NEW RELEASES
The Book of the Black Death by Oguri Mushitaro
The Marchese of Roccaverdina by Luigi Capuana
THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH
Half a century before Umberto Eco sealed monks inside an abbey with a serial killer and a poisoned Aristotle, Oguri Mushitarō locked a detective inside a Gothic castle with a grimoire, a glowing corpse, and a prophecy of six murders written in the hand of a dead man. Serialized in 1934, The Book of the Black Death is the novel Eco might have written had he been born in Tokyo and raised on Charcot, Cagliostro, and the Kabbalistic Exegesis rather than Aquinas and Borges. Its detective, Norizumi Rintarō, is William of Baskerville’s mad Japanese twin, a polymath who deploys heraldry, toxicology, and medieval sorcery with equal fluency, and whose erudition is both the instrument of his investigation and the source of its deepest dangers. Recognized in Japan as one of the four greatest mystery novels ever written in the language, it has never before appeared in English.
In the Celtic Renaissance château known as the Hall of Black Death, a family descended from the Medici through the sorceress-consort Bianca Capello has kept four foreign musicians sealed within its walls for forty years. When the first violinist is found dead with her corpse glowing with an unearthly phosphorescence and the locked room undisturbed, a document surfaces in the hand of the mansion’s long-dead patriarch. It is a prophecy naming six members of the household and the method by which each will be slain.
As Norizumi races to prevent the next murder, he finds himself contending not only with a killer of extraordinary cunning but with the accumulated sorcery and science of four centuries, encrypted in a grimoire that was old when the Inquisition was young.
The translation, by Vox Day, is the first-ever English translation of Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken. Now available on Amazon for Kindle and audiobook.
Excerpt
The six-panel apocalypse that Kuga Shizuko had laid before them was a document concealing content of the utmost grim brutality beneath an exterior drawn in crude, archaic lines and shapes of considerable drollery. And yet there could be no question that in this case it constituted the foundation of every element. Should they fail to penetrate it at this juncture, the wall it erected would stand through a thousand further rounds of interrogation and examination, and it was plain that it would halt the investigation where it stood. Thus, even as Shizuko was delivering her astonishing interpretation, Norizumi had sunk his chin upon his chest and sat in the posture of one asleep, his concentration absolute, and the inner anguish of that meditation must have exceeded anything in his experience. For the fact remained: a murder in which there was no murderer. The method of reading the Egyptian barque and the corpse-figures as correlated elements could not be denied. And yet, to the surprise of all, when he at last raised his face, vitality was visibly flooding into it, and a ferocious expression rose to the surface.
“I understand. But Madame Kuga, the principle underlying this document contains none of that Swedenborg theology. What appears deranged is in truth an orderly logical form. And the geometric theory of spatial structure, which is said to govern all phenomena, serves here too as the absolute invariant unit. Therefore, if this document can be placed in correspondence with the laws of the natural universe, it follows that something must be abstractable from it.” The prosecutor could only gape at the spectacle of Norizumi plunging headlong into what could only be called an unprecedented domain of supra-empirical reasoning. Mathematical logic, it was true, was held to be the guiding principle of all laws; yet even in The Bishop Murder Case, had not the Riemann-Christoffel tensor served merely as a representation of a criminal concept? And here was Norizumi, attempting to apply such mathematics to the practical analysis of a crime, stepping out into the vacant, boundless world of abstract thought.
“Oh, I see…” Shizuko laughed without concealment. “That reminds me of the foolish science student who, after attending a lecture on the Lorentz contraction, began drawing all his straight lines crooked. Very well then, shall I ask you to express analytically the result of adding a Fourth Dimension to Minkowski’s four-dimensional world?”
Norizumi flicked away her laughter with a sidelong glance and gently admonished her before continuing: “Now then, if one were asked to name the most brilliant page in the history of cosmic-structure speculation, it would surely be that hypothesis duel: the debate between Einstein and de Sitter concerning the curvature of space. De Sitter, at the time, argued that the curvature derived from the intrinsic geometric properties of space itself, and in the same stroke he refuted Einstein’s anti-sun theory. But Madame Kuga, when one juxtaposes those two theories, the mainspring of the apocalypse document emerges from between them.” Uttering what sounded for all the world like the words of a man who had lost his reason, he drew the following diagram and commenced his explanation.
“Let us begin with the anti-sun theory. Einstein proposed that a ray of light emitted by the sun would travel along the rim of a spherical universe and return to its point of origin. In doing so, when it first reached the outermost limit of the universe, it would create a first image there; then, continuing its journey of millions of years around the outer sphere, it would arrive at the antipodal point behind the sun and create a second image. But by that time, the sun would long since have perished and become nothing more than a dark star.
“That is to say, the entity corresponding to the image would no longer exist in the world of the living.
THE MARCHESE OF ROCCAVERDINA
A Sicilian nobleman murders his former servant out of jealousy, then watches an innocent man go to prison for the crime. So begins Luigi Capuana’s masterpiece of psychological destruction.
The marchese of Roccaverdina had arranged everything perfectly. His former mistress Agrippina Solmo was married off to Rocco Criscione under an impossible pact: the marriage was to be in name only. When the marchese came to believe the pact had been broken, he killed Rocco on a dark road outside town. Another man was convicted. The marchese was free.
But freedom proved more terrible than any punishment. Haunted by a confessor who demands he turn himself in, tormented by the great Crucifix that watches him from the walls of his own house, and unable to love the wife he married to restore respectability, the marchese begins a long descent from guilt into obsession, from obsession into delirium, and from delirium into madness.
Published in 1901, Il Marchese di Roccaverdina is the crowning achievement of Italian verismo, the literary movement that sought to portray life with unflinching realism. Capuana, who with Giovanni Verga defined the movement, created in the marchese one of the great psychological portraits in European fiction: a man destroyed not by the law, not by society, but by the inexorable workings of his own conscience.
Now available on Amazon for Kindle and audiobook.
Excerpt
Each time he entered the camerone, as the salon of the baronessa di Lagomorto was called, don Silvio La Ciura was seized by a feeling of admiration that rendered him even more timid than usual.
He had remained standing, one point of his priest’s hat pressed to his lips, and seemed almost lost amid the old furniture that gave the long, narrow room an air of decrepitude and abandonment.
Waiting for the baronessa to appear from one of the four doors that reached to the cornice, having cast a rapid glance at the dusty portraits, the blackened and cracked paintings, the baroque-framed mirrors—tarnished and half-eaten by damp—that covered the walls; at the chests of drawers painted a pale green with white flowers and à la Pompeiana borders and medallions on the fronts; at the slender chairs with gilded backs, at the armchairs and the two sofas in the Empire style, upholstered in red damask already faded and worn, don Silvio had stopped to contemplate the large unframed painting in which one could just make out the bald head of Saint Peter, those of five other figures—servant women and soldiers—surrounding him in the praetorium of Pilate, and a rooster on the balustrade of the portico, its beak open in the act of crowing.
He would have liked to see that painting in a church, on the altar of a chapel, and not there, irreverently placed atop the spinet—varnished a dull yellow with black trim, supported by three slender square legs—that stood against the wall, its keyboard facing the large window. But he did not dare suggest once more to the baronessa the idea of donating it to the parish.
The painting had been brought from Rome in the seventeenth century by one of her husband’s ancestors, and she wished to preserve intact all the family keepsakes, just as she had found them the day she came from the house of the Roccaverdina to that of the Ingo-Corillas, barons of Lagomorto, bride to the young baron don Alvaro more than half a century before.
The rustle of a skirt on the varnished tiles of the floor revealed the baronessa’s presence to the priest only as she passed close by him on her way to settle into that corner of the sofa where she was accustomed to curl up on the rare occasions when she received a visit from a relative or from persons of the most intimate acquaintance. Don Silvio was among these.
Tall, thin as a rail, deeply lined but still ruddy, with snow-white hair parted in two bands that covered her ears and made her face look smaller within the folds of the black silk kerchief knotted beneath her chin, dressed in a light grey fabric and wearing on her bony, tapering hands grey lisle half-gloves, the baronessa had entered without a sound through the door to which don Silvio had at that moment been turning his back.
The priest made a deep bow, approached to kiss her hand as soon as she, having seated herself, indicated an armchair to him; then, with a humble bearing and a thin voice, he began:
“Jesus Christ sends me...”
“Jesus Christ sends you to me too often!” the baronessa interrupted, smiling benevolently.
“He turns to those who are able to give charity and do so willingly,” replied don Silvio.
And so saying, he seemed to wish to make smaller still his slight, thin person, which in its sunken eye-sockets and hollow, pallid cheeks bore the marks of the fasts and penances with which he mortified his wretched body.
“Jesus Christ, however,” the baronessa resumed, shaking her head, “remembers the poor who have nothing to eat, and forgets that rich and poor alike already stand in need of rain for the grain, for the vines, for the olive trees!”
“It will rain, in due time, if our sins do not stand in the way.”
“You do penance for all of us, you do,” the baronessa added.
“I am a greater sinner than any!”
“Tell Him so, tell Jesus Christ: We need rain, Lord! We need rain!”
“I shall tell Him,” replied the good priest, with simplicity. “In the meantime, I come to commend to you once more that poor woman, the wife of Neli Casaccio. Now that her husband is in prison, the poor creature is perishing of want, with four children who can be of no help to her. She swears, before God and the saints, that her husband is innocent.”
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