My Grandfather, the Master Detective

Cosy crime meets Before the Coffee Gets Cold in Masateru Konishi's poignant and enchanting debut novel, My Grandfather, the Master Detective - a Japanese The Thursday Murder Club.

There used to be a cafe called Mon Cheri at Nishi Waseda where members of the Waseda Mystery Club spent day after day frothing in excitement over the latest mystery novels, and now he and Kaede solve mysteries together . . .

As a lover of classic crime stories, it's perhaps no surprise that twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher Kaede encounters everyday mysteries more often than your average person. Solving them is another matter, though, and the person she always heads to for guidance is her beloved grandfather - who, despite having dementia, retains a keen sharpness of mind. From impossible locked-room murders to confounding missing person cases, the granddaughter and grandfather team 'weave stories' in master-and-apprentice fashion to get to the bottom of a variety of cases. All the while, a shadow slowly closes in on Kaede, posing a more insidious threat . . .

Steeped in references to classic crime from Christie to Chesterton to Poe, My Grandfather, the Master Detective playfully nods to forebears of the genre, while also carrying the light-hearted, escapist hallmarks of cosy crime books which have recently captured readers' imaginations. Meanwhile, its charming characters and affectionate focus on relationships bring to mind heart-warming Japanese titles such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

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Autorentext
Masateru Konishi graduated from the Department of English and American Literature at Meiji University, and now works as a writer for TV and radio. He has previously written for the stage as well as a manga story, but My Grandfather, the Master Detective is his debut novel. Partly based on his own experience of caring for his father with dementia, the book won the 21st edition of the prestigious 'This Mystery is Amazing!' Grand Prize. Louise Heal Kawai has been a Japanese-English literary translator since 2006. Her first publication was Shoko Tendo's bestselling autobiography Yakuza Moon. She has gone on to translate a large number of crime fiction titles, including Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders, and works by Soji Shimada and Seicho Matsumoto. Her literary translations include Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami, and Hideo Yokoyama's Seventeen, which was a finalist in the 2018 Believer Book Awards, and longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. She is also the translator of Sosuke Natsukawa's The Cat Who Saved Books. Louise comes from Manchester in the UK, and currently resides in Yokohama.