The Case of the Murdered Mackenzie: A Masao Masuto Mystery

Two reviews in as many weeks? What could be going on? What diabolical scheme could Miss Scarlett being cooking, you ask? Frankly put, my area has been hit with heavy snow and I've been given a few days off from work. What better time could there be than to read through a few novels?

The next book on my stack is The Murdered Mackenzie, the last novel in the Masao Masuto Mystery series. The series was authored by E.V. Cunningham, a pen name of the novelist Howard Fast. This is one of those few instances where the author is far more interesting than the book; Fast was a prolific novelist who specialized in historical fiction. However, for a good portion of his writing career, he was blacklisted (for Communist activities and a criminal record!) and forced to write under a psuedonym.

The detective in this series is Sargeant Masao Masuto, a second-generation Japanese-American, or nisei police detective from Beverly Hills. Masuto, a practioner of Zen Buddhism, uses his extensive mental and physical training to crack even the most puzzling of cases.

I think the Masuto Mysteries are be interesting primarily because of the time the novels take place. The series began in the late sixties, but the majority of the books were written in the seventies. This is the time period where many authors began to experiment with the detective genre, and began moving it away from the stereotypical white, male, hardboiled detective figure and tropes. So the Masuto novels were among the first to feature a non-white detective.

The plot begins with Masuto and his family away on vacation; while he's gone, a high-profile murder occurs. An engineer is found dead in a bathtub, and his beautiful ex-actress wife accused of the crime. She claims that the corpse is not her husband's, but four other witnesses disagree. But before the trial reaches a verdict, she dies in a mysterious accident, which Masuto thinks might not have been so accidental...

Now, I found the book itself to be average at best. The plot was quite tricky in some areas, involving an interesting bit with a disappearing body and several characters who technically don't exist. But quite early on, Fast/Cunningham starts smacking the reader in the face with "hints" that there's some sort of conspiracy going on, and eventually pulls in the F.B.I and a few other
big organizations

like the C.I.A and the KGB of all things; I guess when you want to make the incarnate bad guy, you throw in Communists?

To be honest, I find the whole "conspiracy theory"/"secret agent" theme to be rather silly and very out of place in a detective novel. It's really more at home in a thriller novel--which may have mystery elements, but is not a detective novel!

The dialogue felt very stilted and unnatural--especially anything spoken by Masuto or his wife. They are native English speakers, for crying out loud! Why are their speech patterns completely different from the Anglo characters?

I felt rather disengaged with this book. Although the blurbs on the back cover praise Masuto as "fresh and likeable," I just found it hard to "bond" with Masuto. But that's my personal take on it; there have been many books where I liked it overall but just didn't find the characters interesting.

I appreciated the hardboiled elements in the book very much. There are a few heart-pounding, almost cinematic moments of serious danger (trying to prevent a car with tampered brakes from crashing, for example) that punch up the otherwise monotonous investigation.

Overall, the book is fairly balanced between elements that I enjoyed and areas where I was so bored I had to skim through. I'll skip this series, though, since I wasn't too engaged. Hard-boiled fans may enjoy this one, but beware that the plot starts to lean heavily on the "secret spy agency conspiracy" trope towards the end.

In one sentence: A later-generation hard-boiled detective novel that lags in some areas, starting well but ending on a flat note.

Good sleuthing!