Bruised Memories: Q.E.D, vol. 6 by Motohiro Katou

Last month, I reviewed the 5th volume from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D., a manga detective series that ran from 1998 to 2005, which comprised of two splendidly plotted and executed stories that presented the reader with a pair of corpse-puzzles – a specialty of the Japanese detective story. A tremendously enjoyable volume that left me determined to get to the next one before another 6-12 months disappeared from the calendar.

The first story of the volume 6, entitled "Uncertain Memories," made me realize how surprisingly linear and well paced the time-line of this series actually is.

I remember the stories from volume 2 take place over the summer of 1998 and volume 3 has two stories set respectively in December and the winter of 1999. The opening story from volume 4 centers on April Fools' Day with the stories from volume 5 covering the remainder of the year until "Uncertain Memories" picks up at the dawn of the new millennium, December 29th, 1999, with a strangely fitting, character-driven slice-of-life mystery – which introduces the clumsy sister of the 16-year-old protagonist, Sou Touma. Yuu Touma has an superb hearing with an uncanny knack for catching "the rhythms of the different sounds that she hears" and "amazing at memorizing words from foreign languages," but she's prone to stumbling around. Yuu came back to Japan to celebrate the New Year with her brother.

Touma rarely talked to Kana Mizuhara about himself, or his family, and she learns something about him from his sister, which provides the story with one of the two problems centering on the brother and sister. Yuu tells Mizuhara that their parents thought they were very different children, because her dangerous, reckless behavior always required the full attention of their parents and this left Touma to his own devices. A picture emerges from her story of a kind, but lonely, distant child who didn't show any emotions.

When they were younger, Touma would bring home wounded birds and squirrels from the park to take care of them, often "until late at night," but, when the animals were nursed back to health, he immediately returned them to the park and left without turning back – an attitude he also displays towards his fellow humans. But the memory that stings Yuu the most is when her brother showed no interest when her childhood dog went missing. And didn't even help to look for the dog. Why he acted so cold and distant at the time is main question of the plot with the answer bridging the gap between the two siblings as the clock ticks away the last days of the 20th century, which helps them "to face the new world."

This story also has a sub-plot that begins when Yuu is knocked down in the street by a shoplifter, but she can't remember exactly what happened before hitting her head. Touma and Mizuhara have to retrace her steps, following a linguistic clue, in order to clear her name. A very minor side distraction to an otherwise interesting, character-building story of the type you never find in series like Case Closed or The Kindaichi Case Files.

The second story, "Secret Blue Room," brings the reader right back to the traditional detective story with an impossible crime story, but, unlike the title might suggest, the story is not a locked room mystery. This story is about the murder of a sleazy skydiver in mid-air!

Mizuhara uses a ploy to get Touma to take her skydiving, but when they arrive at the drop zone to prepare for the dive, they watch how a four-man skydive team, known as Stardust, attempt to do a formation jump when one of them plummets down to earth – seemingly saved by a device that automatically opens the chute when something goes wrong. The skydiver, Nomaki, gently crashes down to the ground and the first to check on the victim is the leader of the group, Morokawa Shizuo, who removes the parachute only to discover a knife-handle sticking out of his back!

It's cleverly acknowledge early on in the story that, because "it's impossible to stab someone mid-air," the police suspects the team leader "stabbed the victim on the ground when nobody was looking." A classic locked room-trick that can immediately be disregarded as a possible answer to the stabbing and sends the reader scurrying in a different direction, but the Morokawa Shizuo still has a rock-solid motive. Exactly a year before the murder, his girlfriend died in a strange skydiving accident and rumors have been swirling around that Nomaki had sabotaged her parachute.

So this gave me the idea that Morokawa had planted the knife in a dead, or dying, Nomaki to protect the real murderer, who had poisoned or drugged Nomaki, by giving this person an airtight alibi with a seemingly impossible, mid-air murder – directing the attention of the police to himself. However, no further details emerged that could have confirmed my little hypothesis, such as an autopsy report, which forced me to abandon it well before the end. The actual solution works with a similar, classic locked room technique as the false-solution, but applied to skydiving and has some subtly planted, visual clues hidden in the panels. Touma plays a dangerous game of bluff poker by, anonymously, calling all of the suspects and confronting the murderer under dangerous circumstances. This made for a very satisfying ending to an excellent volume.

