Seicho Matsumoto was forty years old when his first book was published. He may have been a slow starter, but by the time he died in 1992 his work had won multiple prizes and he had become widely recognized as Japan’s leading crime writer, earning the somewhat dubious and patronizing tribute from Le Monde, “The Simenon of Japan”.

Tokyo Express first appeared in Japan in 1958. The plot is straightforward and has none of the trickery and deliberate complexity that spoils so many detective stories these days. A Tokyo police officer investigates an apparent double suicide on a remote beach in the south of Japan. The country’s railway timetables play a big part in piecing together what really happened. The whole story has a charm that is difficult to describe. The elegant design of the novel was what drew Tokyo Express to my attention, but it was Matsumoto’s storytelling style that held my attention until the final page.