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.

Conundrums with Corpses: Q.E.D, vol. 5 by Motohiro Katou

I've remarked in past reviews that Motohiro Katou took a different route to other, more well-known, anime-and manga detective series when it came to the characterization of the protagonists, the type of cases they get to solve and volume structure – making Q.E.D. vastly different compared to Case Closed, Detective Academy Q and The Kindaichi Case Files. The previous volume was a perfect example of these dissimilarities with a scam story and a quasi-techno thriller, but the cases in volume 5 were unexpectedly close to the kind of stories littering the Case Closed series!

The first of two stories, "The Distorted Melody," is an inverted detective story, a la Columbo, but with a quasi-impossible problem of where the body was hidden at the time the murderer was orchestrating an unimpeachable alibi.

Hirai Reiji is a world-famous young cellist and an equally celebrated symphony orchestra had added him as their main attraction for an upcoming concert, but the President of Kouwa Industries, Okabe Kousuke, canceled their long-running sponsorship. A decision Hirai, "a slave to a great art," simply could not allow to stand. So, when Okabe visits him at his remote, cliff side cabin, Hirai strangles him and sews together an alibi by inviting a small party of high-school students, which includes Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara – only they arrived a little too early. This leaves Hirai with mere minutes at his disposal to hide the body inside a small, sparsely furnished cabin without any apparent hiding places. Somehow, he managed to do it, but how? And, no, the body wasn't stuffed inside the cello case.

Two days later, Okade's body is found at his home, crammed inside a disused, filled-in water well, but "the kids testified that there was no corpse in the house" and supporting evidence, namely a train ticket and a phone call, cemented Hirai's alibi.

Touma believes the young cellist murdered the tightfisted businessman and begins, piece by piece, to tear down both his story and carefully constructed alibi. The solution hinges on the use of the cello, a piece of classical music and cellphone feedback, but the highlight of the solution is the place where the body had been hidden. A simple and elegant solution marred only slightly by the lack of (visual) clueing, but still a clever take on the hidden object puzzle.

As an aside, this story was loaded with translator's note and had a floor plan of the cabin, which, in combination with the search for a missing, cleverly hidden object, also made the story vaguely feel like an American Golden Age detective story.

Where's the body?

 

The second and last story of this volume, entitled "The Afterimage of Light," is, story-wise, right up there with "Rokubu's Treasure" and "The Fading of Star Map," as one of the better tales so far and serves the reader a bizarre, neatly posed locked room mystery – buried in the dimly remembered past. A story that begins, or ended, when Touma and Mizuhara buy an old camera on a flea market only to discover a role of undeveloped film inside. A film with five snapshots of a doll, a storage house, three children, a mountain and a blurry picture of a man's shoulder.

So they decide to follow the clues of the camera and pictures original to Otowamura, a small mountain village, where they find the "surprisingly small," windowless storage that turned out to have a weird and sad history behind it. Once upon a time, it was simply used to store rice and farming tools, but when tuberculous reared its ugly head in the region, it was converted into a sanatorium. A lot of people died in there. However, the weirdest story to come out of the store house is that of a little girl, Kuwano Taki, who had tuberculous and was confined to the windowless store house. But, every day, the girl told her visiting mother what had happened that day outside the storage house and replicated this ability in public experiments. She was "shut up in a big box" from "where she would tell people what was outside," but this is only of two locked room puzzles the story has to offer!

Touma and Mizuhara, with the unwilling assistance of a local policeman, break open the door of the storage house, because the key had gone missing of thirty years ago and nobody appears to have entered it during that period. Curiously, while the walls are crumbling, one of then looks whiter than the other as it was plastered over in the past, but part of the wall disintegrated upon being touched – revealing a decomposed skeleton behind it. The sole, long-lost store house key had been in the pocket of the body all this time. So how was the murderer able to leave a locked door behind and who did the murderer hide in the wall? And how does this long-hidden murder linked to the photos, the now three grownup children and the story of the clairvoyant girl?