Like I've said in a previous review, I can't quite put my finger on why I enjoy this series so much, because, as a detective series, it often walks a fine tight-rope between the kind of detective stories I normally love and despises – such as a character heavy, practically none-criminal story followed by an impossible crime story. Somehow, it works with this series and found the first story as good and fascinating as the second one. So, I don't know, maybe it's the time period in which the story is set that helps make these stories so appealing. Anyway, you can probably expect a review of volume 7 and 8 before the end of the month.

Alice's Evidence: "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" (2009) by Dale C. Andrews

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine published a majestic pastiche in their May, 2007, issue, entitled "The Book Case," written by two long-time Ellery Queen fans, Dale C. Andrews and the creator of "A Website on Deduction," Kurt Sercu – anthologized a decade later in The Midadventures of Ellery Queen (2018). Generally, my purist streak makes it nigh impossible to enjoy pastiches, but "The Book Case" and its sequel can be counted among the exceptions.

Dale C. Andrew's "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" has, as far as I can tell, only appeared in the September/October, 2009, issue of EQMM and the story stands with one foot each in a world of the EQ multiverse.

"The Mad Hatter's Riddle" takes place in 1975, a transitional year, in which the twentieth century took "a quick breath as it prepared for the final twenty-five-year dash to the millennium." A now seventy-year-old Ellery Queen had given up on writing detective stories and now only edits the magazine, but Universal Studios has hired him as a consultant on the shooting of a very special episode of NBC's Ellery Queen – based on one of his most popular short stories, "The Mad Tea Party" (collected in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1933). The studio wants to use the episode as vehicle to reunite two "fabled stars of yesteryear," Ty Royle and Bonnie Stuart, who are tagged to play Spencer and Laura Lockridge in the episode.

Bonnie and Ty have been out of the public-eye for nearly three decades, redrawing inside a "comfortable cocoon," where they lived a quiet, hermit-like existence. So the episode marks the first time in twenty-five years that "the once-married duo" appeared together. Something that was easier said than done. The studio had to hire another, one-time consultant, Jacques Butcher, who previously appeared in the Hollywood-period EQ novels The Devil to Pay (1938) and The Four of Hearts (1938).

The episode has to be ready to air in six weeks. So, naturally, the whole shoot threatens to come crashing down when Bonnie and Ty announce they are going to be married (again). Something that'll end the quiet, comfortable existence of the people around them.

A second problem comes in the form of a typewritten, acrostic poem reminiscent of an untitled poem by Lewis Carroll that revealed "the name of the real Alice," but this poem only revealed a cryptic message, "trip required no chances" – a prescient "warning in verse." On the day of their announcement, Bonnie and Ty are murdered at the place they were staying for the duration of the shoot (echoing the double death from The Four of Hearts). This is the point where the story, quality-wise, splits in two parts.

The solution to the murders is routine with a decent, but simple, dying message and an alibi-trick that, while a delight to long-time EQ fans, is a trifle unconvincing. I don't believe the huge discrepancy in time would have gone unnoticed. On the other hand, the answer to the titular riddle was excellently handled and the identity of the writer was a pleasant surprise. You've no idea how clever the title of the story is until you have read it. Even if it has a touch of sadness about it.

So, purely as a whodunit, "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" is a disappointingly weak story, but the presence of the acrostic poem elevates it as an excellent code cracker and the respectful treatment of the original characters makes it a first-class pastiche. A better Hollywood-set EQ story than the original and comes highly recommended to other EQ fans.

Rescue Rangers: Case Closed, vol. 72 by Gosho Aoyama

The 72nd volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published in Japan as Detective Conan, begins with the conclusion to the massive story that covered nine of the eleven chapters of the previous volume, which brought Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan to London – where Conan becomes engaged in a hunt for Sherlock Holmes-themed clues. A hunt leading him straight to Wimbledon where he has to prevent the public assassination of the Queen of the Grass Court, Minerva Glass.

