JAPONICA BOOK REVIEW
Reading “Mami Suzuki: Private Eye”
Simon Rowe’s entertaining tales of a female investigator in Kobe
A little less than a year ago, I reviewed Pearl City, Simon Rowe’s award-winning collection of short stories.
My favorite of that collection was the title story, “Pearl City”, about a female private investigator named Mami Suzuki digging into the mystery of pearls disappearing from a processing factory in Kobe.
When I heard Rowe had written a new collection entirely about P.I. Suzuki, it went straight to the top of my reading queue. I wasn’t disappointed.
Mystery novels are common, short stories less so, novellas rare. Too short to publish as stand-alone books and too long for literary journals, novellas don’t fit the standard publishing model. But by collecting four novellas together, each a separate Suzuki mystery, Rowe has created something new and unique that harks back to the Sherlock Holmes collections of yesteryear.
This collection also reminded me of Different Seasons, a collection of 4 novellas by Stephen King, without a doubt his most impressive literary work. (2 of those stories were adapted into the movies Stand by Me and Shawshank Redemption.) Although King had written these stories earlier in his career…
