Sun 5 Jul 2009
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: MILTON K. OZAKI – The Dummy Murder Case.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[2] Comments
William F. Deeck
MILTON K. OZAKI – The Dummy Murder Case. Graphic Books #33; paperback original; 1st printing, 1951.
As part of Professor Caldwell’s class in psychology, the Professor plans a visual presentation to instruct perceptual responses. Instead of the usual classroom show, a rather comlex presentation is given to the class outdoors:
Two friends of the Professor’s assistant, Bendy, stage a mock murder, with a young lady being shot at the end of a, pier and falling into the water. A mannequin has already been sunk at on the spot. The police, with prior arrangement, are to come and drag for the body.
Instead of finding the mannequin, the draggers recover the body of a young woman with her throat slit. The police report to Caldwell that the woman had no visible means of support — and no visible person to support her — and has in her apartment a room equipped like the wrapping department of a store, with paper from several first-class establishments and totally empty boxes already wrapped.
If there were no other reason for him to investigate, this puzzle would bring Caldwell into the case, despite the objections of Bendy, who knows he will have to do all the work while the Professor does the thinking.
There are enough coincidences in the novel to keep a reader muttering, “It’s a small world,” or maybe even “It’s an infinitesimal world.” Only an interest in the explanation for the wrapped empty boxes kept me reading to the end.
EDITORIAL COMMENT. An homage to Milton K. Ozaki’s prose style, along with a complete checklist of all his mystery fiction, can be found here on the primary Mystery*File website.
A longer profile on Mr. Ozaki himself can be found here, where it is said: “Even though he was the product of a mixed marriage, we believe that Milton K. Ozaki is among the earliest mystery writers of Japanese heritage writing in English as his (or her) primary language.”
July 6th, 2009 at 5:43 am
I could never warm to Ozaki, who Bill Pronzini I think rightly nailed as one of the alternative writers. His books aren’t bad by any means, but something is just off.
He may well be one of the earliest writers in the genre of mixed Japanese heritage though. Both Poul Anderson and Will Oursler had protagonists who were half Japanese in roughly the same era, and of course later Howard Fast wrote several as E.V. Cunningham with a Japanese American cop protagonist.
I was actually in a class where they pulled the phony murder routine once. It caught most of the students by surprise, but frankly it was so badly staged I caught on fairly fast and started jotting down notes. Come to think of it, that may have been the only time I paid any real attention in that class. To be fair I had half been expecting it since the class began. He was the sort of professor who must have still thought this was cutting edge even in the early seventies when most of us has seen it on countless television episodes and in countless movies.
I wonder if they still do this today — or if they are too concerned some student will pull out a gun and start shooting — or a cell phone and start videoing? It’s a bit like the test where they tell you to read all the questions first, and question number twenty or so says to just sign the thing and sit back and watch the rest of the class sweat trying to answer increasingly nonsensical questions and do impossible tasks.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
It’s too late to ask him now, but after reading Bill Crider’s piece on Ozaki, I wonder why Bill Deeck didn’t supply some direct quotes from this book as part of his review.
Bill D. was very fond of doing so with other authors, and in fact he had several articles in TMF along those same lines, called “Gems from the Literature.”
Here’s one:
“There was a thick film of dust on the water in the pan.” — CURTAINS FOR THE COPPER, by Thomas Polsky.
And here’s another:
“She was sinking into an unconscious coma.” — THE MERRIVALE MYSTERY, by James Corbett.
And one more for good measure:
“Don’t you realize that those who have to spend an English winter in the country spend their time brooding over imaginary grievances, and if they have none, they create them?” — MURDER BY BURIAL, by Stanley Casson.