Plot-wise, the last act of this story is pretty standard for the series with Conan having to locate the culprit in a capacity-filled stadium, which has been done before, but the tennis setting provided a way to make this culprit stick out "like a sore thumb." However, the plot played second fiddle here to the main-characters and particular the story-line between Jimmy/Conan and Rachel.

The second story begins with Conan and Anita discussing the former's adventure in England. Interestingly, Anita addresses my complaint mentioned in my review of volume 71.

I can see how it made sense to keep Jimmy's predicament a secret from Rachel when the series began, but, in the story, more than two years have passed and the secret has become a story-telling device to create these needlessly complicated personal situations – keeping Jimmy trapped between Rachel and Conan. Logically, she should have been told by now. Aoyama will probably resolve this problem by saying she knew all along and the final panel of the series will show them with their son who's a carbon-copy of Conan.

Anita reminds Conan what he has said about not allowing Rachel to get too close to him, because not being able to be with him would only make her unhappier. So he can't be in the spotlight and has "to hide in the wings until the right moment," but the brats of the Junior Detective League overheard them and misinterpreted it as a suggestion to play a game of hide and seek. One of them knows an abandoned building, scheduled to be demolish, perfect for such a game. During the game, they get "an emergency earthquake alert" on their cellphones and they hear someone knocking out the emergency-code for "Rescue Needed," which leads them to two shady looking construction workers. Conan concludes "a person in need of rescue" from kidnappers is trapped somewhere inside the mostly empty building.

Generally, I dislike kidnapping stories because they're seldom any good, or memorable, but there are two reasons why this story is one of the exceptions. Firstly, the clever way in which Conan and the Junior Detective League used their personalized cellphones to squeeze out of a very tight corner. Secondly, the identity of the kidnap victim came as a genuine surprise. I honestly didn't expect that twist!

The second, complete story of this volume brings Conan, Rachel and Serena Sebastian to Teitan University, renamed here as Baker University, where Richard Moore giving a lecture, but "he's just drooling over college girls" and a group of Film Majors offers them a more palpable sight – a haunted house exhibition. Students are working on a horror movie as their project thesis and want to make it "as realistic as possible." So they created a house of corpses and want to test it on the girls, because Rachel and Serena have seen dead bodies before. The exhibition does what it intended to do... scaring the girls.

One of the film students, Anna Tadami, is strapped to an operating-table and surrounded by dummy surgeons, but, when they walked pass this scene, she started "trembling and thrashing her legs." She shook so hard "it rattled the bed." Anna Tadami was dead! There's "an almond smell" at her mouth and "the remains of capsule between her teeth," which means suicide as Rachel and Serena saw nobody else standing around the operating-table. So a quasi-impossible crime with an obvious murderer, a hack stage-trick and a motive that felt tacked on resulting in an average story at best.

The third case is another kidnap story, of sorts, but this time without Conan, because he's in bed with a serious cold. Conan was supposed to meet the Junior Detective League at Amy's house to play karuta, a Japanese card game, but, when Conan is video chatting with them on his cellphone, a young boy knock's at the door of Amy's department – screaming that there are "bad people" he doesn't know in his apartment. Masao is a boy with a reputation in the apartment building for playing pranks and telling lies, but cries he doesn't know the man and woman who introduce themselves as his parents. And he's dragged back into his apartment. Conan tells them to call the police, but they decide to investigate Amy's neighbors for themselves.

At the heart of the story is a coded message Masao surreptitiously sends under the nose of the culprits to the Junior Detective League over a game of karuta, but this is one of those language-based codes. So practically unsolvable for most non-Japanese speaking readers. Not a bad story, but a pretty minor one.

Sadly, the last chapter is the beginning of new story that will continue in volume 73 and the premise is intriguing, to say the least! Richard Moore is hired to protect the matriarch of the Hoshina family, Rukako Hoshina, who's obsessed with clocks and the ancestral manor house is ticking to the brim with clocks – even has a clock tower. Rukako Hoshina received a death threat accusing her disrespecting "the flow of time" and she'll die at the time she "came into this world." The letter was signed with the moniker, The Guardian of Time. I can't wait to read the rest of the story!

