(*Note, although this is the thirteenth in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)
Detective Conan is a wildly imaginative series at it’s heights, but it’s also a huge franchise. Like I mentioned way back in On Some of the Best Mysteries Ever Written and the Puzzle of Why You’re Not Reading Them, this massive multimedia monster has over 700 distinct mysteries in just it’s manga and anime series alone (this not counting novels, video games, movies, and more). Statistically, many of them have to be good, many of them have to be bad, and many will be… so-so! And you will be getting a lot of so-so back-to-back with a series this massive, it’s just the way of things.
Volume 12 was fine, with two… pretty decent stories and one bad one, and it’s easy to get disheartened when volumes 6 to 11 had so many back-to-back masterstrokes of mystery plotting just for Detective Conan to seemingly take a turn back towards the mediocrity we criticized the early entries for. I’m staying optimistic though! We’re only 10% of the way through the series, there’s no way we’ve seen all of the good Detective Conan has to offer.
In Casebook 34 – The Triplets Murder Case (Chapters 2-4), Rachel and Conan are spending the day at Serena’s sister Ayako’s home to meet Ayako’s soon-to-be father-in-law. But after a night of a sports game, petty squabbling, and drama, the Moores and the girls get ready to turn in and sleep when they look out of the window and spot Ayako’s fiance Yuzo Tomizawa, wearing a beanie to cover his hair, murdering his father with a rock! They immediately go to the police, but while they’re trying to report what they witnessed… two young men who look exactly like Yuzo appear, revealing that what the group really saw was one of identical triplets committing the murder..!
It’s a three-suspect-alibi-check, and it’s hard to do these poorly. The clues and reasoning pointing to the killer are always at least fine, and there are some decent hints here and there in this story. I appreciate that modern technology is being utilized in these plots, though the trick in this story is the most boring, cheap, and straight-forward way to do it. The framing of the three suspects as triplets doesn’t really contribute much of anything. Not exceptionally bad, not exceptionally good. Just… generally not at all exceptional.
Kenjin Hanaoka is a respected painter who has, in fact, been passing off the works of his apprentice Izumi Chono as his own. Blackmailing him with this information, Izumi has pressured Kenjin into a romantic relationship with her and to support her unconditionally. One day, though, Kenjin finally ends up bludgeoning his young apprentice to death… But now he needs an alibi!
Kenjin quickly runs over to his own office, where Richard Moore and Conan are waiting. He proceeds to “receive a call” from Chono, whereupon he urges her not to jump and to calm down! And at the end of this conversation, the entire group sees Chono falling from her balcony, many blocks away from the office, having apparently committed suicide..!
The police are quick to rule this a suicide, as there was nobody else in the apartment or on the balcony when she fell and there’s no evidence of any kind of trick at place, but Conan quickly spots an odd detail on the corpse that immediately tells him that this was a murder! He suspects, Kenjin, but needs to figure out how he orchestrated her fall from miles away..! How can Conan bring guilt home to the killer in Casebook 35 – The Artist’s Apprentice Murder Case (Chapters 5-7)?
This is the third proper inverted mystery Detective Conan has dealt with, after two fantastic outings in The Tenkaichi Fire Festival Murder Case (Volume 6-7, Chapters 9-1) and The TV Studio Murder Case (Volume 11, Chapters 2-4), and unfortunately this is the first slip-up for this particular series of Conan cases.
As an inverted mystery, it’s perfectly good and functional. All of the clues that lead to the killer’s ultimate demise and the trap inadvertently set-up from the very beginning of the story are good and clever. The actual inverted mystery element of the story works very well!
Where this story sadly trips up is that, like the previous two inverted mysteries in the franchise, it’s also a howdunit, because we don’t how the killer performed the trick to give themselves an airtight alibi, making their guilt appear impossible… The alibi trick in this one is particularly bad, just turning on a mechanism simultaneously convoluted and uninspired. It’s such a sour note that it genuinely does spoil the rest of what was otherwise another pretty good inverted mystery outing for Detective Conan. By all means, read this for the inverted mystery if you can put up with the frankly awful howdunit element.
Casebook 36 – The Gomera Murder Case (8-10) has the Junior Detective League attending a tour at a filming studio for the Gomera franchise of kaiju (giant monster) movies. Conan is frustrated with his young friends’ inability to distinguish reality from fiction as they continue to assume that Gomera is a real monster who stars in all of these movies. So, naturally, the kids are horrified when it seems like their hero and idol, the real-life Gomera, appears to commit a murder right in front of them, stabbing a producer in the chest! Gomera proceeds to kick over a paint can, lumbering off down the hallway and leaving a trail of footprints behind him as he goes. As the kids chase Gomera, they follow his footprints to the roof of the studio… where he appears to have impossibly vanished! Looking over the side of the roof, they see the Gomera costume lit on fire, but the culprit was obviously nowhere nearby, even though it’d be impossible for him to have vanished without being seen!
I really like this one. No, the impossible crime isn’t really all that ingenious, and it’s fairly easy to solve, but this story is just super fun. I love the setting, and the way the murder is framed in such a way it looks like a scene from a kaiju film like Godzilla! The Junior Detective League is actually pretty charming in this setting, too, since their naivete contributes to the story in an extremely natural way. The impossible crime isn’t too terribly bad, either, even if a little obvious. Just a good, fun story with a lot of charm and personality. A guilty pleasure of mine.
An uneven volume on all accounts, but it really did round out with an incredibly pleasant impossible crime at a movie studio. This volume is on average still better than early Conan — ten volumes ago, a story like Gomera would’ve been seen as a masterpiece! No, this isn’t a volume I’d recommend you go out and read unless you’re a signed-on Detective Conan fan and want to read all of the gimmick stories (impossible crimes, inverted mysteries, etc…), but it isn’t bad at all and ends on a positive note that bodes well for the remainder of the franchise’s run.
