Hello, WritingForums! My name’s Libby and I’m a university student studying foreign languages with the interest of translating international literature. My primary interest lies in the world of Japanese shin-honkaku detective fiction! While I grew up enjoying anime, manga, and Japanese video games, I never actually had an interest in studying Japanese. It wasn’t until I was about sixteen that I started to want to learn the language, when I discovered my life’s greatest passion: Golden Age mystery novels! Golden Age mysteries are a sub-genre as well as a movement in the history of detective fiction that marked a focus on mystery novels as “puzzles” or “games of wit played between author and reader”, in which the author gives the reader all of the information they need to solve, not guess, with 100% certainty the mystery. Of course, this entailed not only naming whodunit, but also how and why. However, while the genre of “fairplay”, “puzzle plot” mystery fiction died in the English-speaking world in the 1940s, the genre has continued to enjoy popularity in Japan as 本格 and 新本格 (honkaku lit. “Orthodox” and shin-honkaku lit. “New Orthodox”) mystery fiction! Because so few of these (shin-)honkaku detective stories are translated into English, I’m studying Japanese to further pursue my passion of reading Japanese detective stories. I also love to write my own mystery stories, and one day I would love to be able to write detective fiction in the Japanese language! In addition, I blog (poorly) about mystery stories over at Solving the Mystery of Murder. I look forward to grow as a writer with you all, and I hope we all get along well!
In signing up for this site, you converted from "would be" to "de-facto" mystery novelist! You've got friends here that are looking forward to the intrigue you create! Td-
Welcome Libby. I had a try at writing a mystery and it was a great experience. I love the foreshadowing and all the twists and turns with a surprise ending. I'm an Agatha Christie fan but my mystery story was a cozy.
Thank you! I also love Agatha Christie! Cozies can be fun once in a while, but I much prefer authentically Golden Age/honkaku-styled mysteries for their rigidity in cluing, reasoning, and puzzle! Where a cozy foreshadows a potential solution, a Golden Age mystery must fully clue the only possible solution (while also sufficiently ruling out alternative explanations). It's the strictness in the puzzle-crafting, for the complex crime to be 100% solvable with no guess-work and yet you're entirely misled anyway, that I love about the genre! I hope I get to read your mystery someday, anyway, though! I look forward to it, I hope I don't disappoint you all! I'll do you all proud. Thank you, fellow detective/mystery author! Thank you, I'm glad to be here!