So, all things considered, this volume can be summed up as an average entry with only one good story and the conclusion of the London-case as its sole standout moment. I don't think it helped either that it ended with a teaser of a case that already promises to be much better than the three complete cases that preceded it. Oh, well, here's hoping for the best in the next volume!

The Triple Bite (1931) by Brian Flynn

Last year, the indispensable Dean Street Press reissued ten detective novels of one of the unsung, long-forgotten mystery writers of the past, Brian Flynn, who was unearthed by the Puzzle Doctor, Steve Barge, when he found a copy of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) among his Christmas presents in 2016 – he has been beating Flynn's drum ever since. Fast-forward two years, Flynn got his long overdue reprints and these new editions came with introductions written by the newly-minted crime fiction historian, Steve Barge.

The Triple Bite (1931) is the tenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and, "out of all of the first ten Brian Flynn novel," it was by far the rarest of the lot. A novel which had never before been reprinted and only a single copy was located outside of the British Library! So this might be the rarest title DSP has reprinted to date.

The introduction aptly describes The Triple Bite as a "love-letter to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" with a mysterious cipher, hidden treasure and a villain who could have been member of The Red-Headed League.

Young Cecilia Cameron is the story's narrator and she relates the unbelievable events that took place in "a big, ten-roomed bungalow" in Dallow Corner, Sussex, which Colonel Ian Cameron was prompted to buy by a friend of his son, Nigel Strachan – who had a very peculiar reason for doing so. Strachan is a barrister and six months ago, he was called upon to defend "a born thief," Sam Trout, who got a reduction in sentence. Something the old career criminal gratefully remembered when he was dying of pneumonia. Trout wrote a letter to Strachan telling him he had been one of only two people who ever lifted a finger to help him and gives them "an equal chance of a fortune."

An opportunity encoded in "a piece of doggerel" and the only part Strachan had been able to decipher is a location, Dallow Corner, which is why he brought the bungalow to Colonel Cameron's attention. But there are pirates on the horizon!

Colonel Cameron and Cecilia caught whispered fragments of a conversation in a restaurant mentioning Dallow Corner and salmon-fishing, but there's not a stretch of water big enough for such a thing as salmon-fishing within ten miles of Dallow Corner. Someone else is looking for Sam Trout's fortune is confirmed when they're visited by a red-headed giant of a man, "Flame" Lampard, who introduced himself as "the bearer of a warning" and advises Colonel Cameron to immediately leave Dallow Corner. Otherwise, it may be too late. What treads on the heels of this ominous visit is best described as a siege on the bungalow and echoes the plot of Flynn's tremendously enjoyable Invisible Death (1929).

Shots are fired at the bungalow in the middle of the night. The housekeeper is tied to a chair and gagged, while the intruders excavated the garden, which culminated in the apparently death by heart failure of Colonel Cameron – whose body was found lying against the hedge between the bungalow and their neighbor's house. Cecilia is convinced her uncle had been murdered and "send for Anthony Bathurst first thing in the morning." Bathurst not only agrees with her opinion Colonel Cameron had been murdered, but found the page that had been torn from his notebook curled against the hedge. A piece of paper with the dying man's "last message to the world" scrawled on it, "for God's sake, mind the red thing that flies." More than once, this last message is referred to as "the dying message of Colonel Cameron."

Brian Flynn

The dying message is a trope closely associated with Ellery Queen, but this association began with two novels post-dating The Triple Bite, namely The Tragedy of X (1932) and The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933), which makes Flynn's novel one of the earliest examples of the dying message story. There are, however, a number of short stories and novels predating The Triple Bite, but I believe Flynn was the first to use the phrase "dying message." Interestingly, Flynn was perhaps the first to use another trope inextricably linked to another American writer, S.S. van Dine, who introduced to concept of a collector's private museum in The Bishop Murder Case (1929). Something that became somewhat of a trope with Van Dine and his followers, such as Clyde B. Clason (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1938), but Flynn was there first with The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928). Flynn was a little ahead of the curve when it came to the Golden Age mindset!

A second, typical American aspect of The Triple Bite are the brief, but unmistakable, "Had-I-But-Known" moments in Cecilia's narrative. A very specific brand of suspenseful mysteries almost exclusively written by American female novelists such as Mary Robert Rinehart and Dorothy Cameron Disney.

