It’s that time of the year again. Not, not Christmas, although that’s on the way. No, it’s the start of the Reprint Of The Year awards, the competition run by Kate over at Cross Examining Crime. It’s an award for the… well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it.

The amount of Golden Age novels being reprinted is increasing all the time, and I, and several other bloggers will be putting our cases forward for the book most worthy of returning to the public eye.

Now, time for my first nomination for third place in the poll. Third place, you say? Well, these books aren’t my first choices – other bloggers are championing them. I did think about nominating other books by those authors, but as they’re not as good as the best titles re-issued, it seemed a bit odd. So I’m going to nominate the next best…

And I’m also going to go against what I’ve done in the past and I’m nominating books that aren’t actually reprints, but translations of classic crime fiction from overseas – well, both from Japan in fact – and we’re going to start with Murder At The Black Cat Café by Seishi Yokimizo. I’ve never been entirely convinced about including new translations of previous untranslated old titles, but them’s the rules so let’s go.

Murder At The Black Cat Café is actually two novellas, the second being Why Did The Well Wheel Creak?, both first released in Japanese in 1973, newly translated by Bryan Karetnyk. This is pretty late in his canon – the previous titles that Pushkin translated were from the fifties – but it’s pretty clear that he still had fresh ideas to write about.

Both of the stories feature his sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi – well, sort of, he is very much blink-and-you’ll-miss-him in the second one – but he’s somewhat incidental to the stories other than to resolve the first one. What the stories do have in common is the murder mystery trope of the unidentified body – and how to do something new with it.

It’s a pretty standard trick for a mutilated body to be misidentified and the murderer ending up being the assumed victim. In the first story, the question about such a body is whether it belongs to the wife or a mistress. The second involves two men who are similar apart from one having distinctive eyes – one dies in the war and the other returns only having been blinded and having artificial eyes. And both do something rather clever with the plot.

The stories are really entertaining, interlaced with Japanese custom and tradition – the translation does a great job of maintaining the honkaku style. Despite only being novellas, there is plenty going on – the death count of the second is amazingly high – and both of the stories contain a decent surprise.

She Walks At Night, an earlier novel will be out next year, but you could do a lot worse than taking a look at these stories.

In the meantime, check out Kate’s post on Cross Examining Crime for the rest of the nominees – and then vote for this one in a couple of weeks time.