The Locked Room Mystery

A really well done detective with many moving, interlocking parts that beautifully dovetail together in the end. Once again, the clueing is not always pitch-perfect and one clue, in particular, is impossible to correctly interpret, but enough of the plot can be worked out to satisfy most armchair detectives.

I think a good chunk of readers will be able to work out the clairvoyant images of the little girl, which is a surprisingly modern take on the naturalistic impossible crime fiction that was somewhat popular during the turn of the previous century (e.g. L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries, 1898). The result is something pleasingly different than what you usually get in these stories about faked psychic abilities. I liked the explanation as to how the skeleton ended up behind the wall of a locked room, but worked out the trick when I read Ho-Ling Wong's double review of volume 4 and 5. I misunderstood the exact situation of the locked room, but the hint in my comment (mild spoilers) was spot on! To be honest, there's really only one way that specific locked room-trick could have been worked. I still liked it.

The strength of the story is how all these plot-threads were tied together and the fact that the statute of limitation has ran out, which means that the murderer not only gets away with killing an innocent person, but is not even confronted by Touma – reminding the reader that Q.E.D. is not like the other manga detective series. Even when it tries to be!

So, all in all, this is easily my favorite volume up to this point in the series and, while not entirely spotless, I found the stories to be excellent with some original ideas and tricks. Definitely recommended!

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).

Shed a Light On the Past: Q.E.D, vol. 3 by Motohiro Katou

Last year, I started reading the Q.E.D. series, a Japanese detective manga, created by Motohiro Katou, who produced 50 volumes between 1997 and 2014, which sold over 3 million copies and received a live-action TV drama adaptation – centering on the 16-year-old genius, Sou Touma. A former MIT graduate student who moved back to Japan, to experience life as normal high-school student, where he becomes friends with Kana Mizuhara. She's the antithesis to the lonely, withdrawn genius.

I've only read the first two volumes, reviewed here and here, but my review of the second volume dates back to a little over a year! So it was about time I returned to this series.

The third volume of Q.E.D. comprises of two stories, entitled "Breakthrough" and "The Fading of Star Map," covering three, somewhat longish, chapters each. I'm still very earlier in the series, but these two stories are my favorites as of now. And for vastly different reasons.

The first of these two stories, “Breakthrough,” is, technically speaking, not really a detective story of any kind, but fills in some background details of Touma's character and the time he spend in the US – drawing on his days as an MIT student. One day, two American MIT students turn up at Touma's school in Tokyo, Eva Scott and Syd “Loki” Green, who were friends of Touma. They were surprised and worried when he suddenly left college without a word. Everyone suspected it had something to do with the incident in the research lab.

Someone "threw Touma's thesis into the river." The thesis was supposed to be kept in the research lab, but it was taken nonetheless and "even the back-up data on the computer was erased." However, Touma doesn't want to talk about it and it's revealed that he took the blame. So was he shielding someone? The story also has a tiny sub-plot about the quasi-impossible disappearance and reappearance of a string of pearls, but these problems are only secondary to the story about the friendship between Touma and Loki. A story of two lonely geniuses who became friends and, when together, they actually act like normal teenagers and have a bit of fun. So this is really a slice-of-life story about friendship presented as a detective story. I liked it.

Sou Touma is not as popular a detective-character as Conan Edogawa or Hajime Kindaichi, but, after merely three volumes, his personality already has more depth to it than either of his more well-known counterparts – an opinion some of you will vehemently disagree with. However, Kindaichi has always been a two-dimensional character, while Conan's development slowly moves along with the red-thread running through the series.

The second and final story in this volume, "The Fading of Star Map," is a fine example of the Japanese shin honkaku detective story.

The story revolves around an abandoned, rundown star observatory, standing on a lonely, snow-capped mountain, but the place is now surrounded by a ski-resort. So the ramshackle observatory now poses a potential danger to curious skiers who might get injured as they wander around the place. Obviously, the place has to be demolished, but the observatory's founder, Fukutaro Tsukishima, disappeared twenty-five years ago and a district court investigator has gathered all his living relatives to decide "who the legal beneficiary is" – who will have to pay for the demolition. Someone accidentally opened the giant telescope and it revealed the charred remains of a long-dead person.

