In Death in the House of Rain (Locked Room International, Nov.), Taiwanese author Lin crafts a taut impossible-crime novel.
What was the inspiration for the book?
The trick of the impossible murders first came to me when I was using the men’s room in a restaurant. Such a space becomes a locked room when people are in it, and I started thinking about how I could get out of that space with it locked from the inside. The answer dawned on me before I left.
The book has an unusual setting: a house in Taiwan designed to resemble the Chinese character for rain. Where did that come from?
I chose the unusual setting because the term “snowbound” in the context of mystery fiction is usually translated as “rainbound” in Chinese. Therefore, a setting that makes “rain” physical would be representative of this subgenre of mystery, at least for Chinese-speaking readers.
How different would the book have been had you set it in Japan, where more impossible-crime fiction is being written these days?
There might not be a big difference. And I think this shows that Taiwanese culture is indeed influenced by Japanese culture to some degree, and this partly explains why Taiwanese readers enjoy Japanese fiction so much. But the attitude towards life revealed at the end of the final chapter of the story, which goes into debates about free will, is very typical of the Chinese-speaking world.
How have your mystery criticism writings shaped your fiction?
Comments from the hardest critic tend to be the most constructive; at least this is what I have learned from experience. Though I’m still hurt by harsh remarks, I’ve learned to accept them. My attitude towards criticism reached a turning point after I produced The Nameless Woman in 2010 and submitted it for the second Soji Shimada Mystery Award. Though it gained critical acclaim, it also received very harsh criticism from one of my fellow Taiwanese authors. Eventually, I revised the novel based on his comments and it was published in 2012.
What was translating your own work like?
At first, it felt surreal, because that is a rare thing for a mystery writer to do. And then came a painful process, because many sentences in my narration are long and complicated—a feature of my early works. Under Locked Room International publisher John Pugmire’s guidance, I trimmed and reshaped the text quite a bit so that it flows much better than in the original version. I have learned that succinctness and terseness can be a great virtue, at least for Western readers.
