a thoroughly impressive, excellently crafted murder mystery. though the decagon house murders is slow to take off when compared to other contemporary whodunits, it’s hard to put down once the murders do kick off. the tongue-in-cheek, hyper-referential, puzzlebox style pays off in the most rewarding way, diving headfirst into formula and the game-ification of the genre rather than shying away from it. the decagon house murders succeeds as an homage to and then there were none, as its own page-turning mystery, and as a formal experiment: how far can we push the meta whodunit?

 ““I don’t believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish. Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That’s all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.”  “Oh, please,” I said. “I don’t believe that. Time’s hot water and we’re not fish and you can choose to be eaten and also not to eat—not to eat,” I added quickly, turning a little red before his delighted and sardonic smile, “the little fish, of course.”  “To choose!” cried Giovanni, turning his face away from me and speaking, it appeared, to an invisible ally who had been eavesdropping on this conversation all along. “To choose!” He turned to me again. “Ah, you are really an American. J’adore votre enthousiasme!”  “I adore yours,” I said, politely, “though it seems to be a blacker brand than mine.””

when giovanni’s room was published, baldwin was criticised for writing a white protagonist; for writing a book that seemed less interested in discussing race than it was in discussing sexuality or class. in the quoted section above, however, we see a conversation between david and the titular giovanni. giovanni, an italian man who is consistently characterised as ‘dark’ (giovanni’s room was released in a time where the perception of italian people in regard to race was rapidly changing, leading to some of the nuance in this choice being lost in translation) reflects on the inevitability of the food chain, of privilege and the lack thereof (at least as i read it). david, our white american protagonist, disagrees: the world is what we make of it. he christens giovanni’s disposition as a b(/B)lacker sort than his own.

this is the genius of baldwin. in so few pages, and in such a deeply human and empathetic way, he is able to have so many coded conversations around race, class, and intersectional identities within the spoken conversations around sexuality, masculinity, and national identity. every line is precise, no word is wasted; you may read between the lines, then between the lines between the lines, and so on. this is a trojan horse of a book, deceptive in its seeming accessibility, but secretly harbouring such an incredible complexity. it packs a punch so hard it kills. essential read.