“The pipe that Detective Chief Inspector Maigret lit on coming out of his door in Boulevard Richard-Lenoir was even more delicious than usual. The first fog of the season was as pleasant a surprise as the first snow for children, especially when it was not that nasty yellowish fog you see on certain winter days, but a misty, milky vapour with halos of light in it. The air was fresh. The ends of your fingers and your nose tingled on a day like this and the soles of your shoes clicked smartly on the road.” (Cécile est morte (Cécile Is Dead), Georges Simenon, 1942)
”The first train on the Keihin-Tohoku Line was scheduled to leave Kamata Station at 4.08 am. The engineer, the brakeman, and the conductor left the night duty room shortly after 3.00 am to go to the rail yard. It was dark and cold.
When the young brakeman shone his flashlight under the seventh car, he stiffened, stood still swallowing for a moment, and then began to run, his arms flailing. He flung himself into the engineer’s cab, shouting, ‘Hey, there’s a tuna’.
‘A dead body?’ the engineer laughed. ‘We haven’t even moved the train yet. How could there be a tuna? Rub your eyes and wake up.’
‘No, I’m not mistaken.’ The brakeman looked pale. ‘I really saw a tuna under the train.’ “(Inspector Imanishi Investigates, Seichō Matsumoto, 1989)
Opening lines that conjure up pictures by masters of their genre and translators capable of conveying the original without feeling at all clunky. I must dash your hopes, if you like reading intelligent, second half, 20th century detective fiction. Unlike Simenon and Maigret, Matsumoto only wrote one Inspector Imanishi novel but many others in the same genre.
A better bet might be Kosuke Kindaichi, a private detective created by Seishi Yokomizo, who features in seventy-seven of his novels and short stories. I still cleave to Maigret but have turned to Matsumoto for variation and will definitely read Yokomizo too. I am trembling with excitement at the prospect of going through a new literary door; Japanese Crime Noir. Sounds like a delicious, dark, bittersweet chocolate.