(*Note, although this is the twelfth in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)
Volume 11 may have a weak plot-chapter in the middle of it, but that doesn’t detract from the utter brilliance of the two stories sandwiching it on either side. First, a very fun inverted mystery set on a detective-themed reality talk show, and finally a brilliantly technical Soji Shimada-esque impossible hanging in a temple. It’s easy to see that Detective Conan has come a long way from its modest beginnings, back when I had to give moderated praise just to avoid a long series of back-to-back negative reviews. There have been many stories I think people should go out of their way to read, even if they have no interest in Detective Conan as a franchise… The Moonlight Sonata Murder Case (Casebook #18 Volume 7 Chapters 2-7) in particular is a classic feature-length mystery story with a brilliantly simple alibi trick that beautifully plays on the fact the story is a serial killing. Many of the shorts are also very clever short-form mysteries that I think anyone could do worse than to go out of their way to read.
If there’s ever a mediocre volume, it’s not at all representative of the overall quality of the series at this point, and it’s just a minor roadbump in a usually brilliant adventure…
Screenshot from the manga series provided by Detective Conan World wiki
Casebook 31 – Moon, Star, Sun Code Case (Chapters 1-3) has Dr. Agasa humoring the Junior Detective League by setting up a fake scavenger hunt with them, with fake clues and everything… But when they get to the house where this is set up, a more sinister scene awaits them, with the house having clearly been occupied since before Dr. Agasa came to set up his scavenger hunt… Conan realizes that something must be hiding in the house, with carvings of the moon, star, and sun scattered throughout the house clearly indicating a code…
This is a Junior Detective League Code-Cracking story. No, it’s not very good, though I think it’s the most tolerable. The clue is a simple cipher and it, strictly speaking, makes an attempt at playing fair with the reader (I know enough Japanese to understand the cipher and feel stupid for not figuring it out, at least). Still, it’s… a Junior Detective League story, and a code-cracking story. It’s the least bad of a pretty rotten bunch.
In Casebook 32 – Mantendo Bombing Murder Case (Chapters 4-6), Richard Moore visits a video game exhibition to play the new mystery game inspired by the famous exploits of this real-world Superdetective, but the festivities are interrupted when Conan sees a member from The Organization at the hotel. Upon chasing him down to the bathroom and attempting to eavesdrop, Conan is nearly killed by a bomb which does unfortunately kill the Organization member…
Screenshot from the manga series provided by Detective Conan World wiki
I was surprised by how much this story conducted itself like a traditional whodunit once Conan determined that the bombing was targeted, rather than indiscriminate. There are some decent clues, some obvious clues, but all-told it’s still a pretty classical tale of ratiocination in spite of the very gritty, modern murder method.
The story does lay down a lot of obvious clues, which will correctly lead you to a half-complete resolution, but fortunately the solution is just a step more complicated and has one pretty neat hint. Nothing here stands out as particularly brilliant — it’s just a pretty solid outing for the franchise. Not bad, but also not worth seeking out with the express intent of reading this story especially.
One hugely disappointing element to this story is that the game exhibition setting was wasted. It’s a very unique, exclusively modern setting, and to see a mystery centered entirely around video games would’ve been interesting. The murder ultimately could’ve happened at any hotel under any pretense and it probably would’ve functioned exactly as well with no major alterations. Alas…
Screenshot from the manga series provided by Detective Conan World wiki
Casebook 33 – Holmes Enthusiasts Murder Case (Chapters Chapters 7-10, Volume 13 Chapter 1) takes place at a meeting of Arthur Conan Doyle enthusiasts, during which participants are made to take a 1000-question quiz on the author’s famous detective Sherlock Holmes, with the grand prize being a first edition of A Study in Scarlet, the debut of Holmes! But during the meeting, the coordinator appears to commit suicide by driving off a cliff…
This one is another decent one. There’s two murders, and both have some minorly clever elements. The first relies on a biological trick, which I don’t particularly care for, and the second is a pretty neat way of inducing death. The “special setting” here is… somewhat utilized, I suppose, though mostly just to create a Macguffin, which is essential for establishing a potential motive as well as the second murder method. There are a lot of “essential questions” that are explained away with chance, and aren’t very interesting.
There’s enough good here, but it’s just decent. Another one that’s not worth seeking out, but decent enough if you’re hell-bent on reading every Conan story and reviewing them on your blog like some sort of weirdo.
Volume 12 was… not great at all. One very bad story, two decent stories… No, it isn’t bad, and it’s still better than the average quality we were getting early in the series, but this still isn’t a volume to seek out. Just another bookshelf filler for series collectors, and definitely disappointing after the recent masterpieces we’ve been seeing.
The ranking has changed, with Poisoned Bride Attempted Murder being raised quite a few ranks.
I’ve never liked making “top favorite” lists in genres where I am so painfully aware of how little I’ve experienced in contrast to how much of it still exists waiting for me. Making a list of my favorite impossible crime novels specifically felt impossible because I’m just so, so, so aware of how many likely very good locked-room mysteries are sitting in my to-be-read pile right now. It’s worse, in fact, since I’ve started studying Japanese and have become more aware of a whole new world of obviously brilliant mystery novels. My personal horizon is so narrow, but the potential is so broad and it makes me feel like any list I make will come off as pedestrian. That’s why I’ve labeled this “revision 0”; I’m confident that by this time in 2023 the list will look immensely different. Maybe 33% of the entire list will be traded out by that time, I’m sure, and there will be at least one revision
This list is media non-specific. Television, movies, video games, comics may all apply. This is also why I’ve also settled on 15, rather than 10, because in the making of this list I realized that it was hyper-dominated by locked-room mysteries from Japanese novels and non-novel media, and I wanted to make some room for good, accessible, western media too. I’ll also only include one full entry from an author, including honorable mentions if necessary. Having qualified my list and the title of the post, my top 15 favorite impossible crimes, in no particular order, are…
Anyone who has ever spoken to me will not be surprised by this being my immediate first inclusion on a list of favorite impossible crimes. Not only is Death of Jezebel my favorite Christianna Brand novel, not only is it my favorite impossible crime novel, it’s simply my favorite Golden Age mystery novel ever written. Christianna Brand is in top-form at demonstrating her ability to build up entire false narratives and hoodwink you into them, to bait the audience into believing things without ever really saying or doing anything. A masterclass in misdirection, the murder of a woman in a locked-and-guarded tower during a play also features multiple grand mechanical and technical tricks that are clever, novel, and macabre. One of four Brand masterpieces that I think even people with no interest in impossible crimes should give a chance.
