Is this Guy the Next Stieg Larsson?
Mr. Higashino’s first major foray into the U.S. market is “The Devotion of Suspect X,” which was published in the U.S. on Feb. 1st. (Another novel, “Naoko,” had a limited English print run in 2004.)
The novel is a taut thriller in which a single mother murders her abusive ex-husband to protect her teenage daughter and then accepts an offer of help from her neighbor and secret admirer, a math genius called Ishigami who hears the commotion from next door, to conceal the crime. “Trust me,” says Ishigami as he sets about devising the perfect alibi for the object of his obsession. “Logical thinking will get us through this.”
“Murder mysteries cross well between cultures because people have bad sides as well as good,” says Mr. Higashino. “People show their true natures in the act of committing a crime.”
“The Devotion of Suspect X” is part of the author’s popular “Dr. Galileo” series, which feature a physics professor with a knack for solving impenetrable cases. The novel won Japan’s Naoki Prize in 2005, and the foreign rights have been sold as far afield as China, Thailand, France, Russia and Spain. It was also turned into a movie in Japan in 2008.
St. Martin’s Press has set an ambitious print run of 75,000 copies for “The Devotion of Suspect X,” in the U.S., and says it bought the rights to the book before interest in global detective stories took off following the runaway success of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” But Mr. Higashino says he won’t be measuring success in the U.S. in terms of number of copies sold.
They both draw attention to extremely important issues in a very entertaining way.