THE MYSTERY OF MAHJONG
“I had read of there being such a thing as The Perfect Winning—going Mah Jong on one’s original hand. I had never hoped to hold the hand myself. With suppressed triumph I laid my hand face upwards on the table.”
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie (1926)
My first awareness of the game of Mahjong happened decades ago while watching an old television episode from season five of COLUMBO, “Identity Crisis.” The killer, who is played by the highly esteemed actor Patrick McGoohan, is quite wealthy, not to mention devilishly self-absorbed, and when Lieutenant Columbo visits him in his palatial mansion the unassuming scruffy faced, raincoat wearing, cigar smoking detective is more than a little amazed at the number of table games on display in the home’s luxurious study.
“You like to play games, sir?” Columbo says to McGoohan’s character. “I know this one. Backgammon. I’ve seen that before. And I know poker.” He opens a red box and peers inside. “What’s this?”
“Mahjong,” says McGoohan.
Columbo cups his hand to his ear. “What?”
“Maaaah. Jong,” McGoohan annunciates, annoyed.
Columbo is taken back by a game he doesn’t know but moves on. He has bigger fish to fry.
In the final scene, the big reveal in which Columbo exposes to the killer just how he caught him (remember, COLUMBO was not a whodunnit but a howcatchem—we know from the start who the killer is), he finds himself face to face with McGoohan, and the final words of these two men who’d been in a cat and mouse game throughout the episode, is one and the same.
“Mahjong,” says McGoohan, conceding defeat to the detective.
“Mahjong,” says Columbo. The detective has won the game.
For me, at that moment, mahjong became not only a game of sophistication but also a mystery I needed to unravel. Years later I bought a cheap set off Amazon but never took the time to learn. It remained a mystery until this past summer when a friend of my wife learned the game from her friend. The friend then taught my wife who then taught me, our girls, and other friends and family members. Since then I’ve played a number of times and I’ve even “mahjonged” a time or two. The mystery was solved and then I began to learn of it’s history.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie, Special Edition by The Easton Press, 1925.
The game originated in China in the late 1880s as a pastime for sailors. By the 1920s and 30s mahjong had traversed the high seas and become all the rage in the United States, and it wasn’t long before the game found its way between the pages of one the most well-known and consequential mysteries of all time, Agatha Christie’s 1929 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
That night we had a little mahjong party. This kind of simple entertainment is very popular in King’s Abbot. The guests arrive in galoshes and waterproofs after dinner. They partake of coffee and later of cake, sandwiches, and tea.
Thus begins chapter 16, “An Evening at Mah Jong.” Christie goes with her description of the setting.
We used to play bridge—chatty bridge of the worst description. We find Mah Jong much more peaceful … We sat round the table. For some five minutes there was complete silence, owing to the fact that there is tremendous secret competition as to who can build their wall quickest.
While playing the players discuss the case the famed detective Hercule Poirot is working, all the while drawing tiles, discarding, and some even passing. Eventually one of the characters wins and the others lament how close they were to doing the same. Several more rounds are played, all won by the same character, until eventually the narrator of the story mahjongs, much to his surprise.
I was overwhelmed and intoxicated. I had read of there being such a thing as The Perfect Winning—going Mah Jong on one’s original hand. I had never hoped to hold the hand myself.
With suppressed triumph I laid my hand face upwards on the table.
“As they say in the Shanghai Club,” I remarked—”Tin-ho—the Perfect Winning.”
The colonel’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head.
“Upon my soul,” he said, “what an extraordinary thing. I never saw that happen berfore!”
Christie’s insertion of the game into the plot had more to do with its popularity at the time than than anything else. But I think it is fair to say that it also served, as her use of the card game Bridge did in other novels, as a thematic device much the same as that old episode of COLUMBO. As Christie’s contemporary and fellow crime writer John Dixon Carr once put it, the fair play detective story is the “grandest game in the world.” Murder always leads to a competition between killer and detective.
John Curran, one of the most renown authorities on the history of mystery and expert on the life and writings of Agatha Christie, makes the point in his recent book The Murder Game that the Western craze of mahjong during the Golden Age of Mystery (roughly that period between the two world wars, 1920s, 30s, and 40s, which included Christie, Carr, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, Margie Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Erle Stanley Gardner) was no mere coincidence. Rather, the simultaneous explosion in interest of the mystery novel and the game of mahjong stemmed from the public’s growing appetite for puzzles. As Curran notes, there is a connection between crossword puzzle addicts and detective fiction.
Some readers find the same satisfaction in detection that they find in doing a demanding crossword puzzle … You are competing with an adversary who cannot possibly cheat you, and need never outwit you, because his statement is frozen on paper and he cannot, as he would in, say, a game of chess, adjust his strategy to yours. (Curren)
I’ve known for years I wanted to include the game of mahjong in a mystery of my own, to follow in the literary footsteps of Christie and others who’ve used games as a motif for murder. Once I learned how to play the game this past summer it was a no-brainer that the mahjong mystery I would write would include Jaxson and Holiday and find it’s setting in some glamorous old hotel where no doubt, during that wonderful Golden Age of Mystery, guests once gathered around tables to see who could build their wall of tiles the quickest. I’m currently working on The Eyes of Murder Are Upon You: The Mystery of the Grand Galvez, a locked room mystery in which Jaxson and Holiday must discover how a killer got in an out of a room that’s been bolted shut from the inside. That mystery will release next year, and once it does I’ll turn my attention fully to another story I’m already pre-planning, Echoes of Mendacity: The Del Coronado Mystery, and you can be sure it’ll be the mahjong mystery I’ve been dying to write for years. But unlike Christie, I won't just use the game as a pretext for gathering the suspects, nor as a mere homage to the great game and its current modern-day resurgence. The game will be the setting but also the clues and the red herrings as well. It will be the scene of the crime and the scene of the big reveal, where Jaxson and Holiday stand before everyone, disclose the killer among them, and in a final closing word say, “Mahjong!”