Murder by Starlight

Naturally, a snow storm delays the arrival of the police and, shortly after the discovery, Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara arrive at the observatory. They're on a school trip, to the ski resort, but they got lost and were brought to the observatory. Where they have to spend the night.

On the following morning, they find the body of Fukutaro's brother-in-law, Muneaki Miyabe, hanging outside the bathroom window. This turns out to be a cleverly contrived, quasi-locked room murder showing that the Japanese are not only the masters of the corpse-puzzle, but understand the endless possibilities of the architectural mystery like no one else. A wonderful trick that could have been fleshed out into a full-fledged locked room conundrum. However, even better than the trick is the identity of the murderer and the clues that were found in the stars, an old drawing of a dog and the cruel lies adults tell to children. The murderer is a truly tragic figure, but, even more tragic, is the death of this character.

If you're going to kill off the murderer at the end of the story, this is how it should be done with exactly right emotional punch to punctuate the ending. A highly recommendable story.

So, all in all, this was an excellent, well-balanced volume with a character-driven and plot-oriented detective story, which both showed improvement in characterization, plotting and story-telling. I might tackle the next two volumes in the coming weeks, because two volumes a years is simply not enough.

By the way, I know only a tiny segment of my regular readers actually read and watch anime-and manga detective series, but I like to know what you uninitiated think when you read these reviews. Are you intrigued? Tempted? Why don't you take the plunge? You'll find some of the cleverest detective stories you have ever read in these series. And they're banquet, if you're a locked room fanboy. For example, I think the Detective Conan episodes The Case of Séance Double Locked Room and The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly are modern classics of the impossible crime genre.

The Rokubu Demon: Q.E.D, vol. 2 by Motohiro Katou

Back in March, I reviewed the first volume from the once long-running Q.E.D. series, a detective manga written and drawn by Motohiro Katou, originally serialized between 1997 and 2014 in Magazine GREAT, Magazine E-no and Magazine Plus – selling over 3 million copies of the 50 volumes that make up the entire series. The main-character of Q.E.D. is Sou Touma, a teenage genius, who's an MIT graduate and moved back to Japan to be a normal high-school student. Once he's back in school, Touma becomes friends with a classmate, Kana Mizuhara, who's a social and athletic sixteen year old. She plays the Archie Goodwin to his Nero Wolfe.

The second volume, as every volume in this series, is divided into two separate, longish stories. So the cases are usually longer than those found in Detective Conan, but shorter than the novel-length detective stories from the Kindaichi series.

The first of these two stories, "Rokubu's Treasure," checks all of the boxes of a conventional, shopworn detective story regularly found in anime-and manga mysteries: a small, secluded village with a dark back-story and a curse laid upon it. A murderer who walks around dressed like a Scooby Doo villain, long buried family secrets and bizarre murders, which usually links the family skeletons with the village history – which could be a rough outline of the recently reviewed The Headless Samurai. Touma even observes that "these kind of myths are often found" throughout Japan However, I did very much appreciated what Katou ended up doing with the plot. Something that was slightly different.

Touma and Mizuhara are sitting at the edge of his swimming pool when the former receives a package from the United States.

Diane Butler is the archaeology speaker whose lectures Touma attended in America and she send him sheaves of old, crumbling and bug-eaten documents written in Japanese. The package also includes a small bottle with a shiban mushi (death bug) in it and a letter with a request to translate the ancient documents. Butler contacted him on behalf of a friend, Shizuna Kotohira, who comes from a rich family with "a wide expanse of land with hotsprings" and accepting the request comes with a holiday trip to the Kotohira family estate. This was enough of an argument for Mizuhara to pressure Touma into accepting.

When they arrive in the village, Touma and Mizuhara wanted to ask directions at the police station, but they find the place deserted and learn from one of the locals that the village policeman has been called away on a case – a university student had been attacked by someone dressed as the Rokubu Demon.

