Hell's Gate

"In this world, there's no such thing as the perfect crime!"

- Hajime Kindaichi

Last week, on the recommendation of our guide in the world of shin honkaku, Ho-Ling, I decided to take one last crack at the Kindaichi franchise with a recent animated series, Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi R), which was originally aired in Japan between 2014 and 2016. The third time proved to be the charm!

Hajime Kindaichi

I watched a two-part episode, The Blood Pool Hall Murder, which revolved around a very tricky murder committed during an annual Go tournament between two rivaling school teams. A short, clever and pleasantly put together detective story that made excellent use of its background and even had some Go-themed sleight-of-hand – such as the killer's alibi-trick and the victim's dying message. So I wanted to try a longer, multiple episode story next and one of them was recommended to me twice.

The Prison Prep School Murder Case consists of five twenty-minute episodes and offers an intricate, multi-layered plot with one hell of an alibi-trick. A trick that turns a string of gruesome murders into a large-scale impossible crime! So let's dig in, shall we?

As noted in my brief introduction of The Blood Pool Hall Murder, the protagonist of the series, Hajime Kindaichi, has an astonishing IQ of 180, but has earned himself a name as a lazy underachiever and his grades have finally caught up with his reputation – placing him in danger of having to repeat a year. Luckily, his long-time friend, Nanase Miyuki, knows of a good prep school and generously offers to come along on a cram course. There is, however, one problem: the prep school in question resembles and operates like prison.

Gokumon Prep School is a study retreat, known among its students as "Hell's Gate," where the first body is discovered as soon as Kindaichi and Miyuke stepped inside the school building.

One of the former students, Moroi Ren, who revisited the school to do a test is fatally poisoned in the counseling room and pressed the alarm bell in his death struggle. The poison was introduced with several needle pricks to his hand and the local police assumes the murder is a random act done by another student, who cracked under the pressure, but Kindaichi believes the murderer had singled out Moroi as a target and knows it was done – a trick known as "Magician's Select." Regardless, this doesn't bring them any closer to the person responsible for the poisoning and only established that something dark is bubbling beneath the surface of Gokumon Prep School.

During the final half of the opening episode, Kindaichi and Miyuke bump into two of their policemen friends, Police-Inspector Kenmochi and Superintendent Akechi. The former has been in charge of the school poisoning case, while the latter confirms Kindaichi suspicions that his old nemesis has a hand in the murder. A magician and criminal genius, known as the Puppeteer from Hell, who made his first on-stage appearance in The Magical Express, but eluded capture after being revealed by Kindaichi.

Now he "manipulates people like puppets" and "writes perfect criminal scenarios for people who bear grudges." So the young detective has quite a challenge ahead of him! 

Hell's Puppeteer appears in the crowd

The next episode moves the large cast of characters, including Kindaichi and Miyuke, to the secondary buildings of the school, called Moonlight and Sunlight, which are situated in a dark, sprawling forest with an hour's walking distance between them – something that becomes relevant when the impossible alibi-trick comes into play. But more on that presently.

Kindaichi and Miyuke are split up and assigned to two different groups. A science-and a humanities-oriented group, but this is also the point in the plot where the school demonstrates it's deserving of its nickname and reputation. The students are stripped of their personal belongings and clothes, which are replaced with prison-style jumpsuits. Some students with poor grades can even be locked up in solitary confinement to help them completely focus on their studies.

So you can say that the administration of Gokumon Prep went out of their way to conform to the nightmarish image we have in the West of juku (cram schools).

Anyway, the harsh, closely watched environment does provide safety to the students from the unknown murderer and even Akechi is present in the (undercover) role of instructor, but students still manage to go missing from the premise. One after another, students from both groups began to disappear after walking out of a full classroom. One was ordered to fetch a fresh piece of chalk from the hall closet, while another finished a test and was excused. The viewer is aware that they were murdered, but the bodies are nowhere to be found and everyone simply assumes they wandered into the woods – after cracking under all of the pressure. Something that's apparently not all that uncommon at Gokumon.