The Moai Island Puzzle – Arisu Arisugawa (1989), trans. Ho-Ling Wong (2016)
The impossible shooting that occurs in this novel is a very strong alibi trick, but as good as it is this element of the story is only a small part of what makes The Moai Island Puzzle so strong a contender for fans of mysteries-as-a-puzzle. Puzzles buried within ciphers wrapped within riddles and tied-up with lateral thinking problems are the name of the game with this novel that celebrates puzzles as almost like an artform. A brilliantly intriguing and cerebral mystery novel.
Whistle Up the Devil – Derek Smith (1953)
Cringe-inducing romance and overly-convoluted climax aside, this is a homerun of an impossible crime novel. The principle murder of a man conducting a ceremony within a supposedly haunted room is just a good offering, with a complex arrangement of what still amounts to a quick series of little tricks we’ve all seen before, obvious bits and pieces and sleights of hand, but nonetheless enjoyably convoluted. What elevates this novel from good to fantastic is the knee-slapping devious and blastedly simple alibi trick employed in the secondary murder in a police station that nobody ever walked into or out of, aside from two men who were in each other’s view for every point of time that mattered. This short story-length masterpiece hiding in an otherwise just-above-average impossible crime makes this well-worth reading.
Here I want to give a quick honorable mention to Derek Smith’s other novel, Come to Paddington Fair, which if you were to ask me probably has a more brilliantly-plotted and conceived central murder, and a much more unique trick. I neglect to mention it as a proper entry on the list, because I felt like when you realized that coincidence doesn’t exist in a deliberately-plotted world the beginning of the story spoils the resolution in such a way that it makes much of the ensuing investigation feel redundant. Come to Paddington Fair is a fantastic idea, but unfortunately relies so majorly on an early Christie-esque dodge that, if you’re not hoodwinked by it, ends up toppling the whole story and every misdirection that comes after it. I noticed the initial dodge immediately, and pieced together the rest of the plot before the story had even hit its stride, and that did dock a few points for me. I still heavily recommend it, because while I feel like it spoils itself by being too clever by half, I think I’d always prefer a too-clever-for-itself story to its dull counterpart any day — it’s novel, unique, and a very intelligently plotted crime novel with a very innovative take on how to establish an impossible crime.
Murder in the Crooked House – Sōji Shimada (1982), trans. Louise Heal Kawai (2019)
Sōji Shimada is the Japanese locked-room murder, well known for his output of well over 50 novels featuring locked-rooms and other various impossible murders. His other major impossible crime offering, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which is also available in English is much more well-known and equally deserving of praise for its brilliance and grandiosity of mechanical scale, but I just adore Murder in the Crooked House. Sōji Shimada, I feel, is an author you’ll either adore or hate. His settings and solutions are brilliant and original, but also stretch credulity and highlight above anything else the puzzle. As a sheer lateral thinking exercise, Murder in the Crooked House contains one of the best impossible crimes in any novel ever, even if I can’t confidently say it’s one of the best novels containing an impossible crime. It is wholly original, complex, intricately-plotted, and taut, and a fantastic puzzle from end to end with a fantastic method for committing murder in a triple-locked room that more than makes up for its obvious culprit.
Time to Kill – Roger Ormerod (1974)
Roger Ormerod is an author who wrote well after the Golden Age had ended. Despite this, his novels had all of the fairly-clued plotting and cerebral misdirection and alibi tricks as a novel from the 1930s, blended with the aesthetic of a gritty contemporary PI novel. His debut novel is an impossible alibi problem — from the moment the murder is committed, we know who the killer is, but there’s one problem: the killer has an airtight alibi provided by the narrator himself and we have no idea how he committed this murder under such impossible-for-him circumstances. I used to think that there were only three basic explanations for the impossible alibi, but Time to Kill offers a fourth possibility that to this day is still my favorite explanation for this particular problem. It perfectly sets up Ormerod’s thorough and educated understanding of Golden Age-styled alibi trickery almost in the style of Christopher Bush — a lost disciple of the puzzle mystery that more people should be seeking out.
Till Death Do Us Part – John Dickson Carr (1944)
Despite being a self-styled disciple of the impossible crime problem, I’m actually incredibly ashamed to admit that my reading into John Dickson Carr’s oeuvre is very limited! My first review on this blog was me airing out how little I enjoyed The Case of the Constant Suicides. Aside from that, I’ve only read a small handful of specially-recommended Carrs, only around 10 I think. I’ve been so caught-up in reading other impossible crime novels that I’ve neglected to honor the master himself! Let this be a wake-up call to me to get back to Carr…
Till Death Do Us Part is absolutely the most brilliant locked-room conceived by Carr that I’ve read. Preceded by expectation, nobody needs to know what I have to say about this book. It’s damnably simple and clever, the puzzle is brilliantly conceived, the cluing clever and well-done.
Jonathan Creek (Season 1 Episode 2) “Jack in the Box” – David Renwick (1997)
Jonathan Creek is a late 90’s-early 2000s BBC drama featuring the titular magician’s assistant who uses his knowledge of stage illusions to solve locked-room murders and impossible crimes. I think the series is incredibly hit-or-miss, containing both some of my favorite and least favorite locked-room mysteries ever conceived, and it might be a little worrying that in Jonathan Creek‘s 17 year run I think the show peaked in its second episode ever…
There are more than a small handful of fantastic impossible crimes in this series, actually. The Christmas special “Black Canary”, the first episode of season two “Danse Macabre” are both also great, but “Jack in the Box” really perfected the formula right out of the gate with a satisfying and original explanation to the shooting of a man in a locked-and-sealed bunker that entirely inverts the very premise of a locked-room murder as a question of how the killer escaped from the room.
The Great Ace Attorney 2: The Resolve of Ryūnosuke Naruhodō (Case 3) “The Return of the Great Departed Soul” – Shū Takumi (2017)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a Japanese mystery video game series, one game of which I’ve reviewed on this blog. In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and all of its subsequent spinoff titles, the player takes on the role of a lawyer tasked with proving the innocence of clients falsely accused of murder. Using a point-and-click interface, the player investigates crime scenes, interviews wacky witnesses and suspects, and collects evidence. The next day, the player goes to court and is tasked with cross-examining witnesses who are either grossly mistaken about what they saw or hell-bent on seeing your client behind bars and deliberately lying. Through a series of simple question prompts, the player finds lies in testimony statements, presents evidence to expose the lies, and then is loosely-guided on a series of Ellery Queen-esque sequences of deductions and logic where the player explains why the lie was told or the mistake was made and then what the truth of the situation is. By the end of every case, the real killer is discovered and your client is saved from wrongful imprisonment!
In the spinoff series The Great Ace Attorney the format is shaken up by placing the player in the role of Phoenix Wright’s ancestor Ryūnosuke Naruhodō, a Japanese lawyer who teams up with the Great Detective Herlock Sholmes in Victorian London. The third case of the second game of this particular series is a very unique take on the impossible crime problem, inspiring one of my 15 categories of impossible crimes — the impossible technology problem!
Your client is a scientist who was presenting an instantaneous kinesis machine, a piece of technology that is capable of molecularly dissembling any human subject and then reassembling them somewhere else, allowing them to teleport from one location to another in the blink of an eye! Unfortunately, during the presentation, his assistant and test subject was teleported to the wrong location. While he was meant to be transported to the INSIDE of a nearby glass tower, the test subject was instead manifested a few dozen feet in the air above the tower, whereupon he fell through the walls of the tower. The police were summoned only to find the man stabbed to death by a screwdriver through the heart. Since the tower was totally inaccessible to anyone until the police arrived, it’s determined that the only person who could’ve committed this murder is your client, who must’ve stabbed the victim before teleporting him away. In order to prove your client’s innocence, you need to prove how the teleportation could’ve been faked! But how else can you explain a man moving hundreds of feet into the air in less than a second…
The solution to the teleportation isn’t at all difficult to figure out, but there’s a second and third puzzle hiding in the background of this case that makes it brilliant. The true explanation for the murder when you get past the impossible problem is genuinely shocking, and there are quite a few plot threads that connect this murder to an ages-old serial killing that the rest of the game’s narrative is concerned with. A brilliantly innovative presentation of impossible crimes, the method of connecting this subplot to the overarching narrative of the game is a masterstroke of writing, and a somewhat obvious impossible solution doesn’t stop the mystery from offering up some genuine surprises. One of the best cases from a very, very good mystery series.
Death Among the Undead – Masahiro Imamura (2017) trans. Ho-Ling Wong (2021)
One of the most defining features of the shin-honkaku movement that I feel like westerners don’t see from just the translations we get from Vertigo Pushkin and Locked Room International is the amount of authors who love to experiment with form, style, and genre without betraying the underlying and ever-present element of a complex, cerebral puzzle. Hybrid mysteries, the sort we get from Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi mysteries like The Cave of Steel, are even more present in modern Japanese mystery writing than they ever were over here! There are authentically Golden Age-styled mysteries written to take place within the confines of a world that operates under the rules of a fantasy roleplaying video game, or mysteries set within fantasy worlds. There’s a short story collection about a group of murderers who share stories of their exploits over an internet board and every story is a different member of the board. And then there’s Masahiro Imamura’s breakout hybrid mystery, Death Among the Undead, which combines the locked-room mystery with a zombie apocalypse!
Death Among the Undead is a brilliant piece of work with three absolutely stunning impossible crimes that all three offer up entirely novel and unique explanations to the problem of murders committed in locked-rooms either provided by or enhanced by the presence of a horde of brain-eating undead! This novel is an absolute jaw-dropper of plotting genius that can confidently stand with its head held high among any classic of the genre. It is no less a classic, puzzle-driven impossible crime story for the presence of zombies — in fact, I’d say it’s even more so, as the rigid rules that the zombies abide by offer an extra layer of complexity and reasoning. Simply fantastic.
Death in the House of Rain – Szu-Yen Lin (2006) trans. (2017)
Death in the House of Rain is a dangerous impossible crime novel, because its an idea that I feel like could’ve easily failed. It doesn’t succeed on the strength of its core idea alone, but on the framing of its idea through the personification of fate and fortune as almost its own character, which arguably is the true killer, above anyone else who might’ve committed murder in the story. The solutions to the three first disparate locked-room murders are all connected by a single thread that is very devious and devilishly simple, brimming with an original idea whose reliance on coincidence could’ve easily failed if not for the underlying theme of fortune. It’s, in fact, an idea I proposed in my List of 50 Locked-Room Solutions which people often privately criticized me for because no impossible crime existed which could claim to use the solution, so I’ll admit I’m a little biased from reading this book and getting that feeling of aha! I told you!.
A fourth impossible crime brilliantly rises from the resolution of the previous three as a connecting thread, and it’s just as good as you could hope. This novel is fantastic, but easily could’ve not been.
The Kindaichi Case Files Shin (Case 3) “The Prison Prep School Murder Case” – Seimaru Amagi (2006)
I actually know very little about the Kindaichi Case Files franchise or its sister series Detective School Q, having only organically read one or two mysteries from each of them. They weren’t bad at all, mind you! Honorable mention to Detective School Q‘s first proper murder mystery for being blindingly brilliant, actually! However, I was directed to this particular case by TomCat’s blog post on this very same topic, and reading it honestly reawoke my interest in the two franchises! This is ingenuity distilled into its purest form, plain and simple, with a grand, brilliant, and complex impossible alibi trick at the heart of it.
