Murder, He Wrote

Deadly Premonition creator Hidetaka Suehiro is back with another whodunnit.

- Hidetaka Suehiro

The collected works of Hidetaka Suehiro don’t exactly portray a man troubled by the confines of convention. Better known by his alias Swery 65, Suehiro has mastered a craft of mystery games that are eccentric, mischievous and – whether by accident or design – sometimes thoroughly bewildering. With his next release, The Good Life, he is hoping to satisfy the cultural forefathers that established the whodunnit genre, after an unlikely journey deep into middle England.

Suehiro’s work, curiously, had previously taken him to Hitchin, a modest UK market town that’s all timber-framed buildings, ancient churches and chocolate-box side streets. “I was really interested in how they were upholding English traditions while changing and adapting to the new generation,” he says of his stay in the Hertfordshire town. It reminded him, too, of the kinds of places in which his favourite classic crime yarns were set.

“I’ve created several mysteries over my career, and I’ve read my share of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie,” he tells us. “They’re ‘Mystery 101’ to me. I suppose I always wanted to try and write a mystery story set in England at least once. I’ve always thought that maybe if I created a mystery set in England, then all the people who’ve previously created mysteries there would approve of me.”