![]() ![]() ![]() X marks the spot where one can enjoy an old-fashioned matching of wits and the melodrama of criminality recedes into the background. It isn’t in fact over, until the fat lady sings, but the ending seems rather in conflict with the overall tone of the novel where, as Poirot would have it, sentiment and reason have remained firmly opposed all along. “I recall you posing a question to me before,” Ishigami says to Yukawa, “You asked which was more difficult, formulating an unsolvable problem, or solving that problem.” When Yukawa responds to Ishigami’s solution to the popular mathematical conundrum, Ishigami realises, “It’s over.” Yukawa begins to disentangle Ishigami’s elaborately woven smokescreens and elegant deceptions but all this takes place with great reluctance and over one degree of separation. ![]() Fiction seems to be stranger than truth in this case: the plodding policemen are aided by none other than Ishigami’s old schoolmate and onetime friend, the brilliant professor of physics, Yukawa. ![]()
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