If you're trying to write something, picture this for a moment.
You're 48. A university professor. You've published plenty of academic papers and essays, but you've never written a single line of fiction in your life.
Then one day, you sit down and write your first novel. It sells 50 million copies.
That's Umberto Eco.
An Italian semiotician and medieval scholar. The first novel he ever wrote was The Name of the Rose.
This is the seventh book in my 100 Debuts project — and easily the most gripping one so far.
Serial Murder in a Medieval Monastery
Here's the setup: fourteenth-century Italy, a monastery perched in the mountains. Monks start dying under suspicious circumstances, one after another.
Enter William of Baskerville, a former inquisitor and intellectual heavyweight. He arrives with his young apprentice Adso to investigate — but this story isn't just a whodunit.
William has three objectives running simultaneously.
Identify the killer.
Get his hands on a forbidden book.
Mediate a volatile standoff between the Papacy and the Franciscan order.
The truth is, he can't accomplish all of them. Which ones he fails at — I'll let you find that out for yourself.
You Don't Need to Know Christianity to Enjoy This
I'll be honest — Christianity plays almost zero role in my daily life. I celebrate Christmas, sure. I exchange gifts with my wife and eat cake. But if you asked me why we celebrate it, I'd just shrug.
That level of cluelessness didn't stop me from devouring this book.
The reason is simple: it's wrapped in the machinery of a mystery. A monk dies. Suspects emerge. Clues are gathered. Deductions are made. Another victim falls.
That "whodunit" engine pulls you forward so relentlessly that even when you're wading through medieval theology and Latin quotations, you never feel lost.
You might assume a novel by a professor of semiotics would be impenetrable. It's not. Eco was too smart for that. The narrator, Adso, is a young novice — he's bewildered and amazed right alongside you. He's your surrogate, and it works beautifully.
If you're writing mystery fiction, this is a masterclass in accessible design.
Skip the Movie, Read the Book
Hmm. For this particular book — no. The movie does have its moments, though.
Ron Perlman as Salvatore, for instance — a wandering monk who's drifted through so many countries and picked up so many languages that he can't speak any of them properly anymore. Perlman — years before Hellboy — delivers a wild, unforgettable performance.
But.
When To Kill a Mockingbird was adapted to film, the filmmakers stripped away the subplots and kept only the essence. That subtraction made it a classic.
The Name of the Rose film did the opposite. It added material that doesn't exist in the novel — particularly scenes of angry villagers raging against Church authority.
Honestly, it feels unnecessary.
The story's greatest strength is the claustrophobic pressure of a sealed monastery where knowledge, faith, and power collide. Bring the outside world in, and you lose that density.
I Found My Muse: The Inquisitor
Let me get personal here.
The reason this novel won't let go of me has a name: the Inquisitor.
Bernard Gui, who appears as William's antagonist in the story, was a real person. Born around 1261, he was a Dominican friar who served as an inquisitor for sixteen years. He even wrote a manual on how to conduct inquisitions — the Practica Inquisitionis.
An actual how-to guide for inquisitions. Let that sink in.
I've been asking myself why this figure fascinates me so much.
Someone who condemns the innocent based on flawed evidence. A man who wields institutional power to destroy lives. And the people who get destroyed are almost always the poor, the powerless, the ones at the bottom.
That raw unfairness electrified something in me.
Looking back, I realize I felt the same pull toward Mozgus in Berserk — a bishop and inquisitor who's sent over 500 people to crucifixion and the breaking wheel, earning him the title "The Blood Scripture." The contrast between his merciful face and his merciless actions is terrifyingly beautiful.
Life is unfair. Some are born rich, some poor. And within that unfair world, there exist people with the official authority to bring suffering upon others. The ones who suffer are almost always those who were already at the bottom.
What draws me isn't cruelty for its own sake. It's the collision between those intoxicated by their own power and those crushed by fate. Human nature, laid bare.
The Inquisitor might just be my creative muse.
I Started Writing Two Hours Every Morning
Seven books into this 100 Debuts project, and I still hadn't written a single short story. The despair was real.
So I flipped the script. I gave up on not writing.
I've started living as a writer. A writer's job is to write. So I made that job the first thing I do every morning — two hours, no exceptions.
At first, I was just reading books about how to write fiction. But input without output is meaningless. Obviously. And yet I kept falling into that trap. I'm the kind of person who finds endless comfort in planning and preparation. It makes me happy, but it doesn't produce anything.
So I forced the issue: two hours of facing a blank page. No reading allowed.
Yeah, I know — should've done that from the start.
I haven't started drafting prose yet — I'm still in the setting and plot phase. But it's been two weeks and the habit is holding. The challenge now is stabilizing my wake-up time by fixing when I go to bed.
I Picked My Genre: Mystery
I used to think light novels — short, serialized Japanese genre fiction — were my best shot. But I realized that despite their reputation for following templates, light novels actually offer enormous creative freedom. Swimming in an ocean without structure is brutal for a beginner.
So I made my choice. I'm entering the Edogawa Rampo Prize.
For those unfamiliar, it's one of Japan's most prestigious mystery awards for unpublished novels. It's named after Edogawa Rampo, the father of Japanese mystery fiction — whose pen name is a Japanese wordplay on "Edgar Allan Poe."
Here's something about Japan's publishing world that surprises a lot of Western writers: you can't just submit a manuscript to a publisher. Cold submissions barely exist here. Winning a newcomer's prize is essentially the only path to a professional debut.
The novelist Arimasa Osawa wrote in his craft book that aspiring writers should aim for "high-caliber prizes" — awards whose past winners have gone on to successful careers. In other words, prizes with editors who know how to develop talent.
In my last piece on To Kill a Mockingbird, I wrote about editor Tay Hohoff, who ordered Harper Lee to rewrite her entire manuscript and gave her the direction that turned it into a masterpiece. Meeting the right editor can transform a career.
And the truth is, I love mysteries. I didn't fully realize it until I looked back and noticed the pattern — Christie, Holmes, Joker Game, Lord El-Melloi II's Case Files. I've always gravitated toward puzzles and deduction.
Most importantly, mystery has structure. It has form. As a discipline for mastering the fundamentals — the "shu" in shu-ha-ri, the Japanese principle of mastering the basics before breaking the rules — it's unmatched.
There are no shortcuts. I want to learn the craft properly.
Like Eco, who wrote his first novel at 48. It's never too late.