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Masao Masuto #5
The Case of the Sliding Pool
In his most baffling case yet, Masao Masuto, Beverly Hill's American-born Japanese detective, unearths a thirty-year-old murder, and in doing so, arouses a killer who will stop at nothing to put the case back to rest.
178 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1981
9 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
E.V. Cunningham
35 books9 followersEV Cunningham is a pseudonym used by author: Howard Fast, and under that name he wrote 21 mystery novels plus two others, one under his own name and one using another pseudonym Walter Ericson.
He was educated at George Washington High School, graduating in 1931. He attended the National Academy of Design in New York before serving with the Office of War Information between 1942 and 1943 and the Army Film Project in 1944.
He became war correspondent in the Far East for 'Esquire' and 'Coronet' magazines in 1945. And after the war he taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the summer of 1947, a year in which he was imprisoned for contempt of Congress, concerning his communistic views.
He became the owner of the Blue Heron Press in New York in 1952, a position he held until 1957. And he was the founder of the World Peace Movement and a member of the World Peace Council from 1950 to 1955 and was later a member of the Fellowship for Reconciliation. In 1952 he was an American Labour Party candidate for Congress for the 23rd District of New York.
He received a great many awards between 1933 and 1967.
He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and they had one son and one daughter.
Under his own name he wrote 35 works of fiction plus a variety of history and critical works, short stories, plays and a screenplay, 'The Hessian' (1971) plus a book of verse with William Gropper.
He died died at his home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, on 12 March 2003.
Gerry Wolstenholme
March 2022
He was educated at George Washington High School, graduating in 1931. He attended the National Academy of Design in New York before serving with the Office of War Information between 1942 and 1943 and the Army Film Project in 1944.
He became war correspondent in the Far East for 'Esquire' and 'Coronet' magazines in 1945. And after the war he taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the summer of 1947, a year in which he was imprisoned for contempt of Congress, concerning his communistic views.
He became the owner of the Blue Heron Press in New York in 1952, a position he held until 1957. And he was the founder of the World Peace Movement and a member of the World Peace Council from 1950 to 1955 and was later a member of the Fellowship for Reconciliation. In 1952 he was an American Labour Party candidate for Congress for the 23rd District of New York.
He received a great many awards between 1933 and 1967.
He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and they had one son and one daughter.
Under his own name he wrote 35 works of fiction plus a variety of history and critical works, short stories, plays and a screenplay, 'The Hessian' (1971) plus a book of verse with William Gropper.
He died died at his home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, on 12 March 2003.
Gerry Wolstenholme
March 2022
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
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October 8, 2015Part of a series by Howard Fast that was originally published under a pseudonym. To make things mildly unusual, Fast chose to make his detective a Beverley Hills cop who is a Zen Buddhist Nisei living in Culver City.
In this book (the first of the series I've read), heavy rains cause a hilltop swimming pool to slide away, revealing a skeleton buried thirty years earlier. The story moves along at a brisk pace, with Masuto anticipating but failing to prevent several new murders committed to cover the murderer's tracks, and a whole slew of deductions, many of which later prove to be mistaken but all of which nonetheless further the investigation.
This was more fun to read than to rethink. The author's choice of a Nisei detective was quirky, but now (thirty years later!) comes across as an odd form of local color. People are repeatedly noting that Masuto is Nisei, or comparing him with Charlie Chan. I lived in Southern California in the decade before this book was written, and my impression was that by that time Japanese-Americans didn't attract any more attention than Italian-Americans, Armenian-Americans, or Irish-Americans. (This may indicate merely that I was young and ignorant, but the internment camps of the 1940s were past and not yet well known to my generation.) I was willing to suspend disbelief regarding the detection for most of the book, but found the repeated twists at the end excessive and hard to follow. Basically, it's a story about a smart sociopath who kills to protect his own interests, and whose 1950 murder would almost certainly have remained unsolved if he hadn't begun to kill off everyone in his path once the body was discovered.
In this book (the first of the series I've read), heavy rains cause a hilltop swimming pool to slide away, revealing a skeleton buried thirty years earlier. The story moves along at a brisk pace, with Masuto anticipating but failing to prevent several new murders committed to cover the murderer's tracks, and a whole slew of deductions, many of which later prove to be mistaken but all of which nonetheless further the investigation.
