1/21/23

More Than Zero: Case Closed, vol. 84 by Gosho Aoyama

Gosho Aoyama's 84th volume of Case Closed (Detective Conan) traditionally begins with the concluding chapters to the case that closed out the previous volume, a prequel story, which takes place before Jimmy Kudo became Conan Edogawa during a trip to the aquarium – where someone predictably got killed. A man is stabbed to death in the aquarium tunnel and some detective work, amateur and professional, whittles down the crowd of potential suspects down to three: the victim's current girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend. There's just one problem. All three suspects possess waterproof alibis as all three were shooting a video on their smartphones. 

Case Closed began serialization in 1994 and tried to keep pace with the changing times. Just think how much the world changed between 1994, 2004 and 2014, which is when this volume was originally published in Japan. So the series deserve applause for always trying to come up with ways to apply modern technology to the classically-styled detective stories and a really fine example is the elevator case from vol. 79. A story that uses modern-day technology to straight up warp people's perception of reality with the only drawback being that the execution of the trick was a little rough around the edges. Some can be said of this prequel story. The smartphone alibi is perfectly fine in theory, but strains credulity in practice as it requires very specific, even contrived circumstances to work. A second problem is that the presence of 2014 smartphones look really weird in a prequel story from a series that began in 1994. I know only about a year has passed, in-universe, but this story clashes with earlier stories featuring '90s fax machines and '00s flip phones.

This observation comes with the benefit of hindsight, but it might have been better had Aoyama frozen the series, culturally and technological, somewhere between '94 and '04. It would have come at the cost of most of these innovative, tech-based detective stories. However, placing the series in a clearly defined period of time would have improved continuity and the reader's perception of time passed, because it feels like nearly two decades past instead of merely a year. And, as the next few stories demonstrate, continuity is the foundation of Case Closed.

The second story has Conan and the Junior Detective League participating in a kite-flying competition, which becomes the scene of a nearly fatal accident when one of the kite-fliers nearly drowned in the river. Ryota Renno was holding his kite, while taking walking backwards, but the guard rope behind him was broken and tumbled backwards – suggesting nothing more than a simple accident. Conan astutely observes that the guard rope only looks like it had snapped a long time ago. Somebody lured him into the river and there are three potential suspects, but none of them was anywhere near him. So how could they have impelled him to walk into the river? The trick has all "the cleverness of a child" and the comic book format helped make the clueing a whole fairer than it would have been otherwise, but resolving the problem can also be filed away under "contrived circumstances." A fairly minor and average story.

Unfortunately, the third and weakest story of the collection can, plot-wise, also be described as contrived, but the plot plays second fiddle to the main, ongoing storyline that begins to take precedent as the build towards vol. 85 begins. More about that in a minute. Conan, Rachel and Richard Moore visit Eva Kaden, who had her appendix removed, in the hospital when someone gets poisoned under quasi-impossible circumstances. Three women were cheering up a hospitalized friend with an impromptu tea party, but one cup of tea contained poison and the obvious answer is that the murderer, in an unguarded moment, swapped the victim's teacup with a poisoned one. However, they were all drinking differently flavored and colored teas ("one's brown, one's blue and one's yellow") with the victim's "was drinking a red blend" with a slice of lemon in it. Normally, this series is quite good at poisonous puzzles, but this case is not one of them. However, Conan has something else on his mind as Toru Amuro turns up at the hospital to ask questions about events from the novel-length vol. 58.

The fourth and final case follows the pattern of the previous story, but with even more familiar faces turning up. A schoolteacher is viciously attacked and left for dead in a public park, clumsily disguised as an accident, but the victim had a direct connection to the two FBI agents, Jodie Sterling and Andre Camel – who had engaged Amuro as a private investigator "because she was being victimized by a stalker." So, while they try to figure out whether the culprit is a stalking colleague or a disgruntled parent, Conan also attempts to probe Amuro's true intentions. Sometimes even the best detectives can be surprised at the answers they get ("I think you're a bit mistaken about me"). The case of whom attacked the teacher is descent enough, but all of the interest here went to the ongoing storyline and setting up the next volume. Another long, volume spanning story tidying up several story-arcs that have fueled the series ever since vol. 58. I very much look forward to the pay-off!