You can find the clearest example of HIBK in the final lines of the opening chapter when Cecilia writer, "had I known, however, what lay in store for us," from "the coming of "Flame" Lampard" to "the night of horror in the darkened room" when the last scene was enacted, she would not have responded so flippantly to salmon-fishing. So not style you expect to find among the works of a male, British mystery writer who debuted in the 1920s.

Anyway, Colonel Cameron's dying message is one of the practically unusable clues to the fanciful method employed to dispose of two men in the story, which also includes "the puffy pink marks" on the bodies, a pink smear of blood and "a ghastly whirring kind of noise" – like "something was zipping through the air." I gathered from these clues and the many allusions to fishing that the murderer was fooling around with a rod and a hook smeared with some kind of exotic poison, but the solution was something else altogether! John Norris described this utterly bizarre method as something "right out of the weird menace pulps." I agree!

Fascinatingly, the method was based on an obscure line from a Sherlock Holmes story, which helped Bathurst tumble to the solution, but he refers to Holmes and Dr. Watson as actual people. And not as fictional characters like he did in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927). Flynn was such a massive fanboy!

The who-and why were much easier spotted and the coded message, or parts of it, can be deciphered by the reader, but everything is draped in the style of the 19th century detective story and pulp-thrillers. Some bits of the plot might be hard to swallow for the Golden Age purists, but The Triple Bite stands as a warm homage to Conan Doyle and is as enjoyable as the previously mentioned Invisible Death. Just pure, pulpy fun! I think pulp readers and Sherlockians will get the most out of this classic rendition of their favorite reading material.

Well, this leaves me with only two more of Flynn's novels, The Five Red Fingers (1929) and The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1930). So, hopefully, we don't have to wait too long for DSP's second serving of Anthony Bathurst cases.

The Bloody Tower (1938) by John Rhode

The Bloody Tower (1938) is the 32nd novel in the Dr. Lancelot Priestley series and has a plot fulfilling John Rhode's own requirements expected of a good detective story, "painstaking workmanship" and "accurate expression of fact," but the most attractive facet of the story is it was perhaps inspired by the work of his friend, John Dickson Carr – similar to how Rhode influenced Carr's The Man Who Could Not Shudder (1940). You can easily make out the contours of a Carr-like detective story when glancing at the skeletal structure of the plot.

The Bloody Tower is set in the now gloomy surroundings of "the ruined grandeur" of the once splendiferous Farningcote estate.

Sometime in 18th century, Thaddeus Glapthorne constructed Farningcote Priory with the stones of a ruined monastery and erected  "a cylinder of masonry" on the highest point of his land. An inscription carved above the lintel of the iron door prophesying, "while this tower shall stand," so "long shall Glapthorne dwell in Farningcote." One of his less fortunate descendants has religiously clung to that promise.

Simeon Glapthorne is an elderly, invalid man who lives in the bare, but habitable, central block of the Georgian house with the now closed, disused wings lying in ruin – empty rooms, broken windows and missing tiles. Every piece of furniture and book in the house was sold until there was hardly "a stick left." A significant portion of the estate consists of unproductive woodlands, some wasteland known as the warren and Farningcote Farm is leased to a dairy farmer, Thomas Chudley. So what little money comes in "almost exactly balances" the interest on the mortgage.

You can say the place has lost some of its shine over the centuries, but the old, wheelchair-bound man clings to the place and lives there with his oldest son, Caleb. A frayed, shabbily dressed butler, Bill Horning, who has been with the family for over fifty years and his bibulous wife and cook, Mrs. Horning. A younger son, named Benjamin, refused to take part in the struggle against "inevitable ruin" and became an engineer aboard a steamship. Where he dreams of a life together with his first cousin, Joyce Blackbrook, in the engine room (gross). So there's no apparent reason to suspect anything, but a tragic accident, when Caleb's body is found in the warren with part of his face blown to pieces. A burst shotgun, or parts of it, were found lying next to the body.