This was more fun to read than to rethink. The author's choice of a Nisei detective was quirky, but now (thirty years later!) comes across as an odd form of local color. People are repeatedly noting that Masuto is Nisei, or comparing him with Charlie Chan. I lived in Southern California in the decade before this book was written, and my impression was that by that time Japanese-Americans didn't attract any more attention than Italian-Americans, Armenian-Americans, or Irish-Americans. (This may indicate merely that I was young and ignorant, but the internment camps of the 1940s were past and not yet well known to my generation.) I was willing to suspend disbelief regarding the detection for most of the book, but found the repeated twists at the end excessive and hard to follow. Basically, it's a story about a smart sociopath who kills to protect his own interests, and whose 1950 murder would almost certainly have remained unsolved if he hadn't begun to kill off everyone in his path once the body was discovered.
August 19, 2025
This the fifth installment of Howard Fast's Masao Masuto detective series, written under his pseudonym E.V.Cunningham. Masao is Nisei, employed by the Beverly Hills Police Department. This time out, it has been raining heavily in the L.A. basin, enough so that the pool of a house loses its foundation and crashes down the hillside, revealing a body buried beneath the pool 20 or so years earlier. Masao is called to the scene and instantly knows how and what to pursue. Fast was a champion of social justice, and I think he created Masao as an antidote to the racism that runs rampant in the Charlie Chan stories. It's also likely the Zen-practicing, family-oriented Masao was intended to be an accessible, human counter to Sherlock.
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August 9, 2021A quick read, almost too quick. Masua jumps to conclusions, correctly, but sometimes it can be difficult to recall how he got to each one!
Final verdict, this book definitely felt rushed. I still enjoyed it, but I think if I decide to read another in this series, I'll look for the first one to compare it to these later additions.
Final verdict, this book definitely felt rushed. I still enjoyed it, but I think if I decide to read another in this series, I'll look for the first one to compare it to these later additions.
December 22, 2021
Lots of twists. A skeleton is discovered buried under a swimming pool that slid down an embankment after persistent heavy rains led to mudslides. Masuto has to find not only the identity of the victim, but also the killer, from thirty years ago. The ending it somewhat unsatisfying, but sometimes things don't work out the way one would expect.
September 22, 2025
I loved the detective and the references to his heritage, religion and culture all vying with his chosen profession as a cop. And I'd say it plays well for when it was published and is still interesting. Having lived with Japanese in college in the 1980s, it also was accurate to their conflict living in US Western culture.
January 24, 2023
It's the rainy season in Los Angeles, a time of mud slides in the well-to-do Beverly Hills, so it's not too surprising that a swimming pool goes down a hill, but the skeleton beneath presents problems as Masuto gets misdirection over identities.
May 2, 2020
Weak and destroyed by the ending. Every deduction by Masao was wrong, or right for the wrong reason. Bizarre
April 5, 2022
I really enjoyed my first meeting with Masuto. A little less than four hours in one sitting and now I’d like to find the rest.
July 1, 2024
Oh, this was good. Kept me turning the pages. Set in Beverly Hills. I obtained the full series for the Kindle now.
October 7, 2022
This is one of those mystery novels that's absolutely engrossing--to the point where I stayed up later than usual to finish reading the final chapters--but has an ending about which I am ultimately ambivalent. The story concerns a body that's uncovered when a swimming pool slides away from its foundations after a punishing flooding rain hits Beverly Hills (thus the title). Will detective Masuto, armed with almost nothing but his remarkable talents for both intuition and deduction, be able to figure out whose bones were buried here decades ago, and who put them there?
What's interesting and a little different about this book is that it's the process more than the final outcome that's most riveting. (Which is saying something, because the sequence that closes the story is thrilling!) This novel seems to happen more inside Masao's head than some of the earlier entries: we're somehow more with him as he makes the mental leaps that lead him toward the unraveling of the seemingly unsolvable crime. We marvel as he grapples with only tiny elusive threads of fact to build cogent and plausible explanations for what's happened. And we share the frustrations he encounters, with The System and with himself.
