Here I am in my last article friends, confessing to nurse an affinity for crime thrillers!
As the third wave drove all of us back to home hibernation, picking up the on-the-edge yet cozy mystery Malice by Keigo Higashino - who is famously known as ‘the Japanese Stieg Larson’ but is really much more than that label- was a conscious decision from my side. One that was rooted in intending to smash the monotony and bring some much-needed mental jolt in my life.
An overview of the novel goes as follows: Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, in a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems. Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga recognizes Hidaka's best friend. Years ago when they were both teachers, they were colleagues at the same high school. Kaga went on to join the police force while Osamu Nonoguchi left to become a full-time writer, though with not nearly the success of his friend Hidaka. But Kaga thinks something is a little bit off with Nonoguchi's statement and investigates further, ultimately executing a search warrant on Nonoguchi's apartment. There he finds evidence that shows that the two writers' relationship was very different than the two claimed.
Nonoguchi confesses to the murder, but that's only the beginning of the story. In a brilliantly realized tale of cat and mouse, the detective and the writer battle over the truth of the past and how events that led to the murder really unfolded. Which one of the two writers was ultimately guilty of malice?
So we have a seemingly simple case, with an obvious trajectory of events that goes erratically haywire with multiple turns and new angles continuously emerging on the scene as one progresses through the story. But there are no sudden twists in the story, no final punches or rug-pulling to shock the readers. Some might feel that the plot is a bit slow at places, but this is a different kind of mystery which focuses on the finer key-details and the masterful plotting that is involved before and during the actual crime, rather than selling the same-old thrill and fast-paced action of the crime genre that is generally given more prominence in literature.
The killer is caught soon enough, and the confession is recorded. But the case is far from over. The "why" and "how" of the crime that has been committed remains unanswered- was it premeditated, or it a crime committed in the heat of the moment? Why does the crime scene say one thing, and the clues point to the opposite? Does it matter why the crime was committed when the killer is the same person? Just imagine a killer meticulously planning the crime and also making sure that the motive for that crime is what he insists it is and not something even sinister. It is upto the readers to decide that which of the characters are reliable sources of information and who aren't? Whether it is the victim, the killer or the investigating detective, all have a secretive past that they would rather not talk about.
The dual narrative style of the novel's two main characters serves its intended purpose of highlighting the differences in Osamu and Kaga's inherent motives, professional backgrounds and thought processes. And the risky troupe of an unreliable narrator- one who maintains a religiously tight account of events (you can't help but feel that there is something suspiciously fishy hidden in there) can be quite tricky to deliver, but the author pulls off this anomaly with great talent.
In the end, I would just say this- Murderous thoughts festering within a man's psyche is the perfect recipe for an intriguing psychological thriller and, in every sense that matters, Malice is the perfect gateway novel to crime-author's Higashino's books.
Higashino does not follow the normal conventions of the crime thriller genre. In his cult sensation novel, The Devotion of Suspect X — the reader knows who committed the crime from the outset, but not how it was carried out. His follow-up novel, Salvation of a Saint, presented a similar conundrum. And Malice (originally published in Japanese in 1996 and translated to English by Alexander O. Smith with Elye Alexander in 2014) is one of the most bestselling and acclaimed novels in Keigo Higashino's series featuring police detective Kyochiro Kaga- one of the most popular characters created by the writer within the Asian reading circuit.
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