Both Kindaichi Case Files and Detective School Q are classic examples of the locked-room mystery puzzle plot in the realms of anime/manga series, and having read one of the best impossible crime stories of all time by sheer chance in these series I can easily recommend anyone and everyone to seek this series out and read it if they have even a tiny interest in locked-room mysteries. John Dickson Carr would be proud of these two detective series. I read this case in Japanese in the manga, but the anime adaptation is available in English for anyone curious!
Case Closed/Detective Conan(Anime-original, Episodes 603-605) The Séance’s Double Locked Room Mystery Case – Chiko Uonji
Detective Conan, as I’ve mentioned on my post about the franchise, contains many classics of basically any form of Golden Age-styled plotting you can think of. Alibi problems, locked-room mysteries, inverted mysteries, Detective Conan could probably make a top 10 list of any of them. Between both the manga and the anime, Detective Conan has produced more than its fair share of strong impossible crimes, many of which could end up on a list like this. For anime-originals, honorable mention to The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly, which I think is more inventive and innovative, but The Séance’s Double Locked Room Mystery Case narrowly won out for its intricate intertwining of two impossible crimes. A brilliant set of two locked-rooms that rely on each other for their solutions makes this case a stand-out for its uniqueness of plotting, and the solutions are nothing to sneeze at either, but trust me when I say there are probably at least seven other Detective Conan impossible crimes equally worth mentioning at some point or another…
“The Lure of the Green Door” by Rintarō Norizuki (1991) trans. Ho-Ling Wong (2014)
The standout story from international tour of impossible crimes, The Realm of the Impossible, “The Lure of the Green Door” is a locked-room mystery inspired by the premise of an old science fiction parable by English author H. G. Wells in which a man enters a green door to another world. In “The Lure of the Green Door”, a man is murdered in his locked-and-sealed study with a green door that isn’t locked but mysteriously cannot be opened… The solution is a physical trick that plays on an old concept, but it’s a startling unique take on the concept that I’m proud to have solved ahead of time. The scale of the solution is also great without detracting from the elegance of the trick! A masterpiece of the short-form locked-room mystery.
“The Clown in the Tunnel” by Tetsuya Ayukawa (1958) trans. Ho-Ling Wong (2020)
A clown commits a murder, is seen running into a tunnel, and then vanishes before he can appear from the other side!
Tetsuya Ayukawa is a Japanese author famous for crossing wires between impossible crimes and alibi problems. As the introduction to the The Red Locked-Room collection notes, Ayukawa often uses alibi tricks to establish impossible crimes, and locked-room tricks to establish alibis. This gimmick very often lends itself to old tricks being applied in unique, novel, and stunning ways, and “The Clown in the Tunnel” is the best example of this! An absolute stunning example of how an alibi trick can lend itself to an impossible disappearance, and one of the best stories from a very good collection.
“The Ginza Ghost” – Ōsaka Keikichi (1936) trans. Ho-Ling Wong (2017)
The Ginza Ghost is a fantastic collection of impossible crimes from early Japanese crime writer Ōsaka Keikichi. Despite it existing in the early eras of the honkaku school of plotting, this collection shows off an author who demonstrates marked ingenuity and genius, with ideas that are still novel nearly 90 years in the future. The best story in the collection is easily the title story, “The Ginza Ghost”, which features a murder inside of a locked tobacco shop where a woman appears to have killed another and then herself — however, mysteriously, the murderer appears to have died significantly before her victim, suggesting the presence of a ghost who committed the crime… Ordinarily, I don’t enjoy impossible crimes that rely so centrally on an accident for the illusion to function — I’m a sucker for cartoonishly intelligent criminal geniuses — but the accident in this case is so elegant, simple, and brilliantly unique that it’s impossible not to love it.
And there you have it, my 15 favorite locked-room mysteries, which is 66.6% Japanese, quite a few of which aren’t even from novels. I’m sure Ho-Ling doesn’t mind the free publicity. I don’t mind to seem biased, but there are just so many strong and ingeniously plotted mysteries in the Japanese honkaku and shin-honkaku schools of mystery writing… This list will definitely not last long, but I enjoyed making it.
(*Note, although this is the eleventh in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)
Volume 10 of Detective Conan wasn’t the best of the volumes we had so far, but a far shot from the average quality we were getting earlier on in the series. While its third story was hurt significantly by a Japanese-centric clue, it was still absolutely ingenious. It also had the best Junior Detective League story so far in it, as well as a pretty decent locked-room mystery. Volume 11 comes with a good recommendation from Mr. Sands of Time himself, TomCat, boasting what he considers one of his favorite locked-room mysteries in the entire franchise…
Richard Moore is invited to a detective-themed talkshow, on which he’s asked to give a dissertation to the people on the work he does in solving murders. He gives a talk about the security features of cellular phones, and the show cuts to a murder mystery skit that the live studio audience has a chance to figure out themselves… During this skit the host of the show, Takashi Matsuo, calls his producer Michihiko Suwa and threatens to jump off of the roof. Suwa opens the window to the conference room in which he’s waiting to tell him to stop, and is immediately shot.
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
After the show, Suwa’s body is found inside of the conference room. Conan immediately suspects the host Matsuo, but there’s one problem: in order to get from the stage to the conference room would take nearly three times as long as the time Matsuo was offered, offering him an airtight alibi. Nonetheless, Conan doggedly sticks to his lead, and attempts to prove Matsuo’s guilt in Casebook 28 – The TV Station Murder Case (Chapters 2-4).
The TV Station Murder Case is another hum-dinger of an inverted mystery. Very similarly to the last inverted mystery, The Tenkaichi Fire Festival Murder Case (Casebook 17, Volumes 6-7 Chapters 9-1), this mystery has an element of howdunit. We do know who the killer is, and we do know roughly what their plan is, as we see it conducted from their perspective; however, we do not know how Matsuo managed to get from the stage to the conference room to commit the murder in the time allotted to him. The explanation is perhaps a little less inspired than in Tenkaichi, and is very unreliable in how it turns on the victim performing a very specific action in a very specific way, but it’s nonetheless fun and doesn’t detract from the overall experience in any meaningful way.