All of this takes up two-and-a-half episodes and this was, perhaps, too slow, but the pace picks up when all of the bodies, one after another, turn up in thematic fashion that alluded to the material they had been studying. So that was an interesting and unexpected twist in the plot. However, what really saved the episode is the unfurling of the complicated and involved explanation for the apparent impossibilities surrounding the murders over the next two episodes.

Initially, I feared my review of The Prison Prep School Murder Case was going to be lukewarm, because I erroneously thought I had figured out the who, why and how of the case, but it turned out my explanation had only touched upon the most elementary parts of the solution. And was completely wrong about the ingenious alibi-trick.

In my first review about this series, I mentioned a blog-post by The Reader is Warned, "But is it a Locked Room Mystery? The case of the impossible alibi," on which I commented what kind of alibi qualifies as an impossible problem and the episodes that make up this case tick all of the boxes – since every potential suspect were together, in the same room, when the murders happened. So none of them appeared to be, physically, capable of being the killer. I really thought I had stumbled to the truth, early on in the story, when one of the episodes showed a birds-eye view of the grounds surrounding both buildings. It's what gave me an idea how murder could be committed in each building while everyone was alibied. But my solution was childishly simple compared to what was revealed.

Sure, you can argue that the magnificent alibi-trick is too complex and involved, but my only real complaint about it is that the entire story was obviously written around this idea. The trick came first and the story second, which explains the shoddy pacing in the first two episodes and the extreme rules of the prison-like prep school. As the strength of the whole story hinges on the trick, the writer had not much to work with in the setup of the story and the tight regime was needed to make the plot work.

However, if you want pure, undiluted ingenuity, you will appreciate the overall plot of The Prison Prep School Murder Case. Arguably, it's one of the better examples of how an elaborate alibi can turn a detective story into a full-bloom locked room mystery. I really wish I could tell more about the nature of the trick, but that would be spoiling the surprise and that's a capital offense around these parts.

Finally, I need to point out that, at times, the story tried too hard to touch a dramatic note, but regularly failed at it. And the final, over-the-top showdown with Hell's Puppeteer was preposterous! With his hell-fire magic, flower darts and high-school drama-class dialogue. Nevertheless, I did chuckle when the Puppeteer told Kindaichi he wanted to meet him again "on the stage of another atrocity." Oh, no, I thought, does that mean Yozaburo Kanari is going to write their next case?

Alright, alright! I promise that's the last swipe I'll take at Kanari in this series of reviews, I swear!

End Game

"Just like there's no perfect tactic in Go, there's no perfect trick for a criminal."

- Hajime Kindaichi

In the tail of comments on my previous review, the subject of (Japanese) anime was brought up and Ho-Ling suggested Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi Return), which can be streamed (for free) on Crunchyroll.

Some of you long-time readers might remember my rants about one of the writers, Yozaburo Kanari, who has all the creativity of an echoing well and his copy-paste plots prevented me from fully enjoying the original run of the series, but other parts of the series was written by Seimaru Amagi – who wrote the excellent Tantei Gakuen Kyu (Detective Academy Q). According to Ho-Ling, the plotting of this new Kindaichi series is "generally much closer to one of those longer Detective Academy Q stories." So why not give the series a third shot now that Kanari is out of the picture?

Ho-Ling recommended several episodes with enticing sounding titles, such as The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Death March of Young Kindaichi, but settled for a short, two-part episode: The Blood Pool Hall Murder. I figured a shorter story would be a nice way to get into the series and the background of the story captured my interest.

First of all, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the series, the protagonist is a high school student, Hajime Kindaichi, who comes across as a lazy goof and an underachiever, but he's a genius with a staggering IQ of 180 – which he probably inherited from his famous grandfather, Kosuke Kindaichi. Some of you might recognize that name as the detective from Seichi Yokomizo's celebrated Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) and you would be right. Kindaichi used to evoke his name, early on in the series, but this resulted in some copyright issues and now only refers to a famous grandfather (i.e. "I swear it on my grandfather's name").

Kindaichi is also one of the biggest murder magnets in all of detective-fiction, rivaling Jessica Fletcher, Conan Edogawa and the English county of Midsomer for the number one spot, which is perfectly demonstrated in The Blood Pool Hall Murder. After all, who would have thought a competitive game of Go between two rivaling school teams would end with the death of one of the players?

Once a year, the rivaling Go Clubs of Fudou High and Kaiou Academy hold a multi-day tournament with the three best players from each club, but the former has seen its membership dwindling and are short one players – bringing the high school detective into the picture. Kindaichi was taught to play Go by his grandfather and is added to the team consisting of the only two remaining members of the club, Kosumi Yukari and Kaihou Manabu. And their opponents are serious and tense bunch of students.

Mitsuishi Isao is the slightly arrogant, serious-minded captain of Kaiou Go Club, but his hopes to train as a professional player were dashed when he beaten at the Insei exam by the second member of his team. Amamoto Kaori is already well-known as a female player and has the skill-set required to become a professional player. The final member is a shy, withdrawn young man, Hoshi Keima, who was the former junior champion of Reversi.

So, on the surface, the tense atmosphere appears to be nothing more than the byproduct of the usual rivalries dominating the world of Go and the first part of the story is, somewhat, reminiscent of a regular episode from Hikaru no Go. However, that all changes in the final ten minutes when one of the players, Hoshi, briefly disappears. Hoshi is nowhere to be found. Until someone notices a sinister message, spelled out with black and white Go stones, in the garden pond: "Hoshi is dead in the Blood Pool Room." And that's where they found his body, flung over an upturned game board, with marks around his throat.

 

"Hoshi is dead in the Blood Pool Room"

There is, however, one problem: the murder room was checked several minutes before the message in the pond was found, which means the body was placed there within a five-minute window and that makes the murder a quasi-impossible crime – since everyone had an alibi for that period. I really had some internal arguing with myself whether or not this episode qualified as an impossible crime story.

Back in March, I responded to a blog-post by The Reader is Warned, titled "But is it a Locked Room Mystery? The case of the impossible alibi," in which I said that an alibi story can only be considered an impossibility under one very strenuous condition: the alibi should not merely rely on witnesses (who can be misled) or items (such as theater or movie tickets), but the murderer should appear to have been physically incapable of having carried out the crime. I gave a rather famous Agatha Christie novel as an example and referred to an episode from Monk in which the culprit was in a coma at the time of the crime, but David Renwick also wrote several interesting variations on the impossible alibi for Jonathan Creek – e.g. Time Waits for Norman (1998) and Miracle in Crooked Lane (1999).

I believe the alibi-trick tiptoed the line between a regular alibi-trick and an impossible crime, but tilted a bit too much to the former to be considered an impossibility (as it relies on the item bit). However, the trick is clever piece of misdirection. Sure, the killer played a dangerous game by relying too much on everyone's assumptions and predicting their movements, but, purely as a plot-driven detective, it's pretty clever and satisfying.

One other thing that should be mentioned is the Go-themed dying message: Hoshi's body was found with his hands tied behind his back and he had been stuffed away somewhere before he was murdered. Somehow, he was able to stuff his pocket with a certain amount of black and white Go stones. Usually, Japanese dying messages and codes are hard to translate, but the color-coded dying clue here is pretty much universal and works in every language. I really wanted to kick myself for having missed the obvious message those stones tried to convey.

I had a good idea who the murderer was, but not exactly how the alibi-trick was done or how the victim's dying message confirmed my suspicion.

So, all in all, The Blood Pool Hall Murder was a nice way to get back into this series and looking forward now to the larger, four-part episodes with some proper locked room mysteries. You can expect me to return to this series before too long. 

But, for now, I want to end this review with an important question directly related to the Kindaichi series: when will Ho-Ling finally renounce Kanari and all his hackiness?  

The Vanishing Magician

"A good magic trick is like the perfect crime. Not a loose end in sight."

- Akechi (The Magic Express, 1996)

I was inspired to pull The Magical Express (1996), which is the sixteenth volume in The Kindaichi Case Files series, from the congested shelves that give a home to my vast collection of mysteries after reading a post on Pretty Sinister Books – in which John elaborated on his past as a puppeteer and admitted to being a total magic geek. This put the cog-wheels of this Mycroftian brain of mine in motion and dredged up attenuating memories of one of Hajime Kindaichi's cases that is actually quite clever, The Magical Express, and decided to shed some light on those dimming impressions I had of the story.

The plot revolves around a wraithlike presence, emblazoned with the moniker The Puppetmaster or Hell's Puppeteer, who's in the middle of on-going magic trick to make a troupe of magicians disappear, one after another, from the grand stage called life – and one of these disappearance acts involves a brilliantly clued and ingeniously executed impossible situation situated in a train compartment under observation.

The first chapter of The Magic Express departs with the arrival of a sealed box at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Department, containing a twisted marionette, posed like a mangled corpse, and a dire warning that a spell of death and fear has been cast on a train bound for Hokkaido. It also has some wacky embarrassing high-jinx, involving an adult videotape Kindaichi has in his possession, but these are best glanced over and banished from your mind. Anyway, the line that owns the now star-crossed express provides a bit of entertainment for their passengers with a troupe of renowned magicians, who conjured up a reputation for themselves with a trick known as The Living Marionette, which involves a doll that is magically endowed with life and cuts his own strings before cycling across the stage, but before reaching the final terminal their leader is murdered – and his body disappears under miraculous circumstances.

Gentle Yamagami, a maven where fire illusions are concerned and head of his own enchanting pack of conjures, is found with the handle of a knife protruding from his left temple in an unoccupied compartment, scattered with roses and strewn with balloons, after the train was hastily evacuated after The Puppetmaster called in a bomb thread, but the remains are spirited away in front of several eyewitnesses – including Hajime Kindaichi! The solution is inspired, even though Yazoburo Kanari probably stole a page from the book of one of his fellow brethren, and the (visual) clueing is impeccable! Various parts of the solution, from the inexplicable disappearance of the magician's body to the identity of Hell's Puppeteer, are dangled in front of the reader, like a hypnotists' pocket watch, but it's so in your face that it's easily overlooked and can effectively lead you astray.

By and large, The Magical Express follows a predetermined track decided upon in previous entries, as there's an unresolved death in the past of the magic group, which betrays another avenger-from-the-past ploy to readers familiar with the tropes of this series, but there are some unexpected and pleasant departures along the way. The aforementioned plotting and clueing is one of them, which is continued after the death and disappearance of Gentle Yamagami, as the puppeteer happily dispatches more members of the troupe – saturating the pages with even more clues! It was also a refreshing to watch the murderer, during a theatrical dénouement, slowly morph in a different breed of killer than the ones that usually put in an appearance in these stories and that Kindaichi is accompanied by both Kenmochi and Akechi. Kenmochi continues the tradition that began with Lestrade, while Akechi acts as a foil to Kendaichi, but, more often than not, ends up playing second fiddle – like Simon Brimmer who only seems to fail when he works with his rival on the same case.

Overall, this is one of only two or three volumes from this series that I would unhesitatingly recommend to any mystery fans and shows how underutilized comics are within the genre. So much can be done with visual clueing and you can come up with a lot more labyrinthine-like solutions as they are visualized for you. Shortly put, an excellent mystery on nearly all counts.

Oh, and to everyone who wants to point an accusing finger at me that I pounced on this opportunity to tempt one of our own into reading mystery manga's and hoping that this story will function as a back door introduction to Detective Conan/Case Closed... well... you're completely right! ;)

A Legendary Lepidopteron Flutters Above the Murky Waters

"The butterflies fluttered in the blackness, like ghosts wandering without a destination."

– Hajime Kindaichi (The Undying Butterflies, 1997)

You may remember that a few months ago, I posted a compendium of the strength and weaknesses of Yozaburo Kanari's The Kindaichi Case Files by impartially evaluating three volumes I labeled as good, bad and average, but my contempt for the author tainted the neutral tone I intended to adopt for the review. I won't waste time by trodding over ground covered in a previous blog entry, but will simply point you back to that post in case you want to know why I loath him and it's best you read that before continuing reading this one – in which I'll take another shot at putting my personal disdain aside and objectively critique two more titles from this series. I think I can hear someone sceptically mumbling in the back.

The books I opt for in this second-round are The Legend of Lake Hiren (1994) and The Undying Butterflies (1997), which, by themselves, have the framework of a standard, formulaic Kindaichi story, but combined they're lifted slightly above an average effort – as the murderer from the former story resurfaces in the latter and poses an interesting moral question at the end of the second volume.

Still Waters Run Deep

Typically, The Legend of Lake Hiren begins with Kindaichi and Miyuki scoring exclusive invitations to a sumptuous lakeside resort, located at the heart of a secluded valley enclosed by an immense, nearly impenetrable forest with a tottering footbridge as its only route leading back to the civilized world, where the participating members of the traveling group can earn themselves an exclusive and coveted membership once the place officially opens up for business. The participating members of the traveling group include, among other, a former high-school friend of Miyuki, a tacky reporter who goes out of his way to be offense, a kind-hearted doctor with a dark secret, a once promising artist with a morbid fascination for corpses and a gold-digging wife who isn't particular mournful about the sudden and violent passing of her husband – which provides a nice set-up for a good, old-fashioned whodunit.

However, the threat of a menacing murder, lurking from the shadows of the valley as the victims are snatched from their midst, one after another, apparently does indeed seem to come from the outside of the confines of their closed circle – as an alarming radio broadcast notified the public at large that a demented mass murderer escaped from his jail cell. The killer was an avid movie fan who snapped and massacred thirteen people in a single night while dressed as Jason Voorhees, and the vale is beginning to sense his presence when a body turns up with his face torn-off!

Someone torching down the bridge and them uncovering a second, face-less body stuffed in the fridge rapidly follows this. Kindaichi reasons from the facts that the murderer is now "sealed" in with them and that none of their food was stolen must mean that the escaped madman is a clever ruse and that the actual slayer is among them – and here's where Kanari's blatant incompetence as a mystery writer comes into play.

Only a novice would've missed the significance of the shredded faces, a supposed act of random savagery that makes the murderer stand out like a sore thumb, but this could've been solved by taking the personality and modus operandi of the mass murderer into the equation to mislead the reader. The ax-wielding maniac is supposed to be a fiendish movie freak who emulates his on-screen idols and the fact that he neglected to swipe any food from their fridge, after being on the run through the forest for nearly a week without provisions, could've easily been explained away by suggesting that he fed himself with the flesh of the victims – which just so happens to be Hannibal Lecter's favorite snack.

This would've neatly obscured the true motive for mutilating the features of the victims, but then again, what else was I expecting from someone who can only produce an inspired idea when he has a book to copy it from – and the remainder of the story is pretty much what you'd expect from a hack like him who desperately clings to his formula. However, I have to give him props for the way in which he handled the final scene with the murderer who wasn't impressed at all with Kindaichi's attempt at an emo-speech and the semi-original twist he spun on the motive that he loves regurgitating over and over again.

All in all, this is a pretty average entry in the series, impaired by missed opportunities and a lack of truly inspired ideas, and its only saving grace is that it's associated with The Undying Butterflies – as the murderer resurfaces in that story after the murky depths of Lake Hiren swallowed this persons body and was presumed dead.

Note of warning: one of the panels in this story contains a rogue's gallery of murderers from previous cases. The reader is warned. 

The House of the Butterflies

Well, after a stretch of time, in which Kindaichi bumped into a number of murderers, the memories of the grim episode at Lake Hiren begin to dim and accumulate a layer of dust in the attic known as the human brain, but one day he's confronted with a magazine article on a dilettante scholar who rediscovered a rare species of butterfly – and a snapshot depicts the savant standing next to the person he unmasked as the one who was responsible for butchering four people at the lakeside resort.

In tow of a reporter, Kindaichi and Miyuki make a journey to the family mansion of the savant, where thousands of invaluable butterflies swarm the heavily guarded premises, and come face to face with the murderer who found employment as an assistant to the residents patriarch, but claims to have no recollection of a prior life – ever since being dragged from a river. Whether this is true or not, it's unequivocal that this individual is neck deep in another murder case when someone begins killing off the members of the family and leave them pinned like butterflies – beginning with the family's 12-year-old daughter!

The death of a child, coupled with a motive that is accompanied with a minor, but nifty, twist gives this story a decidedly dark tone. Unfortunately, this atmosphere of doom and gloom amounts to nothing more than a thin film covering a familiar exterior as the plot goes through the motions of a standard Kindaichi story – which makes it possible for regular readers to identify the culprit without even glancing at the given clues.

What lifts this story above its basic plot is the inclusion of a murderer from a previous volume, whose hands are undeniably stained with blood but who may be innocent of these butterfly-murders and perhaps even morphed into a completely different person due to the amnesia suffered during a traumatic escape, and a really clever trick to create a unbreakable alibi. Even though he probably nicked that part of the plot from another detective story. Yeah, when it comes to Kanari's hackwork I'm a cynic.

On the whole, The Legend of Lake Hiren and The Undying Butterflies are pretty average fares when tackled separately, but read back-to-back the characters managed to wrestle the plots loose from Kanari's death grip of mediocrity and deliver an overall decent enough story. But more could've been done with them had they been put down on paper by more capable hands guided by a brain possessive of a shred of imagination.  

And thus ends another shoddily written review. I really have to up my game starting with the next blog post. By the way, did I succeed in objectively looking at these stories?! ;)

The Kindaichi Case Files: The Good, The Bad and The Average

"If I plagiarize, it's only because I like someone else's idea better than mine and I want credit for it."

- Anna Chin-Williams

If you would press me to pick my least favorite mystery writer, I would probably blurt out the name of Kanari Yozaburo – who possesses all the originality of a copying machine and imperiously passes swiped plots off as his own stuff. But what's really unforgivable is his failure rate at utilizing these stolen goods to produce at least a half descent story, even if we've seen parts of it before. Instead, he clings desperately to a rigid, hackneyed formula constructed around the avenger-from-the-past theme, closed circle of suspects, cut-off locations and cribbing plot ideas, mostly locked room scenarios, to fluff it all up.

But what I really hate, more than anything else, are Kindaichi's little emo-speeches to the murderers, after he caught them.

The murderer: They were responsible for the death of my kid brother; they deserved to die!

Kindaichi: But your brother wouldn't have wanted you to hurt them... he would've wanted you... to be HAPPY!

The murderer: OMG!1!! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!11! * breaks down sobbing and moaning *

Even though I can't manage to muster up any excitement or enthusiasm for this series, given up on that a long time ago, I will put all my personal disdain aside and briefly, but objectively, discuss three titles that I tagged as good, bad and average to give the readers of this blog a general idea of what to expect when they decide to pick up a volume.

A Short Introduction:

The protagonist of The Kindaichi Case Files is the high school student Hajime Kindaichi, who's the supposed grandson of the famous Kousuke Kindaichi, and, despite an I.Q. of 180, he's a lazy underachiever at school with a knack for attracting corpses wherever he goes – especially when he's taking a field trip or is on holiday with friends from his school.

The Good: House of Wax

I don't know who was being ripped off and repackaged in this volume, but his or her sense for clueing and creating locked rooms is on par with John Dickson Carr and Christianna Brand – and even that second-rate hack wasn't able to dilute the brilliance of the original ideas with his tired old formula and mediocre writing.

The set-up of the story is riddled with tired old clichés and reinforces the flawed image most people have of a classic detective story: Kindaichi and Miyuki are invited by Superintendent Akechi to be his tag-along guests at the House of Wax, a castle transplanted from Germany, where its owner will be throwing a murder party for people who have made a name in the world of crime. There are professional and amateur detectives (including the nephew of Lt. Columbo!), mystery writers, crime reporters and even a pathologist. Upon their arrival they discover the place is filled with lifelike wax dolls, including replicas of the participants, dressed up in fancy medieval costumes, and their mysterious host is only present as a disembodied voice bellowing through the ancient hallways of the castle.

The game's afoot and the guests have to solve the stabbing of one of the wax dolls, but this proved to be an eerie precursor for an actual and identical murder, this time under impossible circumstances, and what follows is an exceptional well-plotted detective story – in which the characters play around with assumptions and have to correctly interpret a galore of double edged clues (e.g. medieval costumes, wax dolls and the flickering of candle light). 

This is one of perhaps only two or three volumes really worth the effort of tracking and hunting down. 

The Bad: The Tokyo Zodiac Murders The Mummy's Curse

 

This is one of the most shameless acts of plagiarism in the series, in which Kanari Yozaburo audaciously lifts the best bits and pieces from Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) and brings nothing to the table himself.

The story follows Kindaichi and Miyuki to a small, hexagram-shaped village were they plan to attend the wedding of a friend. The strange village is littered with themed mansions, and all of them harbor the mutilated remains of a mummified corpse – hinting at a dark secret buried deeply in the faraway past. But whatever was buried starts clawing its way to the surface and shortly after their arrival an impossible murder is committed, inside a locked chapel, and the aristocratic owners of the mansions start dropping like flies.

Yes, I know what you're probably thinking, but don't make the mistake of saying to yourself, "Well, that doesn't sound all that bad." The shaped village, the cutesy themed mansions and the gore fest only serve to distract your attention away from the fact that you're reading a poorly altered and abridged version of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. That's all the story has to offer, the main trick and a rejected solution from that book – everything else is just eye candy or filler.

The Average: Smoke and Mirrors 

Surprisingly, this story broke with the apparently adamant formula and consequently wangled an unexpected solution, but only because, as a regular reader, you were expecting the same old, same old. Still, it's one of the more readable entries into the series.

This time Kindaichi and Miyuki enroll into the school's mystery club, who are in the process of investigating the origin of a bunch of urban legends attached to their school and a possible connection to a shady figure calling himself The After-School Magician – whose been sending warning letters to the school not to tear down his old abode on the campus grounds. But his pleas fall on deaf ears and he decides to force his point home by scattering the school grounds with a few bodies, and he's not too shy to make an appearance in front of live crowd, including Kindaichi, and hang one of their friends in full view of them – only to disappear, together with his victim, from a locked and watched classroom moments later.

You don't have to overtax your brain too much to figure out how the murderer created the locked room illusion, but his identity comes as a genuine surprise if you were expecting the face of the usual Kindaichi killer underneath the magician's mask – and I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

However, much of the praise must be heaped on the translator, who was faced with the problem of an untranslatable dying message and simply, but effectively, cooked up a new one that fitted in with the story and artwork.

I hope that publishers, who may or may not be reading this blog and might be contemplating to publish foreign detective stories, will take notice of that and get themselves a translator who's up on his mystery stuff – like my friend Ho-Ling (whose excellent blog is simply one of the best of the online mystery community, loaded with interesting and enticing reviews, and a connecting link between the detective stories of the West and the East. Oh, and drop him a line asking when the review of The Frightened Stiff will be up. ;))  

Hey, let's end this negative tainted review on a positive note with a few more plugs: At the Scene of the Crime (from a very prolific blogger... seriously, give us a break to catch our breath), Pretty Sinister Books (read this... or else!), Only Detect (great blog), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel (aren't we all?), Classic Mysteries (weekly podcasts of classic whodunits currently in print) and Tipping my Fedora (glad to know there are still classy people with taste).