Inspector Jimmy Waghorn, of the Criminal Investigation Department, happened to be in Lydenbridge and talking with Inspector Appleyard, of the local constabulary, when the apparent gun accident was reported – who invites Waghorn to come along. And they soon discover there's more to the exploding shotgun than a mere hunting accident.

As their investigation progressed, Waghorn decides to consult that "queer old stick," Dr. Lancelot Priestley, who has retired and spends his days stirring up "the very devil in scientific circles" with controversial articles and attempting to satisfy his "hunger for human problems." Something the police is more than willing to help feed, but, at this point of the series, Dr. Priestley has become an armchair oracle and leaves the practical detective work to Jimmy Waghorn and Superintendent Hanslet. So he only makes a couple of brief appearances before drawing his conclusions in the last chapter.

So you might expect the story to be one of Rhode's technical how-was-it-done stories, but, surprisingly, "the mechanism of the crime" is settled early on in the book with a visit to a local gunsmith. What we're given instead is a very clever and evenly paced whodunit with an ever better executed historical plot-thread, which revolves around a coded message left by Thaddeus Glapthorne in the family bible. A cipher linking bible verses to odd, hand-drawn shapes of balloons, crescent moons, circles and squares. If you put the book aside and take the time, you actually have a shot at decoding the message. Something I didn't do myself, but someone with a mind for codes and puzzles could do it. And how it related to the old, gloomy tower demonstrated why Rhode was the Engineer of Death! This excellently done plot-thread is also the reason why I tagged this review as historical mystery. It's really that good!

Technically, the who and the cleverly disguised motive were equally well done, but the observant, cynically-minded armchair detective will have no problem fishing both of them from the small pool of suspects – which weakened the partial false-solution following in the wake of an unexpected death. A character who I didn't expect to die in this Carrian detective novel.

I don't remember who exactly made this argument, but someone posited Rhode's primary weakness was his unwarranted expectation that his readers would take anything he told them on blind faith. But when we open a detective novel, we become a very suspicious and uncharitable lot who give the stink eye to even the most innocent looking characters or actions. This is what made the murderer and motive standout in The Bloody Tower.

Nonetheless, the easily spotted murderer and lack of a strong how-was-it-done type of killing, The Bloody Tower stands as one of Rhode's better and most readable detective novels. A sobering, realistic take on the atmospheric, Gothic-style mysteries of doomed families and old, long-lingering curses laced together with an ingenious historical plot-thread. I unhesitatingly recommend it to everyone and particular to readers who are new to Rhode. You might not get to know Dr. Priestley, but it shows, in more ways than one, what Rhode could do with the detective story.

Fossils of the Universe: Q.E.D, vol. 4 by Motohiro Katou

Back in July, I reviewed the 3rd volume in the Q.E.D. series, created by Motohiro Katou, which comprised of two excellent, well-balanced novella-length stories that fleshed out some of main-characters and gave the reader a classic, puzzle-oriented detective story – set in an abandoned star observatory on a lonely, snow-capped mountain peak. I ended my review with the half-promise to read the next two volumes in the weeks ahead, but, as you probably noticed, it's 2020 now. And no further reviews have materialized over the past six months.

So, as my belated New Year's resolution, I intend to get as close to volume 10 as possible before end of the year, because I really like Q.E.D. Even though I can't quite put my finger on what exactly intrigues me about series.

The fourth volume of Q.E.D. opens with "1st, April, 1999," a story demonstrating the difference between Q.E.D. and Case Closed, Detective Academy Q or The Kindaichi Case Files, focusing on a scam coinciding with an April Fool's Lying Tournament. Curiously, the scam has a slight hint of Ruritania!

Sou Touma is the 16-year-old protagonist, a boy genius and former MIT graduate student, who won the 1998 April Fool Club's annual contest "to see who can tell the best lie or pull the best prank," but now he has to participate again to defend his title – or else "everyone will be mad." Particularly, the club member who came in second, Miss Gria Elenoar. A second plot-thread is introduced when Touma meets an old acquaintance from his days as an MIT student, Cliff Bhaum, who's Vice-Minister, of Foreign Affairs, of a developing nation, the Kingdom of Clavius. Bhaum is in Japan to entice a group of greedy businessman, who have preyed on his country before, to reinvest a big sum of money and resources into Clavius. But this time, the offer is actually a baited trap. Touma's energetic, plucky school friend, Kana Mizuhara, convinces him to help Bhaum.

Bhaum approaches the group of businessmen, representing D Corporation, with an unappealing, hardly profitable offer to invest in the development of an iron ore mine, but a simple remark gave them second thoughts. When the meeting ended, Bhaum regrettably remarked that "the Japanese are not willing to research "The Fossil" together."

The fossil in question is a tiny, magnetic stone that only has a southern pole. A compass placed on any side of the stone will always "point towards the south direction," which means the stone is made up of monopole particles that, until now, had been purely hypothetical and referred to as fossil particles – as they are considered "a remnant of the beginning of the universe." A discovery that would grant humanity access to "large amounts of energy" and "fame and fortune to the one who finds it."

So you can probably see where this story is going. It's classic con/scam story in which greedy people want to get something for practically nothing and are given practically nothing for something, but don't expect any rug-pulling or surprising reversals that cast the story in an entirely different late. What you see, is what you get. "1st, April, 1999," is a minor, but amusing, story that handily brought two very different plot-threads together in a satisfactory way. The ending was a nice, gentle touch to the characterization of Touma and Mizuhara.

A note for the curious: Mizuhara gives the businessman a demonstration of the monopole stone with a magnet, which you can classify as a quasi-impossible problem, but I can already feel JJ judging me.

The second story, "Jacob's Ladder," sees the return of two characters, Eva and Loki, who previously appeared in "Breakthrough" from the third volume, but what makes this story an interesting curiosity is that it's basically a techno-thriller with hints of a locked room mystery inside a computer-rendered environment! The story is obviously a product of its time.

Touma and Mizuhara are in the downtown area of Tokyo when all of the traffic lights go haywire, paralyzing part of the city with "large-scale traffic jams and train delays" due "to accidents," which ended with 58 injuries and no clear explanation given – suggesting to Touma that "the government is just trying to hush things up." A suspicion that is confirmed when Loki returns to Japan with the news that Eva has been arrested by the CIA in connection with the incident in downtown Tokyo.

Eva is the manager of the Artificial Life lab, at MIT, where they were researching "Artificial Life in computers" and the crash of the traffic control systems was caused by her A.I. But how did it get out? The computers in MIT's laboratory are separated from external connections by "a barrier called a firewall." So how did the A.I. bypass the firewall and ended up on a Japanese server, where it connected with the internet, to wreak havoc on the traffic control system? A second incident shows the threat is spreading with the potential to "crash all the computers in the world." A potential crisis that was on everyone's mind at the time the story was published.

This volume was originally published in September 10, 1999, when many people feared the "Millennium Bug," or Y2K, would crash the computerized world upon the rollover from '99 to '00, which makes the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900 to computers – potentially setting humanity back to the pre-industrialist age. Touma, Mizuhara and Loki have to try to prevent this in order to clear Eva's, which provides the story with a technically fascinating, possibly unique problem. What makes a "clan" of artificially intelligent units tick? Why did this stable, harmonious and peaceful artificially-rendered world ended in an all-out war of aggression? Can an answer be found in one of the four core commands that the units have to obey, no matter what? A set of rules comparable Isaac Asimov's The Three Laws of Robotics. Just not used as fairly as in Asimov's masterpiece, The Caves of Steel (1954).

"Jacob's Ladder" is a techno-thriller mystery story with a ton of plot exposition, explaining all the technical background details to the reader, but the story has a surprisingly depressing ending that humanized "computer programs bound by a set of rules" – steeped in biblical imagery. So, a story with an interesting and even original idea, but the temptation to relay on the "secret passages" (hacking) of detective stories/plot-threads centering on computers killed it as a fair play mystery. Sadly, the reason why the blocked-by-firewall mystery didn't turn into a one-of-a-kind impossible crime. I still sort of liked it though.

On a whole, I don't think the fourth volume was as strong as the previous one with two stories that had better premises than solutions, but, in spite of their imperfections, I quite enjoyed reading them. So you can expect a review of the next volume by springtime (let's start slowly).

A Devil on the Court: Case Closed, vol. 71 by Gosho Aoyama

The 71st volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published in Japan as Detective Conan, is an unusual entry in the series as the only two stories in it, a short and a long one, focus entirely on breaking codes and finding hidden messages – only hint at murder is tucked away in the grim back-story of one of the characters. So, if memory serves me correctly, this is one of only two volumes without a single murder case.

This volume opens with a short, so-called slice-of-life mysteries and takes place in the audio/visual storage room of Teitan Elementary.

Ms. Kobayashi recruits Conan and the Junior Detective League to help her find a videotape in the A.V. storage room, crammed with thousands of tapes with faded or hard-to-read labels, but they also find a former student of the school rummaging around in there. Detective Chiba, of the Metropolitan Police, was a member of the A.V. club and had a crush on a girl who was about to move away. So he wrote her a love letter. She wrote cryptically wrote back that she left her answer in the A.V. storage room and hoped it leave on a mark on him, but Chiba "searched the room from top to bottom." And he couldn't find anything. Now a class reunion is just around the corner and Chiba is determined to find that 13-year-old reply.

A charming story, as most these slice-of-life stories tend to be, with Aoyama's favorite trope (long-lost) childhood friends with a romantic interest. My only problem is that the hidden message seems a little bit too clever to have been concocted by such a young child. And on such a short notice.

The second story covers the remainder of the volume, nine of the eleven chapters, which begins with a hint of the Had-I-But-Known School. A story that "began with a strawberry" and Conan "never imagined that this would set off an adventure" – both "sweet and sour." A lucky incident with a strawberry and cat gave Conan, Rachel and Richard Moore to visit England during a school holiday. Conan is a huge Sherlock Holmes fanboy and he can't wait to visit all the places from Conan Doyle's stories. There are, however, some obstacles to overcome. Such as the pesky problem of his double identity. Just read the series and you'll understand.

Conan eventually makes it to London to embark on his "Sherlock Holmes pilgrimage," something only mystery fans will understand, but he finds several hurdles on his path.

On the doorstep of the Sherlock Holmes Museum, on 221B Baker Street, Conan meets an eight-year-old boy, Apollo Glass, who's the kid brother of tennis-star and "the top-ranked Queen of the Grass Court," Minerva Glass. Earlier that day, Apollo was at the tennis court when he was approached by a man telling him that he'll get "a greater thrill" than he would expect. Someone, somewhere in London, will be murdered in front of him and to tell Scotland Yard – if it doesn't make any sense to "leave it to Holmes." So this mysterious event plunges Conan in hunt around London for Holmesian-themed clues and codes. This part of the story almost reads like a travelogue with the characters hunting around all the London landmarks for clues.

As to be expected, not everything goes smoothly and Conan forgets himself for a moment and makes a mistake. One of several mistakes in this volume. In the first story, he talks as if he was a long-time student at Teitan Elementary, but officially, he has been there for only a year or two. At the start of this story, Conan starts speaking fluently English in front of Rachel and Richard Moore. Conan's third mistake convinces Rachel that Jimmy Kudo is London and has purposely avoiding here.

I've said this before, but I'll say it again, the relationship story-line between Jimmy/Conan and Rachel has become stagnant and a weakness at this point in the series.

I concede that it made absolute sense keeping Jimmy's predicament from Rachel when the series started, but, in the series, nearly two years have passed since the first volume and continuing to keep the secret is now only used as a story-telling device – in order to create these needlessly complicated situations. Logically, Rachel should have been told by now as she would have been valuable alley/cover for his Conan identity. Seriously, I begin to suspect that the final volume will reveal that all these stories were told by Jimmy and Rachel on the coach of an incredulous, harassed-looking relationship counselor. Mark my words!

The penultimate chapter of this story, which will be concluded in the next volume, takes place on the court and the tennis match is one that could only be played in an anime or manga series (e.g. The Prince of Tennis). And even for this series, or anime/manga in general, the code cracking in this part of the story stretched credulity a little too far.

Still this was a fun, if somewhat weird, story and look forward to the last chapter, but don't think it will stand as a classic story-arc in the series. However, I do think this volume, as a whole, stands as a notable example of the code cracking detective story and a Holmesian homage to boot!