The victim was part of a group of university students who were looking for the treasure from the legend Rokubu goroshi (Rokubu murder). As they resume their foot-trip to the estate, Touma and Mizuhara recall the legend of the pilgrim visiting all of the holy grounds throughout Japan, but the pilgrim was ambushed and murdered when he passed through this village. They took the treasure he was carrying, a golden Buddha, but, with his last breath, "the pilgrim condemned the villagers with a terrible curse." An old and familiar tale. The difference here is that the locals are convinced that the ancestors of the Kotohira family murdered the pilgrim and had drawn their wealth from stolen treasure.

Touma working on his social skills

When they finally arrive at the estate, they are (eventually) let in by the family caretaker, Hyoe Kariya, who brings them inside where they meet the group of university students. Toshio Hiraki (post-graduate student), Kiyoko Mejiro (third year university student) and Jin Takano (fourth year university student) – who has a bruised cheek and a black eye from the attack. This group is accompanied by the history lecturer of University Y, Akihiko Nezu. One more student, Yamashiro, has gone missing since the attack happened and the village policeman, Ryosuke Kizaki, is organizing a search.

A search that ends when the group arrives at a shrine, where they find Yamashiro's body, "stabbed with a staff" and "positioned like a sitting Buddha." A mocking message had been scrawled on the wall, "a fitting punishment for a treasure hunter." Another student is murdered not long thereafter with a screwdriver. So we have violent attacks, murders, hidden treasure and a cryptic map showing where the treasure is hidden, which is why Shizuna Kotohira needed help. This is also the point where I began to have my doubts about the story.

There's more than enough plot here, but the whole structure seemed to very loosely put together. Nothing seemed to hang together or fitted like it should. We have a murderer, who plays dress up, attacking some and killing others. The murders also widely differ in modus operandi: one of the victims was impaled with incomprehensible strength and the body was put on public display, while the second victim was stabbed in the back of the neck with a screwdriver. Why evoke a legend for one murder and resort to a common stabbing for the other? And why did the murderer not go after the person who was cursed, Kotohira? Obviously, the plot-strands were tied together, somehow, but the knots that held these strands together didn't appear to be tightly fixed.

Luckily, Mizuhara relighted my hope with by asking the key question: "don't you think his actions are too inconsistent?" Touma's answer: Yes. Yes, it is. The solution already shows an improvement in Touma's plotting.

Touma gives the reader a perfectly logical, completely acceptable answer for the inconsistencies in the crimes and they're heavily influenced by previous events, circumstances and simply what's possible at that moment – which is an unusual, but pleasant, way to tell a detective story. The murders are a good example of this plotting technique. Why did the murderer impale the first victim? The answer is a practical one and, when you read Touma's reconstruction of this murder, you'll immediately get a tell-tale clue to the murderer's identity. Because only one person could have committed the murder that way. Why, then, did the murderer stabbed the second victim with a screwdriver? An event from earlier on in the story is the reason why this murder happened the way it did.

It all forms a nice, coherent picture and the crimes fit the character of the tragic murderer. On top of that, the first murder has a nifty alibi-trick and Touma performs his duty as detective by logically eliminating all of the innocent suspects until only the murderer remains.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to discover this story had been playing possum the whole time, only to spring back to life to deliver a solid ending, but have a minor gripe about the second murder. In the murderer's situation, it was a far too risky murder and, as this person should have learned by now, not everyone acts as a willing lamb to the slaughter. Otherwise, this story is a notable improvement over the stories from the first volume.

I hope this means that this series is, quality-wise, will follow a similar evolution as Detective Conan. A splendid series that had began weakly, but improved with each passing volume.

The second story in this volume is "Lost Royale" and is much shorter than "Rokubu's Treasure," which begins in a kendo dojo, where Mizuhara is practicing. A fellow kendo student, Iwasaki, is going to visit her grandfather in the hospital after the lesson and Mizahara decides to go along with her – grabbing Touma with them who happened to be loitering outside. However, when they arrive at the hospital, they find a man in the hospital room who's screaming at Iwasaki's grandfather, Oji.