All of the familiar characters are present here, including Masuto's increasingly assertive wife Kati, his long-suffering partner Beckmann, his ambivalent boss Wainwright who remains both frustrated by and in awe of Masuto's prowess, the crusty medical examiner Sam Baxter, and sometime nemesis Bones of the L.A. police department. We also meet a few more members of his Japanese-American extended family, including two uncles who provide him with tangible assistance in the case.
It makes for an exciting read, and like its predecessors in this series, there is food for thought from author Fast about class, race, and the zen way of living. I was disappointed in the ending in ways that can't be discussed here without giving important stuff away. But this is a great entry in a series that only contains two more books: the fact that there are just two more Masuto novels for me to read makes me cherish this all the more.
What's interesting and a little different about this book is that it's the process more than the final outcome that's most riveting. (Which is saying something, because the sequence that closes the story is thrilling!) This novel seems to happen more inside Masao's head than some of the earlier entries: we're somehow more with him as he makes the mental leaps that lead him toward the unraveling of the seemingly unsolvable crime. We marvel as he grapples with only tiny elusive threads of fact to build cogent and plausible explanations for what's happened. And we share the frustrations he encounters, with The System and with himself.
All of the familiar characters are present here, including Masuto's increasingly assertive wife Kati, his long-suffering partner Beckmann, his ambivalent boss Wainwright who remains both frustrated by and in awe of Masuto's prowess, the crusty medical examiner Sam Baxter, and sometime nemesis Bones of the L.A. police department. We also meet a few more members of his Japanese-American extended family, including two uncles who provide him with tangible assistance in the case.
It makes for an exciting read, and like its predecessors in this series, there is food for thought from author Fast about class, race, and the zen way of living. I was disappointed in the ending in ways that can't be discussed here without giving important stuff away. But this is a great entry in a series that only contains two more books: the fact that there are just two more Masuto novels for me to read makes me cherish this all the more.
September 27, 2022
Nothing remains of the deceased man but his bones.
A mudslide caused by the long, punishing storm destroyed the terrace of a Beverly Hills mansion, dislodging the swimming pool and opening a grave which had been covered for three decades. The skeleton’s deep stab wound suggests a professional’s hand—possibly a World War II veteran with commando training. Masuto digs into the past of the aged murderer, who takes deadly steps to cover up his long-forgotten crime. The detective finds himself locked in a game of cat and mouse with a brilliant and ruthless killer.
I really liked this book. 4.5 stars
A mudslide caused by the long, punishing storm destroyed the terrace of a Beverly Hills mansion, dislodging the swimming pool and opening a grave which had been covered for three decades. The skeleton’s deep stab wound suggests a professional’s hand—possibly a World War II veteran with commando training. Masuto digs into the past of the aged murderer, who takes deadly steps to cover up his long-forgotten crime. The detective finds himself locked in a game of cat and mouse with a brilliant and ruthless killer.
I really liked this book. 4.5 stars
August 18, 2015
I found an old copy of this book recently and had never heard of this author. The protagonist is a Japanese-American police detective working for the city of Beverly Hills.
What I really liked was that the writing flowed really well from the start and I quickly got into the story. I admit the dialogue gets a bit clunky in some spots. I would have given five stars but the ending was a bit too "convenient" I thought. Otherwise I would say it was just a good, simple read.
What I really liked was that the writing flowed really well from the start and I quickly got into the story. I admit the dialogue gets a bit clunky in some spots. I would have given five stars but the ending was a bit too "convenient" I thought. Otherwise I would say it was just a good, simple read.
October 17, 2014
A thirty year old unsolved murdered case is discovered by detective Masao Masuto. It is revealed when the walls of a hillside swimming pool collapse. Against the wished of his captain who just wants the case dropped, Masao pursues old leads.
June 2, 2010
Minimal go reference, but more than compensated by the best go-related cover in all of literature.
Want to read
April 23, 2019Synopsis: Masuto, the American-born Japanese detective from Beverley Hills, unearths a thirty-year-old murder and arouses a killer.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews