It's All in the Game

"With a keen eye for details, only one truth prevails!"

- Kudo Shinichi.

Liberating a brand new volume from the ongoing Case Closed/Detective Conan series from its cardboard packaging, before even glancing at the other mail, is, for me, an experience similar as to when I used to make a traditional grab for the latest Appie Baantjer novel from the shelves of one of the local bookstores – usually on the day the book came out. Yeah, yeah. There was a period in my life when a normal bookstore had everything in stock to keep me complacent, as opposed to now, when I prefer to take out a digital shop cart instead. Anyway, I guess I love this series because it has replaced Baantjer as a fixed habit and the pages of each new collection is like an unbrowsed meadow folding out in front of me like a playing board, dotted with places named Coffee Poirot, Restaurant Colombo and Books Baker Street, on which a kid-sized game piece moves around like a dark horse – translating dying messages, deciphering codes and unlocking sealed rooms. The clues are many and suspect abound!

(note: I penned this review in a hurry and traces of sloppiness are bound to turn up. Please be so kind as to ignore them until they go away).

The Game's Afoot!

A fiend referred to as "The Slasher" rips through the opening of the 43rd volume of this series, but the police looses the knife-wielding madman in a crowd of people, however, he has left them a tangible clue: a strange and bloody imprint of a symbol that turns out to be the logo of a car. Everyone in the vicinity driving such a car is brought in and Conan observes, behind the protective reflection of a one-way looking glass, how one of them slips up. It's not one of the best stories, weakly motivated and you have to accept the premise that all of the suspects lost the master key of their car, but it's another fine example of Aoyama taking full advantage of the visual element of his stories and hides clues in characters behavior, sticks them on their clothes or scatters them across their rooms. This dovetailing of clues, plot-threads and red herrings is very satisfying and a particular good example can be found in the main story of this collection.

But first we drop by Coffee Poirot, where we find Richard Moore, known around the world as the famous "Sleeping Moore," taking his morning coffee and Aoyama must have been in an unusual whimsical mood when he wrote this story. Aoyama is not a dark writer in any sense of the word, usually giving his stories a light-hearted touch in the end (if they are dark to begin with), but seldom genuinely funny. Well, he got a smile out of me with the opening lines of this story – narrated by Moore himself.

"I'm Richard Moore... Private Eye. Missing persons and cheating spouses are my bread and butter, but every now and them I get tangled up in something a little bloodier. Crimes of revenge, money, passion. This is one sick world I live in. And when ever the rough life of a detective starts to wear me down... I come to Poirot. A cup of Joe soothes my wounded soul and... YEOWW!"

That last part is not a typo. Moore burned himself when he took a swig from his scolding hot coffee. Fortunately, the waitress hands him a case that rapidly develops into one of the biggest of his careers: a customer has left a phone and Moore has to tack him down. Routine stuff. A list of numbers on the phone complicated the case and turns into a deduction story in which Conan has to deduce the suspect from a small group of people and one of the clues, or "indicators," as they are apparently called in contemporary crime fiction, is almost as endearing as the opening scene of this story.

The third story is the main course of this volume and opens with Conan picking up a detective novel from a bookstore, Kaori Shinmei's The Wicked Will, a reference going all the way back to the 19th installment, and plans to greedily read his way to the solution. Sounds familiar? Than you might guess what happens next: back home he finds two of his friends, Kazuha and Harley, on his doorstep who want to drag him (and Rachel and Richard Moore) off to Osaka for some fun – except they disagree on where to go. So what easier way to decide than a duel in deduction? Yes. Flipping a coin would suffice, but where's the fun in that? The problem they tackle is that of the unsolved murder of a toy manufacturer, who was tied-up in his office before being murdered, but was able to leave a cryptic message spelled out in ink-smeared blocks of wood. I have to admit that deciphering the dying message is a Herculean task for Western readers, but the (visual) clues that were strewn all over the place compensated for this. You don't have to understand Japanese to figure what about scene of the crime felt off to Conan. The motive is interesting but underdeveloped.

This chapter in the lives of Conan (Shinichi) and Rachel has convinced me that their problem is eventually going to be resolved with a cop-out like "I-Knew-It-All-Along" explanation, which will probably also be offered to account for her stubbornly sticking to Shinichi's side – in spite of being separated for nearly two years. This is the only plot strand that began to bother me more and more as the series went on. The final chapters set-up a story that will be concluded in the next volume and therefore won't discuss it here.

On a whole, this was another good bundle of stories, from one of the most prolific writers of neo-orthodox detective fiction alive today, whose imagination has all the qualities of an inexhaustible well – continuously pulling up buckets of these stories from its depths. Although, considering the ongoing success of the series, it’s more a roaring wall of water coming your way. If only more readers over here would allow themselves to be swept away by it.

Other volumes I have reviewed in this series: 

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 38

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 39

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 40

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 41 
Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 42

Death and Disguises

"The monsters made me do it."
- a poor excuse 

The 42nd volume of Case Closed, also known under its former title Detective Conan, opens with the resolution of the story that closed the previous collection of stories, in which Conan and Anita visit the old dwelling of her sister, serving now as an illustrators studio, to retrieve a (hidden) message from her sister. Of course, one of the illustrators is poisoned right under their nooses and it's up to the kid-sized gumshoe to figure out how the poison was introduced to the victim and by whom, before they can pick up that message from the past. A very good story with some solid detection and a clever, but risky, method for murder that cleans itself up after the dirty deed is done!

Rachel, Serena and their English teacher, Jodie Saintemillion, don the deerstalker and the Inverness coat in the next story to help out a former class-mate, Aya Nanakawa, who stands in the shadow of suspicion of having stolen from her employer – a convenience store owner. The store's earnings and leftover stock are unbalanced and this only happens when Aya closes. Newly installed surveillance cameras eliminated the possibility of shoplifters and nightly stakeouts did the same with burglars. A borderline locked room mystery! It's a simple, but nifty, story with an ample amount of detection, clueing and a nice solution that made a respectful bow to one of Conan Doyle's stories.

The next story is the main event of this volume, in which several of the series regulars receive an invitation, signed with Vermouth, for a party set on a creaky ghost ship and everyone has to come dressed up as a famous creature of the night usually found stumbling and crawling around in late-night B-horror movies. Once the ship swarms with "grizzly ghouls from every tomb" a murderous atmosphere swept its deck and the captain of the ship ends up with crossbow bolt in his chest. The solution hinges on an interesting combination of classic misdirection aided by modern technology, which I thought was neatly done, but, to be honest, I think this is also one of those stories that will turn away older mystery fans from the series. I'm afraid the disguises and identity swaps in this one may be a tad bit too campy (or comicy?) for them.

Nevertheless, it's also an important story because a number of the questions raised in previous collections are finally answered, concerning characters like Jodie Saintemillion and Vermouth, making this entry in the series nothing short of a feast if you read them for the ongoing storyline (involving The Black Organization and their dark garbed agents) and the (semi) regular characters. The final chapter sets-up a new story, involving the Detective Boys and a knife-wielding fiend, but it felt very out of place in this volume.

All in all, this was one of the strongest volumes in some time with some really clever detective stories and the ongoing storyline, involving a number of important characters, got a real boost in the second half of the book. It will still take some time before Aoyama has undraped the entire mystery that drives this series, but it are volumes like this one that keeps us fans coming back for more.

Just Another Face in the Crowd

"With your ordinary sort of adversary, yes. But, given an enemy endowed with a certain amount of cunning, the facts are those which he happens to have selected."

- Excerpt from Maurice Leblanc's The Hollow Needle (1909). 

Yesterday, a package arrived with the novel The Fiend with Twenty Faces (1936) by Edogawa Rampo, translated by Dan Luffey, wonderfully illustrated by Tim Smith 3 and prefaced by fellow mystery blogger Ho-Ling, which forced me to commit the blasphemous act of putting aside a John Dickson Carr novel to read this new acquisition before it ended up on that pile of unread mysteries for the next year or so – like was the case with the last Japanese mystery writer I tackled.

Well, first of all, I have to mention Ho-Ling's preface, in which he briskly sketches how The Boy Detectives series came into being, against a backdrop of ever-tightening government censorship, as well as drawing some interesting comparisons with the works of Maurice Leblanc and Gaston Leroux. It conveys a clear picture of what the series is about without spoiling any of the fun and gives you some understanding of its place in Japanese culture. I say "some" because a far, far away land where you can still hear the names of "Twenty Faces" and Akechi Kogoro on the streets of any neighborhood, not to mention bookstores everywhere stuffed with detective stories, impresses me as one of Chesterton's fleeting daydreams he had on a lazy afternoon when he dozed-off while imagining a new Father Brown story.

Anyway, I'm also glad that Ho-Ling penned this introduction because it gives me an opportunity to point out the atrocity that prefaced the Dybbuk Press edition of Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1891), which is a gem of an example of someone who hasn't the faintest idea what he's talking about or even seems aware of Google and Wikipedia. Inspector Poirot?! Really? In my opinion, it's the end-all argument in favor of taking away the right to freely write introductions for detective stories unless you can scroll through a list of names on the GADWiki without starting to look like a fish gasping for water. But on the review, shall we?

The Fiend with Twenty Faces was originally published as a serialization in Shonen Kurabu (Boy's Club), a magazine for children that began its circulation in 1914, and the battle-of-wits between the master detective Akechi Kogoro and the fleeting figure of the criminal with even more crimes than faces to his name has captured generation of readers ever since. "Twenty Faces" is a crook with the same old-school courtesy as his French counterpart, Arsène Lupin, when it comes to warning his victims before harvesting the paintings from their walls and ripping statues from their plinths – which is exactly what Mr. Hashiba found between his mail at the opening of this book.

Mr. Hashiba has in his possession a handful of diamonds, once encrusted in the crown of the House of Romanov, functioning now as their family heirlooms and wants to hold on to them, but they are swiped from underneath his nose effortlessly, however, the escape of the titular thief was a bit more problematic thanks to Mr. Hashiba's son Soji. Naturally, this does not bode well with the master criminal and kidnaps the boy to demand another one of the Hashiba's family treasure's as compensation and desperately the family summons Akechi Kogoro to their home, but the detective is abroad and in his place comes his assistant – a boy of ten or twelve years named Kobayashi Yoshio. However, do not allow his size and age to fool you as he's unusual bright and came very close to single handily defeating "Twenty Faces" before his mentor stepped into the picture.

What ensues is an adventure that reminded me at times of Tom's run-in with a gang of kidnappers in J. Jefferson Farjeon's Holiday Express (1935) and this book can be recommended to readers who enjoyed that particular story and to fans of Eoin Colfer's Half-Moon Investigations (2006), but I don't think, to be completely honest, that the book will excite the crowd of hungry mystery fans craving for more translations of Soji Shimada and Seichi Yokomizo. As fun as The Fiend with Twenty Faces is, it's also a bit too cute when it throws "twists" and "surprising revelations" around that you foresaw one or two chapters before officially being led in on the secret. No doubt this is engrossing stuff if you are 8-10 years old, but without the cultural or nostalgia factor it will do very little for older western readers, I'm afraid. Still, it's a nice book to indoctrinate the more impressionable minds among our families and friends and help them cultivate an appreciation for detective stories.

You have to admit that you were not expecting a review of this book from me anytime soon, now were you Ho-Ling? :)

Just Like a Shadow

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

- Sherlock Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902)

Glancing back at the previous reviews, penned in this series, I noticed that I prefaced each of them with a mournful remonstrance against the publishing schedule of Viz Media or lamenting the fact that older detective fans are finding it difficult to warm up to this splendid series – which is a repetitive cycle that needs to be broken. There's just one problem: the spark of inspiration was engaged elsewhere and left me here with nothing more than a vast expanse of blankness (i.e. nothing) to lead into the review.

So this left me with only one recourse: shout outs! When you have finished reading my commentary on the stories collected in the forty-first volume of Case Closed/Detective Conan you might also want to check out The Study Lamp and The Ingenious Game of Murder.

Darrel, who also takes a look at little known mystery writers who were expunged from popular view, maintains the first blog and managed to dredge up a name, from the genre's murky past, that even John Norris and Curt Evans never met before – which is no mean feat! Arun is the game master of the other blog and the mysteries that wander into his crosshairs are of the short story variety. Short stories are often overlook, but on his blog they get an opportunity to bask in the same spotlight as their novel-length companions.

And now, on to the review!

Sidelined

This brand new volume opens with a story that picks up the thread that was dropped at the end of the previous collection, in which the famous Sleeping Moore flubbed a ten-million-yen case and burned through most of the dough before he had actually earned it – leaving him and his daughter in a world of trouble. Luckily, for them, his ex-wife, ace-attorney Eva Kaden, takes it upon herself to solve this case for them, but she has to compete with an old high-school alumni, Vivian Kudo, who also happened to be Conan's mom. Unfortunately, for the reader, they come across as a bunch of Mary Sues and the only surprising aspect of this story was how uninspired and unconvincing the plot was. A poor start of an otherwise interesting volume.

"Darkness there, and nothing more"

After the mess that Richard Moore left is cleaned up, Vivian Kudo decides to treat her son and the brats from the Junior Detective League on a special pre-screening of Samurai Kid II, but, once again, murder intervenes and leaves the pint-size detective with a baffling conundrum: how could a murderer silently navigate through a darkened and cluttered room? The solution is a variation on a timeworn trick, but it perfectly fits in with the background of the story and was well clued.  

The Body in the Porsche

The police have closed off the Touto Department Store after the body of a murdered man was discovered, inside a parked Porsche, in the underground car park and Conan has to piece together this puzzle in order to lift the cordon. It's a tricky and a somewhat farfetched solution, but it shows that gimmicky tricks a la The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) work a lot better in comic format than in prose. However, the main attraction of this story is the reemergence of the Black Organization, who seem to have been on their tails like a shadow from the start of this volume, and they may have finally stumbled to their secret!

This also sets-up the next story arc, in which Conan and Anita visit her sisters old residence, serving now as an illustrators studio, in order to retrieve a message she may have hidden there, but that is something that will be revealed in the next volume. Oh, but before they can pick up the hidden message they have to solve another murder case. One of the current residents, believe it or not, was poisoned around the same time those two dropped in on them.

All in all, this was a good volume, especially for fans of the ongoing storyline, involving the Men in Black, but Aoyama seemed a bit off with most of the stories here. The motives, for example, seemed as if they were introduced as an after thought and the tricks impressed me as complex for the sake of being complex – without even as much as a touch of his usual genius (his quality/output ratio is amazing). Only the excellent second story formed an exception to this pattern. It's still a decent volume for the fans, but not one that was a good as usual, however, every once in a while you come across a volume that performs a bit below par. Oh well, the main story in the next volume promises to be a blast (murder on a ghostship during a dress party)!

FYI, it's still my one-year anniversary in the blogosphere today and the next review will, hopefully, be up within the next few days and it probably won't surprise you if I tell you I will take a look at another impossible crime novel.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

"Better a good neighbor than a distant friend."

- Dutch proverb. 

As an ardent collector of detective stories, I have to confess to an appalling trait that the preponderance of books, in my collection, has to endure after the postman drops them off. I have no problem investing time and money in order to acquire a particular novel or collection of short stories, but I have to begin flipping through its pages, as soon as it has shed its cardboard package, or it will languish on the snow capped tops of my to-be-read pile for weeks, months or even years! This was also a fate suffered by Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X (2005), which reached the shores of the English language last year and I immediately pounced on the hardcover edition, however, it took me until now to actually read it – and only after being nudged. Not to mention that the paperback release is just around the corner!

In Japan, The Devotion of Suspect X is part of an ongoing and acclaimed detective series, in which an assistant professor of physics, Manabu Yukawa, nicknamed "Detective Galileo," abets one of his old friends, Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police, in his investigations. At first glance, this structure suggests a platitudinous take on the classic amateur detective, who has to solve the cases for an unimaginative policeman, but this is not entirely the case with this book – which feels more as an upgrade than as a throwback.

The story begins, as so many do, with a man and woman, Yasuko Hanaoka and Shinji Togashi, but in this tale they separated long before the readers meets them in the opening chapters. And for good reason, too! Characters like Togashi are to the modern crime novel what the tyrannical patriarch, who had a stranglehold on the purse strings of his relative and altered his will on a whim, was to the traditional whodunit. He was a bum and a drunk, who abused and leeched off his ex-wife and stepdaughter, Misato, which, needless to say, put a strain on their marriage – and eventually Yasuko and Misato left him. However, Togashi proved to be as persistent as a tick and it took some effort to shake him off their backs, but, in the end, they were able to settle down and began reshaping their lives.

Unfortunately, for them, it takes Togashi only a year to track them down and the confrontation escalades in a scuffle, in which Yasuko and Misato kill their tormentor. Still dazed and confused over what they just did, their next-door neighbor, Ishigami, a first-rate mathematician whose heart secretly beats for Yasuko, appears, like a deus ex machina, to expel their demon once and for all. He removes the body from their apartment and constructs an alibi for them. It's a clever scheme calculated to have the delusory appearance of a common place crime, but there's an unfathomable depth to it and it would have gone without a hitch where it not that Kusanagi mentioned Ishigami's name in passing to Yukawa – one of his old friends from University.

One of the most interesting part of this novel is that Yukawa and Ishigami, from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of this story, act as (im)partial observers – while it's their minds that drive the events that everyone is a part of. Yasuko and Misato function as a proxy for Ishigami, who, in turn, has to adjust his plans when Yukawa is beginning to see through them. This makes The Devotion of Suspect X a very character-driven crime novel, but one that managed to impress me from start to finish and found myself rooting for Yasuko, Misato and Ishigami! If there ever was a bunch of conniving, but endearing, murderers who deserved to get away with murder, literarily, it's them and you almost get annoyed at Yukawa's persistent deconstruction of Ishigami's plan – which felt tantamount to destroying a beautiful piece of art work.

I guess I also have to address the controversy this book whipped up back in 2006, when it swiped the Honkaku Mystery Grand Prize for best orthodox mystery novel. Some well-known mystery critics drew question marks around this decision and wondered aloud about the veracity and fairness of the clues, which, I think, is an apparent qualification to win the prize – and I have to admit that they do have a point.

This story is an inverted mystery and the issue of fair play clueing here is a bit different than in your standard whodunit. It's not about whether the reader has been furnished with all the necessary clues and hints to have a shot at solving the case themselves, but how the detective arrived at that point. This is were you bump into the only flaw I could find in this novel: Yukawa arrives at his conclusions, which he admits to at one point in the book, intuitive rather than deductively and what's more damning is that his guesses were mostly based on 20-year-old memories of Ishigami – which I found, to be completely honest, rather ridiculous.

For example, Yukawa became suspicious of Ishigami after his old school chum made a casual remark that he was losing his hair, which prompted a memory that the Ishigami he knew, from over 20 years ago, never cared about his physical appearance and began drawing conclusions from this. Well, people change, especially after two decades, and the fact that he assisted in a murder, no matter how good his intentions are, proves that he was no longer the Ishigami that Yukawa once knew – and this is were the critics have a point. On the other hand, the final twist that was uncovered in Ishigami's plan oozed with brilliance and completely took me by surprised. It was also reasonable clued.

As a whole, The Devotion of Suspect X is worthy of the praise and recognition it has received as well as being an excellent example that a capable and clever mystery writer can construct a classically-styled, multi-layered plot in a modern-day setting – which makes this a book that can be enjoyed by both detective and thriller fans.

Fellow mystery enthusiastic, Ho-Ling, has more on Keigo Higashino on his blog – including reviews of his, as of yet, untranslated novels and adaptations. I recommend you check it out.

Everybody Loves a Good Mystery!

"You know I speak from experience

I live it each day

It's something she does, it's something she'll say

It's the maddest kind of love."

- Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

Before I began working on this post, I excavated the previous Case Closed / Detective Conan reviews from the archives and came to the dispiriting conclusion that this will only be the third volume, thus far, discussed on this blog – which threw me back to that wonderful period when every year six new volumes were released. Sadly, that was reduced from one new release every two months back to three months after the series was re-branded as a Shonen Sunday manga.

I still have absolutely no idea what that exactly entails, but suffice to say I don't like it one bit and prefer the old schedule. Yeah, I know, the old schedule wasn't as profitable as the new one, but I like to believe that making me happy should be a bigger concern to Viz than something as banal as paying their employers or providing for their families.

The Drug Known As Love

The fortieth volume opens with a Metropolitan Police Love Story, in which Sato and Takagi are laboring under the naïve assumption they have arranged a surreptitious date for two at Tropical Marine Land, a popular amusement park, but their colleagues have them under close surveillance and under the guiding hand of Santos make a serious attempt at wrecking their little tryst – which is easy enough with a drug runner on the loose and Conan unexpectedly turning up with his buddies. As you probably deduced from this brief synopsis, we're dealing here with a lighthearted, risible caper fraught with incredible coincidences, such as Takagi's bag pack accidentally being swapped with the one from the drug mule or when all of the suspects turned out to be athletes, making this somewhat of a madcap chase story. Simply amusing from start to finish.

Justice vs. Crime: 15-Love

Conan is feeling a bit under the weather, but nonetheless insisted on accompanying Rachel to Serena's summerhouse, where they want to spend a weekend on the tennis courts, but an unheralded cloudburst soaks their plans – and the party eventually ends up at a desolated house in the woods occupied by a young tennis instructor and his old father. Needless to say, this inauspicious day ends appropriately when Conan and Rachel discover the body of the old man in his room, suspended from the ceiling with a stout rope coiled around his neck, and everything indicated that took his own life. But our little gumshoe finds himself to be only person who really listens to the story that the silent witnesses are trying to tell the investigators. This story is basically a successful cross between an inverted detective story and a how-dun-it. We know who killed the old codger, but not how it was done, however, there are plenty of clues to work out the method and destroy the murderers craftily build-up alibi. A very satisfying story.

Lost Love

In this story, Doc Agasa takes a central role as Conan and The Junior Detective League offer a helping hand with cracking a code. This numerical cipher was left to Doc Agasa by a girl he was very fond of and refers to a special location where she'll be waiting for him once every 10 years, but the poor professor never managed to break it. Is Conan up to the task to pick the lock to the heart of the Doc's long-lost first love and will she still be waiting for him after all these years? A sweet and touching story, but you have to be a super genius to solve this conundrum (Aoyama admitted this in his after word).

Anyway, it's interesting to notice how Aoyama insists on connecting nearly every (recurring) character in his universe with one another – no matter how superficies that connection turns out to be.

The final chapter is a set-up of a new story, in which the Great Sleeping Moore bungles up a case and runs up a huge tap and both Rachel and Conan's mothers put in an appearance. But more on that in the review of volume 41, which will be released in early January of 2012. Can't wait!

The Adventure of the Scarlet Blaze

"The one who gets the last laugh isn't the criminal, but the little guy with the big brain."

- Hattori Heiji (a.k.a. Harley Hartwell)

Ever since I began participating in the online mystery community, I triumphantly lured over a dozen fellow enthusiasts into reading Kelley Roos' The Frightened Stiff (1942) and John Sladek's Black Aura (1974) and unintentionally resurged an interest in the obscure, hard-to-get books by Anthony Wynne – who stands as one of the most fertile writers of impossible crime stories. But try as I might, I just can't seem to generate even half as much attention or buzz for Case Closed / Detective Conan as I did for an unremembered writer whose books have been out-of-print for nearly seven decades – even with the backing from Ho-Ling and Patrick. This makes me wonder if the lack of overlap, between readers of Conan and Golden Age Detectives, isn't due to mis-advertisement but simply an unbridgeable age and cultural gap. I mean, here we have a detective series that literarily has everything one hopes to finds in well-written, tightly plotted and fairly clued mysteries, ranging from classic locked room mysteries to character-driven suspense stories, but, for some reason or other, older readers seem to be unable to warm up to it.

I hope this is an misunderstanding on my part, but whatever the answer may be, we will continue to proselytize, indoctrinate and incorporate new members into the Cult of Conania, and here's my latest contribution:   

Blazing Horses and a Glowing Firebug

The first murder case of this volume covers just about half of the book, and has Conan and Harley hot on the trail of a serial arsonist – whose modus operandi varies case by case but are signed with the incendiaries unmistakable trademark signature: leaving a small statuette of a red blazing horse at the scene of each inferno. At heart, this is a blazing eulogy to the memory of Agatha Christie, which adeptly avoid the familiar pitfall filled with tired old clichés and misconceptions, but it's also a solid detective story in its own right. And it's always a pleasure to watch Conan and Harley team-up.  

Murder Among Friends

Professor Agasa chaperons another outdoors excursion for Conan and his buddies from The Detective Boys, when they bump into a group of friends from a college club touring around in a campervan and not unexpectedly one of them turns up dead after briefly disappearing from the party. On the surface, it has all the earmarks of an unfortunate accident, but a bike in perfect working order, tire tracks and a bloody picnic blanket are the silent witnesses that scream out foul play. The gist of the trick is easily deduced, but the clueing and use of the outside environment makes this a satisfying detective story.

The Mother Hunt

In the final story of this collection, Richard Moore is employed by a well-known child actor who was abandoned by his mother when he was only a baby, however, recently he has been receiving a slew of postcards which were evidently send by his mother – and he wants the famous Sleeping Moore to locate her. However, it's Conan who does a top-notch job at deducing her whereabouts from the tell-tale clues on the postcards. As a matter of course, their mother hunt turns into a murder investigation and they have to deduce who of three women strangled a freelance, hack mudracker – and who of them is the boys mother. Not one of the best stories in the series, but it has nifty visual clue that I really liked. The deadliness of the murder weapon is questionably, though.

What Mysteries Lie Under the Rising Sun?

Note: this will hopefully proof to be the first entry of a continues, but irregular, series of guest posts by fellow connoisseurs of crime – and I'm thrilled to announce that the first person to pick up the pen is Ho-Ling. I already heaped a considerable amount of praise on his superb blog, which he waved away dismissively, but I really meant when I said that I consider his blog to be one of the best of the online mystery community! It's pretty much the only spot on the web where Western fans can marvel at a part of the mystery genre that is, due to that darn language barrier, still uncharted territory – and with Ho-Ling acting as guide the only disappoint you'll likely meet along the way is the inability to read most of these gems he so expertly discusses. That's why I want to urge the notable readers of this blog (you know who you are!) to pass a link to his blog and this article along to editors and publishers who might be interested in publishing these grand detective stories that have been out of the reach of Western readers for far, far too long!

What Mysteries Lie Under the Rising Sun? 

Write something on Japanese detective fiction as a guest blog? Shouldn't be too hard, I thought. I've reading them for some years now, so I should know a bit about the theme. Well, that was a foolish thought. Seeing the focus of Detection in Moonlight, I knew I could limit myself to Golden Age-style fiction. But when I saw that I was already nearing the 2000 words on the halfway point of my first draft, I knew the topic still was too broad. So then I decided on post-war Japanese Golden Age detective fiction. And then decided I should focus mostly on books that are actually available in English. And then I ignored TV-shows, comics and cartoons.

At this point I realized that that Japanese detective fiction is such a big topic! So much interesting works, so much to talk about! And just a tiny, tiny fraction of all of that reaches an English-reading audience. Sigh. It sometimes seem futile to rave about things you know few people will be able to read. But here I present mostly a selection of Japanese detective novels I can rave about that are actually available in English!

Post War Society: True Golden Age in Japan

Most critics see the end of the Second World War as a turning point in the history of Japanese detective fiction, as writers finally turned to pure Golden Age detective fiction. Yokomizo Seishi's Murder in the Old Daimyo's Inn (Honjin Satsujin Jiken) is generally seen as the definite start of the true Golden Age detective novel in Japan. What was so innovating about this 1946 novel is that it effectively set a Golden Age locked room murder mystery in a very Japanese, rural setting. The combination was a daring one, as one might imagine that almost every architectural structure in such a setting, from the way rooms are build to the whole house, is widely different from the Western setting. Yet Yokomizo succeeded brilliantly, evoking Carr with both the theme of the book, as well as having an uncanny knack for creating atmosphere with his writings. The protagonist, Kindaichi Kousuke, would grow out to be the iconic Japanese detective, with a silhouette as recognizable as Holmes.

The only Yokomizo novel available in English at the moment is The Inugami Clan, but it luckily has exactly those elements that made the Kindaichi novels so popular. A strange will from a wealthy family patriarch leads to bloody battle surrounding the inheritance, set in rural Japan. Yokomizo created fantastic memorable characters here and the story is ingeniously plotted (See also the trailer of a recent movie version). It is a shame no-one bothered with other translations of Yokomizo's works. Many of his books have been so influential on the genre that Japanese parodies on detectives still mostly refer to his books. And yes, the good way to measure influence on culture is by looking at parodies!

Takagi Akamitsu's The Tattoo Murder Case was published around five years after Murder in the Old Daimyo's Inn. Set in the underground world of tattoos, Takagi created one of the most famous locked room mysteries in Japan, with a murderer seemingly out to steal... tattoos. Tattoos are usually stuck to skin though, so if you want to steal a tattoo, you’re kinda forced to take a substantial part of the human body with you. Not for the weak of heart maybe, but the way Takagi manages to intertwine the tattoo world with his own fantastic puzzle is great and makes for a very pleasant read.

The New Orthodox Movement

Around the late 1980's a new wave in Japanese detective fiction started, dubbed the New Orthodox movement and it is exactly what the title suggests: a movement of authors that go back to the orthodox (= Golden Age) detective fiction. Who says Golden Age is dead? It's still very much alive in Japan, with new writers appearing every year, with locked room murders, alibi tricks, disappearing objects, Challenge to the Readers and everything good and nice still being written. The stories are usually set in the modern day world, but these talented modern Japanese writers show that there is still a need for a great detective in this time and age. Most of these writers are very much inspired by the Great Olds and many of the stories feature meta-fictional dialogues on famous detective writers, about tricks and simply the things we fans talk about in real life. These books are both New Orthodox as well as a tribute to the Old Orthodox.

The biggest name of this movement is Shimada Souji, who debuted in '81 with the simply amazing The Tokyo Zodiac Murder Case. With themes like locked room murders, functional dismemberment, a homunculus and a Challenge to the Reader, Shimada delivered a tour-de-force capable of challenging any of the Great Old Classics. He followed the book up with The Crime at the Slanted Mansion (Naname Yashiki no Hanzai) the following year, where he showed once again that the genre was far from dead. Well, Shimada didn't actually attract that much attention of the audience at that time. But he did attract the attention of other like-minded people, who started to send their manuscripts to him. Many of them grew out to be big names in the genre themselves, while Shimada's own popularity also grew with time.

Ayatsuji Yukito, one of Shimada's protégés, published The Murder at the Decagon House (Jukkakan no Satsujin) almost a decade after Shimada's debut and it was this book that effectively started the New Orthodox movement (not available in English). This Giant in the Japanese detective fiction tells an And Then There Were None-esque story about a group of mystery novel fans, who all go by a nickname that refers to famous detective writers, who get murdered one by one on an island. With the publication of this novel, the New Orthodox movement really started to catch momentum, with other writers following and an interest in Golden Age-style fiction being resurrected.

Many writers in this movement seem to be influenced especially by Ellery Queen. Both Arisugawa Alice and Norizuki Rintarou write about writer-detectives with the same name as themselves. Both writers usually set their stories in rather urban areas and often insert Challenge to the Readers in their stories. Norizuki Rintarou even mirrors the Ellery/Inspector Queen relation with his own Rintarou/Inspector Norizuki characters. His award-winning short story "An Urban Legend Puzzle" is an excellent example of how Golden Age detectives still work in this time and age. A carefully structured short story, evoking the old Queen-tradition with its emphasis on logical arguments, set with a wonderfully modern theme of the urban legends. It is a shame none of his other short stories have been translated yet. Heck, Arisugawa isn't available in English at all! Arisugawa often uses Alice in Wonderland imagery in his stories (like Queen) and his short stories remind of Queen's Puzzle Club stories, with small, limited puzzles like dying messages or enigmatic behavior that depend on the right interpretation. Arisugawa also specializes in secondary literature on locked room mysteries, having written works like An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891-1998.

Nikaidou Reito is hailed as the Japanese Carr (he prefers the moniker Japanese Paul Halter himself actually), a writer who specializes in impossible crime situations. Like Arisugawa, he is a prominent writer in the New Orthodox movement who strangely enough isn't avaibable in English at all. His Terror of Werewolf Castle (Jinroujou no Kyoufu) is a gigantic work, the worlds' longest detective story (at the time of publication), with several locked room murders and other impossible crime situations spread across four volumes (not available in English). He's also prolific as a critic of the genre, and has even delved into pastiches of Arsène Lupin and Sir Henry Merrivale. Like Paul Halter, he seems to have trouble finding the English audience though.

You know, I'm just going to stop here. I could go on and on about pre-war detective fiction, about TV-shows, about New Orthodox writers, about themes in Japanese detectives, about…. everything. It's just too much. I just hope that this short introduction to Golden Age-style detectives has piqued the interest of some readers here. Take a look at what is available in English and maybe you'll see that I'm not totally crazy for studying Japanese in order to read these hidden treasures!

Translations in English (mentioned):

Norizuki Rintarou. "An Urban Legend Puzzle." In Passport to Crime (ed. Janet Hutchings). Carroll & Graf

Shimada Souji. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. IBC Publishing

Takagi Akimitsu. The Tattoo Murder Case. Soho Press

Yokomizo Seishi. The Inugami Clan. Stone Bridge Press

Other Japanese detective fiction in English (not a complete list):

Edogawa Rampo. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Tuttle Publishing
Edogawa Rampo. The Black Lizard/Beast in the Shadow. Kurodahan Press
Edogawa Rampo. The Edogawa Rampo Reader. Kurodahan Press
Edogawa Rampo. "The Two-Sen Copper Coin" in: Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913-1938. University of Hawai'i Press
Higashino Keigo. The Devotion of Suspect X. Minotaur Books
Nishimura Kyoutarou. The Mystery Train Disappears. Dembner Books
Matsumoto Seichou. "The Cooperative Defendant" in Ellery Queen's Japanese Golden Dozen - The Detective Story World in Japan. Charles E. Tuttle Company
Matsumoto Seichou.  Inspector Imanishi Investigates. Soho Press
Matsumoto Seichou. Points and Lines. Kodansha International
Matsumoto Seichou. The Voice and Other Stories. Kodansha International
Uchida Yasuo. The Tokagushi Legend Murders. Tuttle

Case Closed, volume 38: On the Ropes

I have decided that reviews of Gohso Aoyama's marvelous Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) series will become a semi-regular feature on this blog spot. Yes, I know. It's somewhat befuddling and illogical to start smack in the middle of a series, but I have been reading these stories since 2006 – and I didn't have the time to revisit all those foregoing volumes.


But don't let that stop you from discovering this tremendous and imaginative detective series for yourself and try to catch up with me if you can. It's been done! Just take the time to read these notes and this earlier blog entry, so that you know what to expect, and plunge yourself in the vibrant, ever expanding universe of Detective Conan – where high adventure and mystery awaits all who seek it!

The Trap

The first chapter of this book is the conclusion of a case that started in the previous volume, which involved a murdered software developer who had close ties with the elusive criminal organization that's responsible for Conan's precarious situation. However, they appear to be completely unaware of the death of their computer programmer, and Conan decides to bait a trap with the program he was developing for them, but they remain as intangible as ever.

This story provided another compelling plot thread in the ongoing and increasingly more important main storyline, concerning Conan and his wraithlike adversaries. 

The Stolen Scroll of the Thunder God

Conan and his buddies of The Junior Detective League lend a helping hand to one of their own in the hope of earning a set of beautiful Festival Dolls for Amy, but at the apartment where the dolls reside also hangs a coveted wall scroll worth a small fortune – and, of course, someone swipes it. This is a fairly clued but minor story in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter."

The Man Behind the Mask

Conan, Rachel and her dad, the celebrated sleeping detective, Richard Moore, attend a professional wrestling show where they have an opportunity to meet the star of the company and reigning champion – the famous masked wrestler, Wolf Face. But a backstage rivalry soon leads them to the dressing room of another wrestler, scheduled to face the masked lucha libre in the main event, who was brutally stabbed to death in front of a running camera and the video shows that the perpetrator was none other than Wolf Face!

Conan does an excellent and swift job in deducing who of his fellow in-ring combatants donned one of his masks and done in his opponent – successfully proving that Wolf Face's paws are free of blood and securing his secret identity from the fans and press.

Not a Good Day to be Harley Hartwell

Conan's friend and rival detective, Harley Hartwell, also has a knack for landing himself in tight situations – as he and Kazuha find themselves at the mercy of a ruthless jurist who's trying to force him to decipher a code cooked up by a private detective who has the goods on her. He has to try to keep himself and Kazuha alive while also trying to reach Conan for help. This is more a thriller than a proper mystery, but with the complicated cryptogram worked into the plot an intelligent suspense story would probably be a better qualification. 

The stories that make up this volume are a fairly good, if somewhat unexcited, addition to the series, and will not fail to entertain its fans. 

Case Closed, volume 39: The Adventure of the Scarlet Blaze is set to be released in mid-July, and I, for one, can't wait to get my greedy hands on it.