The way the killer is caught, like in the previous inverted mystery, is clever, but this story really shines in its denouement — Conan’s deductions are aired to the world as part of the mystery-themed talkshow, and he’s cheered on by the show’s massive audience as he corners the killer. It’s an unbelievably fun denouement that wraps up an unbelievably fun story.
Casebook 29 – The Coffee Shop Murder Case (Chapters 5-7) has Conan with Ran at a coffee shop, waiting for an unknown person, but when a woman is found murdered in a locked stall in the restroom, Conan is able to reduce the suspect list to three people…
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
I think this one is silly and just not very good. It’s a locked-ish room in presentation, since the mystery is “how could someone climb through the opening without getting covered in the victim’s blood”, but I think the trick used here, on top of not being very compelling, is just unreasonable and unnecessary in getting the desired effect. Maybe if I re-read this in the future I’d like it more, but I do not enjoy this mystery much at all as it stands. It’s just a killer
Conan gets helped by a lawyer who turns out to be Rachel’s mother, making it a plot-relevant story, unfortunately, so if you’re deep in the overarching Case Closed lore, then you’ll have to give this story a read.
Casebook 30 – The Tengu Murder Case (Chapters 8-10) has Conan and the Moores’ car breakdown outside of an old shrine where they’re taken in by monks. While there, they learn about a years-old murder that took place in that temple. A murder committed by a beast of Japanese legend, a Tengu… But upon probing into it, the Moores anger the head-monk, who tells them they will have to be on their way the very next day.
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
Unfortunately, that night, the head monk is found killed in a way that resembles the old case… Strung up impossibly inside of a room dozens of feet high, fatally hanging from the ceiling beams. When it’s further proven that it’s nearly impossible for a human being to carry a body over those beams to hang him, it’s ruled that the death must be a suicide. But Conan is not convinced, and gets to work proving how the head monk could’ve been murdered!
Complaints that this was never proven to be an “impossible” crime and is more of a “wildly improbable” crime aside, this is an absolute whammy of an impossible crime! The eventual solution is one of those unreasonably high-scale mechanical solutions of the type you’d associate with Soji Shimada’s mysteries like The Murders in the Crooked House, and it is very inspired, if not a bit on the absurd side as well. I agree with TomCat’s prognosis that this story would only be tolerable in the form of a comicbook and would be a little hard to swallow as a novel written in the 19xx’s. Nonetheless, it was very satisfying, novel, and well-done, and easily one of the best stories in the series so far. It’s the first impossible crime in Detective Conan that I really feel strongly about.
Volume 11 has one of the worst stories we’ve seen so far, but it’s sandwiched between two of the absolute best. Since both fantastic stories start and conclude in this volume as well, I can easily recommend interested peoples find a copy for their bookshelves if they’re in the mood for a fantastic impossible crime and a fantastic inverted mystery. A fantastic volume and an easy recommendation.
There’s been no end to the ingenuity of the impossible crime genre. When you see murders committed inside of perfectly sealed rooms, and stabbings in virgin snow where the killers leave no footprints, you’re only taking the daintiest of baby-steps down the iceberg of magic murders. Take a few steps further and you’ll find yourself barreling into the realms of animated murderous snowmen, disappearing hotel rooms, witchery, teleportation, telekinesis, premonitory dreams, apparitions, flying men, transmogrification, impossible golf shots, men dying from falls when there’s no elevated surfaces for miles, time travel, people running through solid brick walls, and even the apparently magical disintegration of a man in front of witnesses. All of which, mind you, must be explained through perfectly human means without reliance on far-fetched science-fiction technology or preternatural agency — or, if sci-fi tech and ghostly happenings are commonplace in your world, their rules must still be adhered (and are usually exploited to establish the impossibility…). A whole world of man-made miraculous murders that would have the skeptics of our world taken aback! When you imagine the impossible crime problem, you imagine a scenario which absolutely cannot be taken at face value, and which the characters in the story have to battle with the reality of, whether it’s through disproving the supernatural or an ostensible suicide. There’s an impossible crime tale for damn near every insane scenario under the sun a person could think of.
The impossible crime tale seems to be a favorite of people looking to create taxonomies. From solutions to situations, the impossible crime sub-genre more than any other seems to invite people to create lists trying to chronicle every little manner of plot, style, and form that exists. You might argue that this is a testament to the sheer formulaicity of the impossible crime story, or a testament to the magnetism of its versatility…
Just like I’ve done before in attempting to produce a list of 50 solutions to the 3 principle impossible crime genres, I will here be attempting to produce a list of all every conceivable manner of impossible crime situation — within reason. I will only be adding to this list if I feel like the entry is all of (a.) something that meaningfully alters the presentation of the impossible crime, (b.) something that meaningfully alters the potential explanations to the crime, and (c.) categorically non-specific so to be applicable to a suitable variety of stories. This is primarily because the minutiae distinguishing two locked-room mystery situations is a lot less significant than the minutiae distinguishing two solution types — this also means I can provide less “theoretical” entries than I could before.
Over at The Invisible Event, Jim Noy has actually covered a lot of our bases on his own post a few years back on the same topic. My intention here is not to contradict him, but rather to supplement his list with a few potential entries I feel worth pointing out. I will be covering a lot of re-tread ground here, so in the interest of keeping Jim’s contributions and my own separated I’ll simply be listing Jim’s entries first in one set and then mine at the end. I’ll be supplementing each category with a paragraph or two explaining the concept too — just so that this is my post, and nobody else’s!