According to the man, Oji claimed to have found "the legendary seventh royale car," a Bugatti Royale Type 41, which was designed by Ettore Bugatti as the biggest, most luxurious and expensive automobiles money could buy in the 1930s. Bugatti intended to sell these luxurious cars to the royalty of Europe, but only six cars were produced and three sold before production stopped. So the Royale became a legendary car and collectors, as well as museums, "try their hardest to obtain them" and a persistent rumor tells of a seventh, unaccounted Royale – a rumor rooted in the many shenanigans of Adolf Hitler. Oji apparently found the fabled Royale, but now refuses to talk about it. After the angry man takes his leave, Oji confides in the three that the car was stolen from him by an old friend, Yasuhiko Tomizawa.

Tomizawa is an incredibly rich man and owns a number of buildings in town, which is where this story takes an interesting turn. Touma, Mizuhara and Iwasaki try to find the car by studying the floor plans of the buildings owned by Tomizawa and sneaking into these places to inspect the possible hiding places. Mizuhara is becoming a regular Carmen Sandiego!

The hiding place of the car turned out to better than expected, because assumed the 6.7 meter long car would be found inside a large trailer van. I had not expected a piece of old-fashioned stage magic to mislead everyone. Unfortunately, the story does not play particular fair with the reader. There's not a single clue to the hiding place and this is a missed opportunity, because in Detective Conan this trick would have come with a strong visual clue in the background of the panels. The reader should have gotten the whole back-story of the car or that last, important part a whole lot sooner.

All in all, this was a passable story with a good premise and great use for our beloved floor plans, but the plot is marred by a lack of fair play. So this volume ends on a slightly weak note. However, I'm still very hopeful about this series. The stories are not stellar, but this second volume already shows improvement and hope this will continue in the third volume. I'll try to get to that third volume sooner rather than later.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum: Q.E.D, vol. 1 by Motohiro Katou

Q.E.D. is a Japanese detective manga created by Motohiro Katou, who produced 50 volumes between 1997 and 2014, originally serialized in Magazine GREAT, but chapters were later published in respectively Magazine E-no and Magazine Plus – an impressive run that moved over 3 million copies and spawned a live-action TV-series. And, as to be expected from a shōnen mystery, the protagonists are high-school students who, somehow, attract murderers like an overpowered super magnet.

Sou Touma is a 14-year-old genius, who's already an MIT graduate, but moved back to Japan to experience live as a normal high-school student. Only problem is that he has the social skills of a hermit and loves to hang out by himself on the roof of the school. This is, by the way, a staple of manga-and anime series that take place around a school. They always hang around on the school roof.

Luckily, Touma befriends a classmate, Kana Mizuhara, who knows her way around the social norm of polite society and loves sports, which makes her perfect to play the Archie Goodwin to his Nero Wolfe. It helps tremendously that Kana's father is a homicide detective who's smart enough to recognize Touma's talent as an amateur detective and allows him to meddle in his work.

Going by the two stories in the first volume, my impression is that Q.E.D. is a blend of Case Closed (type of cases) and Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning (characters).

The first of the two stories that make up the inaugural volume, titled "The Owl of Minerva," takes place at the central building of "the famous A-KS game company" where Kana is spending a rainy evening at the gaming center with a friend, Norika Arita – who's the daughter of the company's president. On their way out, they witness an altercation between two gamers. One of them is Touma, who not only utterly demolished his opponent, but honestly told him his movements were predictable and that he sucked. So Kana intervened and took him out of the situation, which marked the first occasion that she really interacted with her famous, but reclusive, classmate.

Not long after this incident, Norika is whisked away to a locked-off, top floor level of the building and the place is suddenly swarming with police. Kane even sees her father, Inspector Mizuhara, enter the building. She overhears him saying that there's "a case on the 23rd floor" of the building.

So Kana grabs Touma by the collar and drags him to an employee-only elevator, protected with an electronic, three-digit code lock, which Touma cracks by using the good old pencil trick to make fingerprints appear on the type-pad – after which they spend some time peeking around corners and gathering information. What they learn is that the company president, Norika's father, was stabbed to death in his office and the CCTV footage shows that only six people were present on the 23rd floor at the time of the murder. And the police found a dying message.

