The Black Swan Mystery

A prize-winning railway murder mystery from Japan, this crime classic is a hair-raising delight perfect for fans of Agatha Christie. Early one morning, a body is found lying next to the railway tracks just outside of Kuki Station in Saitama Prefecture, shot dead. It is identified as belonging to the owner of a local mill which is embroiled in a labour dispute. Suspicion initially falls on the workers' union, then on a new religious sect that has been gaining followers recently. Chief Inspector Onitsura and his assistant Tanna are called in to investigate, and soon set off in a journey across Japan, from Tokyo to Kyoto and Osaka, and finally to the island of Ky?shu, in a hunt for the killer. But as they investigate, the killer strikes again, and again. Will they be able to catch the murderer before even more people are slain?

Tetsuya Ayukawa (1919-2002) was born in the Sugamo district of Tokyo. The son of a surveyor for the South Manchurian Railway Co., he spent much of his youth in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, returning to war-ravaged Japan only in 1944. He began writing detective mysteries, and introduced the recurring character Inspector Onitsura, for which Ayukawa later became renowned. Celebrated as one of Japan's finest writers of impossible crimes and alibi-deconstruction mysteries, he won the Japanese Detective Writers Club Prize for The Black Swan and in 2001 he was awarded the inaugural Honkaku Mystery Grand Prix for his contribution to the genre. Many of his works have been adapted for radio and screen.