Admittedly, I expected a little more from this volume with the individual cases turning out to be mostly average and without the red-threads, of the main story-arcs, it would have been a pretty poor volume overall. So all its strength is in building towards that big story and getting a taste of things to come. I eagerly look forward to the pay-off!

6 comments:

  1. 85 is definitely the big volume they have been working towards now, and as you can guess, the volumes afterward are a bit meh again as new pieces have to set in place etc.

    About the sliding timeline, the fact it is serialized in a magazine aimed at children/teens makes it hard to really "fix" a specific time, because people reading the serialization will, in general, be relatively young and it's obvious they want to have the series always set in "the present" to be as accessible as possible (it's obviously not intended to be a "historical" work). But yeah, that sometimes becomes a bit weird, with Conan's lunch box phone contraption in the past, and a story a few (Japanese) volumes ago, when they talk about a certain nickname middle-aged men used when *they* were children and it's obviously based on something that has only become common for *us* the last 10 or so years.

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    1. I don't mind new pieces being set in place after vol. 85 as the payoffs are always worth the long build. And like it that the translations are scratching up against vol. 90. From there on, it's only a little over two years before reaching vol. 100.

      A sliding timeline is not unusual in long-running series. You can find a similar sliding timeline in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin series where everything around their brownstone chances, like technology, except them. It's a trap that can't always be avoided, but, as you said, it can become a bit weird at times.

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  2. Interesting timing you posted a Conan review just as I finish Robert Thorogood's THE KILLING OF POLLY CARTER, which I realized was nearly identical to an early Conan case!

    Sorry these three stories weren't to your liking! It seems like the last few volumes weren't so bad! I'll be returning to my Conan reviews soon, but I honestly am not looking forward to the next few volumes. I've read to the late 20s, and people have promised the series starts to become more oriented around its overarching plot, and every plot-relevant case I've read so far has been underwhelming so I'm worried about a long string of heavily plot-relevant volumes....

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    1. I've tried to figure out which of those early Conan cases it so closely resembles with only the plot description of The Killing of Polly Carter to go on, but I'm completely blanking out right now. It can't possibly be that idol case from vol. 1.

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    2. How do you italicize text on Wordpress comment and Blogspot comments?

      MAJOR SPOILERS FOR A CONAN CASE AND *THE KILLING OF POLLY CARTER* FOLLOW
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      It's "Scuba Divers Attempted Murder Case", believe it or not. Both stories involve the female victim being convinced by the culprit to pretend to be in mortal danger (drowning, committing suicide) to convince a close family member (her fiance, her husband) to overcome a psychological infliction (his fear of swimming, the sister being wrongfully psychologically convinced she can't walk) in order to do something they otherwise couldn't (swim into the ocean, run down the steps into the beach) in order to save their lives, specifically to help them overcome the affliction. The killer uses the victim faking her death to make it look like the murder happened sooner (before the killer walked into the ocean, before the killer walked down the stairs) in order to falsify an alibi. Debatably both stories are motivated by jealousy (romantic jealousy, jealousy over the fact Polly recovered from addiction), and both murders even coincide with a romantic subplot involving the detective helping reconcile a (debatable) father figure (Richard/Kogoro Moore, Richard's father) with his wife to help solve the murder.

      Obviously neither story is 100% totally unique, but I just think it's funny how coincidentally the two plots perfectly line up, even in the periphery stuff. I doubt Thorogood plagiarized this story (I doubt he even knows what a Detective Conan) but it's funny to note.

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    3. You can italicize comments like this: <*I>The Killing of Polly Carter<*/I> without the *.

      "I doubt Thorogood plagiarized this story (I doubt he even knows what a Detective Conan) but it's funny to note."

      You get coincidences like that every now and then. If I wouldn't know any better, I would swear David Renwick lifted the locked room-trick from The Clue of the Savant's Thumb from The Kindaichi Case Files (The Magical Express). Right down to the titular clue of the victim's hand, but somehow I doubt he's even aware there's such a thing as manga mysteries. There's always the fascinating case of Akimitsu Takagi's The Tattoo Murder Case and John Russell Fearn's The Tattoo Murders. What are the odds an English and Japanese mystery writers, separated by distance and speaking different languages, hit upon the same, very specific idea of a father tattooing his daughters roughly at the same time. They still wrote two entirely different stories around that core idea, but it remains an interesting coincidence nonetheless and always wondered if there perhaps was a newspaper story or even an urban legend at the root of those two novels.

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