Without further ado…
1.) The Locked-Room Mystery
The grandfather of mystery fiction and the perennial favorite of all impossible crime aficionados, locked-room mysteries scarce warrant an introduction. You have a murder committed within a room locked, sealed, and barred from the inside so that every entry is blocked-off. The only key to the room is inside of the victim’s pocket, so the killer must be still inside of the room… and yet they are not! The implication is that the killer has someone walked through the walls or vanished into thin-air…
This is the most popular form of impossible crime, and examples are a-plenty. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, popularly (and debatably) considered the original detective story, Clayton Rawson’s Death from a Top Hat, and John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (also known as The Three Coffins) all features killers who seem to vanish into mid-air within a locked room…
1.5.) The Judas Window Locked-Room
Not, perhaps, a separate situation altogether, but a prominent enough sub-sub-subgenre to warrant mention, this is one of those “Doylist Impossibilities” I invoke in On a Defense of the Impossible Alibi Problem. The situation is entirely the same as a traditional locked-room mystery, with one caveat: there is a single suspect locked inside of the room with the victim, so that it appears entirely impossible for them to be innocent of the murder! The situation is only impossible if you, as the reader accept the condition that this person is innocent and the murder must’ve been committed by an external agency.
I’ve named this one after the most prominent example, John Dickson Carr’s The Judas Window. This situation is a favorite of many cases of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video game series in which you defend clients falsely accused of murder — more often than not, this accusation comes as a direct consequence of the defendant being locked in the same room or sealed in the same general location as the victim. Edward D. Hoch, the “Master of Short Stories”, also produced more than a handful of these, such as “A Shower of Daggers”.
2.) Footprints in the Snow
…or sand, or dust. These crimes involve a man found murdered in a vast expanse of snow! The killer definitely murdered the man from close-quarters, and the man was murdered after the snow had finished falling… so how could the killer have committed this murder without leaving his footprints in the snow!? A killer who can somehow float over the snow…
John Dickson Carr dealt with the problem most notably in The White Priory Murders, and his French-speaking disciple Paul Halter also wrote these in, among others, The Lord of Misrule and The Gold Watch. Christianna Brand produced one of these in Suddenly at his Residence using dust, and Arthur Porges’s “No Killer has Wings” and Hal White’s “Murder at an Island Mansion” are two examples of this problem on sandy beaches.
3.) Psychological Impossibility
We’re starting to get into the abstract. A man’s death is caused not by direct murder, but instead by a behavior that is so absurdly unbelievable it defies every known principle of human psychology! The most famous example of this is Father Ronald Knox’s “Solved by Inspection”, which involves a man who starves to death in a room surrounded entirely by safe-to-eat food that he could’ve eaten at any moment.
4.) Impossible Physical Feats
Humans are constantly displaying their infinite capacity for improvement. Records are always being broken, and the human condition forever expanding. But in these stories, these feats of athleticism swerve from the superhuman straight into the supernatural. A man cannot run from California to New York in a matter of hours, neither can a man leap from the top of the Eifel Tower and land with not a single scratch on his body…
The Stingaree Murders by W. Shepard Pleasants features a knife that’s hammered into the wooden boards of a boat so tightly that not even Mike Tyson himself could remove it without causing significant damage and creating noise that would assuredly not go unnoticed — naturally, the knife is removed. Death in the Dark by Stacey Bishop tells of a baffling murder in which a killer is somehow able to make an eagle-eyed shot at his victim in pitch-black darkness! Impossible Bliss by Lee Sheldon involves a nearly-impossible perfect golf shot from a nearly-impossible angle that not even the most seasoned of pros could achieve!
5.) Killer Rooms
Without fail, every single time a man sleeps in the bed in room 405 of the Dickson Inn, he never wakes up… and is found the next morning, having died of heart failure at precisely midnight… The killer room involves spaces that seem to have the uncanny ability to indiscriminately cause death without human intervention. Even more baffling, these situations may have bizarre, hyper-specific conditions under which these deaths occur…
Impossible-crime-oriented BBC drama Jonathan Creek has an episode episode titled “Mother Redcap” involving an inn where bizarre deaths seem to constantly occur within the same room, at the same time… Max Afford’s “The Vanishing Trick” involves a “kinda haunted” room that constantly swallows up servants and sends them to God-knows-where…
6.) Invisible Murderer
A murder who is mysterious able to pass under your nose without detection, strangle a woman in plain view of a crowd of hundreds without being seen, and murder in rooms guarded on all sides. This impossible problem involves the situation of a murderer who is able to defy detection even when the situation dictates that they would be seen.
Such an impossible crime makes up the principle murder of Christianna Brand’s Death of Jezebel, in which a murder is committed in front of a crowd of hundreds of spectators to a medieval pageant at top of a tower, the only viable entrance to which was also in view of the audience. Derek Smith’s Whistle up the Devil features a murder in a jail cell whose sole door was observed by the narrator and a reliable witness at all times the murderer must’ve walked through the door, and yet neither of them saw any such killer…
7.) Vanishing
Whether person or object, the problem of an impossible vanishing involves something disappear when there’s no reasonable way for this to occur. While it can often overlap with locked-room mysteries, footprint mysteries, or invisible criminals, this class of impossible crime also accounts for people vanishing in front of witnesses like a magician, or thefts of objects while in another character’s hands…
Roger Ormerod’s More Dead than Alive features a world-renowned magician who seems to disappear impossibly from his locked-and-sealed laboratory. Edward D. Hoch wrote multiple stories featuring a Great Thief-cum-Detective Nick Velvet, including the impossible caper “The Theft of the White Queen’s Menu” in which three impossible thefts occur: the theft of a roomful of furniture in a matter of just a few minutes, the theft of a roulette wheel from a crowded casino and yet nobody saw it leave, and the theft of rival thief The White Queen’s menu while it is held in her hands! Quite spectacularly, Paul Halter’s story “The Celestial Thief” involves the disappearance of all of the stars in the night sky as an astronomer is watching them from his telescope!
