2 min readJul 29, 2026 06:15 AM IST First published on: Jul 29, 2026 at 06:15 AM ISTWhich is harder: Devising an unsolvable problem, or solving that problem?” posits Keigo Higashino in The Devotion of Suspect X. The stupendous success of the murder mystery, and of the books that came afterwards — Salvation of a Saint, Malice, Invisible Helix, The Final Curtain, among others — however, threw up a third tantalising possibility. Perhaps the hardest thing is to recognise the moral ambiguity that underpins life — the things one can do for love or hate; out of guilt, shame, vengeance, and sacrifice. At a time when thrillers replace emotional depth with relentless pace, it was his exploration of what lies behind whodunits that made the 68-year-old Japanese writer, who died on Monday, a global phenomenon.In part, of course, Higashino was following tradition. Unlike the gory thread of Nordic noir that has come to be a defining feature of the genre, or the French roman policier, he was falling back on the convention of the honkaku mystery — a form of crime fiction that emerged in Japan in the 1920s and relied on the cerebral over the corporeal aspects of a violent crime. But Higashino’s achievement lay in his refusal to indulge certainties, breaking down, one deduction at a time, what circumstances make the crime conceivable and whether justice can ever be separated from empathy.AdvertisementAt its finest, crime fiction examines what happens when ordinary life is disrupted violently, when established mores are upended by an irreparable rupture. Higashino’s appeal lay not just in the elegance of his solutions, remarkable though they often were, but in the fact that he trusted his readers — to grapple with ambiguity, to ask difficult questions —without pretending to offer definitive answers.