A young Wolfean at work

A crumpled playing card, the King of Diamonds, was pried from the hand of President Arita and a second playing card, the Queen of Hearts, was found on his desk. What really surprised me is that this dying message was symbolic and, therefore, solvable even for readers who don't speak Japanese. As a rule, dying messages and coded messages in Japanese detective manga and anime series hinge on the Japanese language, which makes them practically unsolvable to Western readers. Everything one of these dying message or code cracking stories turns up in a series, like Detective Conan, I turn-off my brain and just enjoy the story and that's what I did here.

After all, even the translator appeared to be baffled by this particular dying clue, because one of the characters pointed out a potential connection between the crumpled playing card and a suspect with the name Juuzo, but this was never explained and this was followed by a footnote – explaining that translator also had no idea what the connection could have been. However, it was in the original Japanese text and therefore it was left in the translation. So it was interesting that the dying message turned out to have a practical explanation and therefore solvable.

A second aspect of this story I found interesting is that Touma and Kana couldn't simply walk around the crime-scene and ask everyone impertinent questions. Touma placed a wire on Kana, who pretended to be a young journalist, while he listened to her investigation from behind a computer in his book-lined room. A room that looked suspiciously to the room from another a detective manga that was seen in the first volume of that series.

Anyway, Kana eventually introduces Touma to her father and he's really impressed by the boy's deductive abilities. When Touma acts for his cooperation, he violently shakes the boy and yelled in his face, "tell me everything" and "what should I do." Why do I never meet homicide detectives like that?

The solution itself is not too bad for a introductory story. I caught on the murderer very early on in the story, because this person used a very old locked room technique to throw off suspicion within this closed circle of suspects. I was immediately suspicious of this person's actions and I turned out to be correct. So, on a whole, not a bad kickoff to this series.

In the second and last story of this volume, "The Silver Eye," Kana drags Touma to a doll exhibition to meet a friend of hers, Suzu-nee-chan, who's the daughter of a very famous doll maker, Katsumi Nanasawa – who's considered a cultural asset of the nation. During the exhibition, Touma confronts a fanatical doll collector, Kakuzo Akutso, who made an underhanded, but daring, attempt to steal one of the dolls on display. Nanasawa has resolutely refused to sell the odious collector any of her dolls and, ever since, he has attempted to get his hands on them without having to pay for them.

Nanasawa is an elderly, sick and wheelchair-bound woman and is pretty much at the end of her life. So she devised a plan to keep her beloved dolls out of Akutso's hands. She plans to donate her house and all the dolls in it to the government and turn it into a doll museum, but, shortly after she passes away, the family estate makes an unsettling discovery. A list of sponsors for the museum turns out to be shill companies that are owned by Akutso and this gives him an opening to obtain the entire collection if the museum ever goes bankrupt. However, death intervenes in this plan.

Akutso suffered from arrhythmia and had a pacemaker to make his heart beat at a regular pace, but this did not prevent his heart from stopping and his body was found in one of the doll rooms. One of Nanasawa's lifelike dolls was standing over the body. A smaller, but valuable, doll was missing from the room and the investigation is hampered by the statement of the three suspects/witnesses. They all give different statements about who find the body and what happened thereafter.

I guess most readers will probably catch on how Akutso died, especially after Kana checks up on a clue for Touma by climbing over the roof into the murder room, but the final twist was also pretty obvious. However, it makes for an, overall, nice and pleasant detective story with an interesting background. 

My only real complaint is that the murder method was not used to create a fun little locked room mystery, like the one from Clyde B. Clason's The Man from Tibet (1938), but the story required the suspects to have immediate access to the room. So you can hardly hold that against the writer.

On a whole, Q.E.D. is an interesting detective series with fun characters and relatively good plots. Granted, the plots aren't as good, or strong, as those found in Case Closed or Detective Academy Q, but they show potential to grow and improve. After all, my favorite detective manga, Case Closed, started with some really weak stories and look how that turned out. So you can expect my return to Q.E.D. in the near future.