11/28/15

The League of Detectives


"I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life."
Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur C. Doyle's "The Red-Headed League," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892)
The 54th volume of Case Closed, known in a large chunk of the world as Detective Conan, continues where the previous book ended, which is with the concluding chapters of a peculiar story that began on a similar note as the Sherlock Holmes tale that provided the opening quote for this review.

In the final chapter of the previous volume, Eisuke Hondo directed the attention of Edogawa Conan and Richard Moore to a man who's grossly overpaid for simply picking up trash and bringing it to a parking lot – a whopping 50,000 yen per trip!

Something is rotten on the island of Japan! Of course, they soon stumble across a murder connected to the garbage collecting business: a woman was shot and killed in her home during what appears to have been botched burglary. The explanation for the shooting was simple enough, but everything became too involved and entangled where the missing jewelry was concerned – which dragged down a simple and lightweight story. However, the explanation for the bullet's trajectory remains a noteworthy aspect of the plot.

The second story in this volume finds Conan, Doc Agasa and members of the Junior Detective League on a snowboarding trip in the mountains. It's there where they meet a group of art college students. They're working on a prototype for their senior project, a snow sculpture, but something is deeply amiss within the group and, before long, one of them is discovered dead – drowned in a hot spring-fed lake beneath a cliff.

It's assumed it was a tragic accident, but Conan suspects foul play and starts to reconstruct what happened based on such clues as the taste of salt and a decapitated snowman. The solution was clever, if somewhat predictable. I think it would've worked better if it was expended upon and retooled as an impossible crime, in which it's suggested the murderer had the ability to be in two places at the same time, i.e. at the top of the cliff and by the lake beneath it. It really would've made for a better story.

The two subsequent stories are known in Japan as "Three Days with Hattori Heiji," who is called Harley Hartwell in the English editions, which are the main course of this and the next volume.

In the first story, a young Buddhist monk discovered the bloodied remains of a woman in an annex building of the monastery: the woman lying on the floor with "a knife in her gut," but when the police arrived the body had vanished without a trace – which include the blood that must have stained the tatami mats. The body reappears shortly after, but vanishes under the same, nearly impossible circumstances from the annex building. It's a minor, but fairly clever, story that could only occur in Japan. Well, under these particular conditions anyway.

The second part of the "Three Days" story-arc has Conan tagging along with Harley Hartwell to a deserted and isolated island. It’s the location for a TV-special about Japan's so-called "Teen Detectives," which include Natsuki Koshimizu ("Teen Detective of the South") and Yunya Tokitsu ("Teen Detective of the North"). Hartwell represents the West and Jimmy Kudo the East, but, in his "absence," his place was given to Saguru Hakuba who appeared in a similar case in volume 30 – but ends up surrendering his place to Conan. The game begins when a member of the TV-crew is found bound-and gagged in a locked room, but things soon become serious when one of the detectives is brutally murdered in just such a locked room.

Of course, this major case will be continued in the next volume, but, some years ago, I watched the TV-special based on this story and still remember its solution. So I can keep myself from immediately rushing to the next volume. However, I still found myself enjoying reading the original source material and Aoyama noted in his after word that he "spent a lot of time creating the idea for this locked room mystery," which I remember to be excellent. Once again, if you're not reading this series, you're simply robbing yourself.

By the way, despite that praise, I breezed disrespectfully through this review, but that’s because I'm trying to have a second review up tomorrow. Stay tuned. 

13 comments:

  1. I believe there's also one TV Special which had something to do with "xxx days with Hattori Heiji."
    Doesn't have any special case in it but I rather enjoy Heiji's character (one of the best) so it was a fun watch.

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    1. Heiji's presence usually guarantees a solidly plotted and interesting case. So that made him a favorite of mine.

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  2. Natsuki is actually one of my favorite minor characters of Conan, it's a shame she was used only once (though a lot of elements from her character were re-used for Sera in recent years, and it's no coicidence she too has become one of my favorite characters). I wonder what the US translation did with Natsuki's Hakata dialect? She's not constantly speaking like Hattori, but only occasionally uses it though.

    IIRC, the Detective Koushien is also the first story in Conan to feature a minor (in Japan) as the victim!

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    1. Now that you mention it... I vaguely remember you "fangirling" over her. Anyhow, she didn't have an accent in the US translation, but Yunya was annoyingly talking in the third person peppered with slang like lamer and such.

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    2. Natsuki only used Hakata dialect occassionally, so it might appear in the next volume. And yeah, Yunya had the weirdest speech pattern in Japanese too. Using a fairly archaic and humble first person pronoun, mixed with some (seriously outdated) net lingo.

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  3. Gah. I actually saw the first issue of this manga in Barnes and Nobel once, but the price was simply too high. Petty, I know. Really need to get a few in bulk to make up for it. Or just use scantilations. ;)

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    1. At this point in the series, I could hardly blame anyone for starting with the scans because you really staring at a mountain of volumes as a new reader.

      By the way, is your locked room blog confirmed dead?

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    2. Funny story about that one. :D

      In short, I was editing the blasted thing when my computer got hit by CryptoWall or something like that, and while it was probably someone else sticking their flash drive into the computer, I, in all my computer illiteracy, have since been too paranoid to actually get back on.

      Course, since I'm technically logged on right now and nothing has happened (my Blogger account, not the actual blog...gah) it will probably turn out that I was just paranoid, and I can take a defibrillator to that thing.

      In short, no. :P

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  4. Wow, the English edition is up to number 56 now, I see. Only 7 issues left until they catch up to where the Swedish publishers left off, and I can start reading CC again...

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    1. That would be around 2017, since they're still at a schedule of four volumes a year.

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  5. I wonder why the English publication was so far behind the Swedish one. No. 63 was the final Swedish issue, and that came out at least five years ago. It's been a long wait...

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    1. I've no idea why the English publications were behind the Swedish ones. Maybe they started later?

      Anhow, they dialed it back from six to four volumes a year, because with six a year they would've probably caught up with the Japanese editions by now. Or at least started nipping at their heels.

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    2. I used to follow the German edition, but switched over to the Japanese volumes starting with volume 55 (so the volume discussed in this review is the last one I read in German). I just checked the German publisher's website, and they're basically onlu half a year behind each new Conan release in Japan (volume 89, to be released next week in Japan, is already scheduled for the summer of 2016).

      You'd think that Viz could've done the same too; getting as close as possible to the Japanese releases and then switch over to a four volumes a year schedule (mirroring the Japanese schedule), but I guess that Conan's sales probably aren't strong enough to support that.

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