had also checked out at the same time without realizing the connection. I always love it when creators are married to each other (for example, the writers/illustrators of Hunter x Hunter and Sailor Moon) and have their own independent stuff going on so it's not obvious.