脱ミステリー化の中で - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Via 青葉やまと「横溝正史、江戸川乱歩...... 日本の本格推理小説、英米で静かなブーム」https://www.newsweekjapan.jp/stories/world/2021/05/post-96258.php *1

Michael Dirda*2 “Locked-room masterpieces from Japan are the perfect escape for summer” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/locked-room-masterpieces-from-japan-are-the-perfect-escape-for-summer/2020/08/04/c1049626-d5ac-11ea-9c3b-dfc394c03988_story.html

基本的には、鮎川哲也や綾辻行人や島田荘司などの日本の「本格派」「新本格派」探偵小説の紹介。
先ずは、英米の本格推理小説の「黄金時代」が語られる；

When you need respite from our impossible times, try solving some impossible crimes. Like playing chess or doing crosswords, reading classic fair-play detective fiction provides a welcome, if temporary, escape from sad, tumultuous reality. In books of the 1920s and ’30s — the Golden Age — one can experience the calm of austere intellection, observe the restoration of order after chaos.
In Britain, Agatha Christie specialized in murders committed by suspects you would never suspect, and Freeman Wills Crofts — in such classics as “The Cask” — showed how patient investigation can break down seemingly impregnable alibis. In this country, Ellery Queen presented the most topsy-turvy situations and challenged the reader to explain why, as in “The Chinese Orange Mystery,” a body is found in a room where everything has been turned upside down, backward or inside out.

樽 (創元推理文庫 106-1)

作者:F.W.クロフツ
メディア: 文庫

しかし、現代の犯罪小説の主流は、論理的なパズルという本格推理小説の原則から逸脱している；

In contrast to the Golden Age who-and-howdunits, modern crime fiction generally emphasizes people over puzzles. Some of the genre’s best books are societal dramas, such as Chester Himes’s often darkly comic accounts of the Harlem detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Others are portraits of the criminal milieu like George V. Higgins’s “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” and Ted Lewis’s “GBH,” and still others are mainly psychological studies in the vein of Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer mysteries repeatedly turn on hidden family tragedies, sometimes even ancient Greek ones (see “The Chill”). Most people now read Raymond Chandler less for the mystery than for the sassy similes and the weary melancholy in Philip Marlowe’s voice:

“I rode down to the street floor and went out on the steps of the City Hall. It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way — but not as far as Velma had gone.”

In context, that poignant last sentence from “Farewell, My Lovely” is as moving as anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And therein lies a problem. The more literary the crime novel, the more you need to deal with unruly emotions. You quickly feel yourself caring about the victim, the detective, even the criminal. In short, you’re back in the world from which you had hoped to escape for a few hours.

さらば愛しき女よ (ハヤカワ・ミステリ文庫 (HM 7-2))

作者:レイモンド・チャンドラー
発売日: 1976/04/01
メディア: 文庫

レイモンド・チャンドラーを「ミステリー」として読む人はあまりいない。まあ、日本でもチャンドラーをコナン・ドイルやアガサ・クリスティと同じ資格で享受するということはなかったような気がする。ただ、チャンドラーの村上春樹訳登場以来*3、日本でもチャンドラーの脱「ミステリー」化は進んでいるんだろうなとは思った。
そして、「新本格派」と鮎川哲也 *4；

This is one reason you might want to try some of the modern honkaku — meaning authentic or orthodox — mysteries from Japan. In the 1980s, a circle of young people — many of them students at Kyoto University — turned away from socially aware crime fiction to form a study group devoted to the analysis of classic puzzles and miracle crimes, especially the locked-room masterpieces of John Dickson Carr.

The most brilliant members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club eventually went on to professional writing careers. But they were little known to American readers until Locked Room International began issuing its best books in translations by Ho-Ling Wong. Five years ago, I reviewed Yukito Ayatsuji’s “The Decagon House Murders” — a variant on Christie’s “And Then There Were None” — and last month, I picked up “The Red Locked Room,” a new collection of the dazzlingly tricky stories of Tetsuya Ayukawa.
In general, honkaku mysteries emphasize ingenuity above all else. Some of Ayukawa’s stories do feature the appealing Ryuzo Hoshikage, an amateur armchair detective with a fondness for Sherlockian flourishes. At one point in “The White Locked Room,” Hoshikage suddenly asks, “On the night of the murder, was there any talk about a cat or dog being burnt in the neighborhood?” That story’s plot neatly reworks the classic trope of murder in a house surrounded by freshly fallen snow.

英語圏の人に対しては、ミスリーディングな文章の構成だと思った。綾辻行人などの「新本格派」と同じパラグラフで「鮎川哲也」に、しかも伝記的な詳細もなしに、言及するということには違和感を感じる。世代でいうと、鮎川哲也は江戸川乱歩や横溝正史という戦前からの本格探偵小説の大御所と「新本格派」とのちょうど中間の世代。高木彬光 *5とほぼ同世代。また、松本清張は鮎川よりも10歳年上だけど、作家活動を開始したのはほぼ同時期。