8.) Materialization
Diametrically opposite the previous category, impossible materializations involve the production of an object or person where it very well could never have been! A man manifesting within a sealed room, a plane appearing in the sky when it had nowhere from which it could’ve come, and poison appearing within a test-tasted dish…
James Yaffe’s “The Case of the Emperor’s Mushrooms” involves the murder of Emperor Claudius of Rome, who dies to a plate of poisoned mushrooms — quite mysteriously however, the royal food-tester had eaten a portion of the food without dying, and so the poison must have appeared while in the emperor’s hands…
9.) Prophecy, Clairvoyance, and Predictions
The fortune-teller tells you that you will die on June 4th, 2022 at 5:25 PM… and, lo and behold, you find yourself dead at the appointed time! People coming into possession of knowledge which they should never have been able to learn makes up this class of impossible problem.
There are, in fact, two real-world examples. “The Greenbrier Ghost” of West Virginia is a story about a woman who divines knowledge of the cause of her daughter’s death when the young women’s death was named natural. “The Horse Room” involves a group of women named the Blondie Gang who were robbing casinos blind in the 1940s, and the way they managed to cheat at horse-race betting in a room where no information could travel in or out… John Dickson Carr’s The Reader is Warned also involves a psychic predicting a murder, down to the very minute it’ll occur.
10.) Ghost, Witches, and Miscellaneous Supernatural Jiggerypokery
This, ultimately, is a “miscellaneous” category for all impossible crimes that appear to be ghosts, magic, or the supernatural at work but don’t fit into the other categories for being too specific. The appearance of a floating ghost in a room, a woman casting a spell that appears to come true, or the commission of a seance all fall into this category.
John Sladek’s Black Aura has a man suspended in mid-air and walking without any support in front of witnesses, and Hake Talbot’s Rim of the Pit features floating men, ghosts, seances, and nearly every supernatural occurrence you could hope to dream of. “Miracle on Christmas Eve” by Szu-Yen Lin involves the impossible delivery of gifts by a man who could only be Santa Claus himself… Also, suffice it to say, Scooby-Doo anyone?
11.) Impossible Technology
Mind-reading devices, hover-boards, and teleportation machines don’t exist… or do they? The impossible technology problem involves story where a piece of technology is presented as entirely genuine, but there is no scientific way for such a machine to exist. How could this bizarre feat be faked and manufactured?
In The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve of Ryuunosuke Naruhodou‘s third case, Twisted Karma and his Last Bow, defense attorney Ryuunosuke Naruhodou is commissioned to defend a scientist of murder. This scientist constructed a teleportation machine that’s capable of de-materializing a man in one place, and rematerializing him in another spontaneously. He was demonstrating the machine at a science exhibition when the device malfunctioned, causing the man to appear above a glass tower, suspended freely in the middle of the air! The man would then crash through the roof of the tower where it would be impossible to approach him… and yet, when the police arrive, the man was stabbed to death. Because of the location of the body, it’s only possible for your defendant to have stabbed the man before his teleportation! And so, in order to prove his innocence, you also have to prove how the entirely impossible feat of teleportation could’ve been faked in front of a massive audience…
12.) The Inverted Howdunit
One of two Impossible Alibi problems I described, this Doylist impossibility tiptoes the line between the inverted mystery (mysteries in which we know of the killer and their plot ahead of time) and the impossible crime. In the Inverted Howdunit, we are privy to the identity of the killer very early — however, unlike most such stories, in the Inverted Howdunit we only know the killer’s identity, but we do not know how they committed the crime… or how they managed to construct an airtight alibi! This impossibility hinges on knowing the identity of the killer, but it appearing nonetheless impossible for them to be guilty.
Roger Ormerod’s Time to Kill features a murder by an ex-convict — however, the ex-convict never once left the narrator’s sight during the period during which the murder must’ve taken place! In Detective Conan Volume 2, the case “Mysterious Shadow Murder Case” involves a man who committed murder while unmistakably in another country at the time… Agatha Christie’s “A Christmas Tragedy” has Miss Jane Marple describe a murder she once solved in which she knew the killer’s identity… and yet the killer had an impenetrable alibi!
13.) Suspect X
Nine people are trapped together on an island. One person wanders off, leaving the remaining eight people together in the dining room. The ninth person is soon heard screaming, and when the eight people arrive…. they find him dead! And yet, this is impossible… he hadn’t committed suicide, everybody was watching each other at all times..! Is it possible that an Xth suspect was on the island, killing them from the shadows?
Suspect X is the second “impossible alibi” problem I described in my post on the topic. This impossibility essentially dictates that, in a closed-circle mystery, the crime is only possible if you assume the presence of one extra person whose existence in the closed-circle is itself also impossible. The solution could involve explaining the presence of this extra person, or ways for the killer, who is among the original cast, to commit murder despite being under constant surveillance.
Such problems appear in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, in which the entirety of the cast is dead, and all apparently murdered, while isolated together on an island; NisioisiN’s Zaregoto – The Kubikiri Cycle, in which the narrator’s friend’s computer is destroyed while every living member of the cast is together in the dining room; Derek Smith’s Come to Paddington Fair, in which the victim is shot by a bullet from a prop gun which was at one moment loaded with blanks but later loaded with live ammunition, even though every member of the cast is incapable (by alibi and testimony) of tampering with the gun.
14.) Biological Impossibilities and Illogical Causes of Death
Biological impossibilities are any mysteries in which the victim faces a death which utterly defies human physiology and logic. Initially, I was going to have a separate category for “impossible falls”, those stories in which the victim falls to their death despite the lack of an elevated surface within any reasonable distance, but I decided to consolidate those two categories hear under the blanket of “Illogical Death” since I felt like they were conceptually similar enough.
Robert Randisi’s (awful) “The Hook” involves the serial killings of women who have had all their organs removed quite impossibly, despite the presence of only a very small incision through which removing the organs so cleanly would be impossible. Both Paul Halter’s “Jacob’s Ladder” and Mack Reynolds’s The Case of the Little Green Men involve a man falling to his death despite there being no elevated surfaces nearby. John Dickson Carr’s Gur Erq Jvqbj Zheqref and the first case of The Great Ace Attorney both involve a death by curare when ingested — curare can only cause death when it enters the bloodstream, and is harmless when imbibed. Paul Halter also wrote “The Robber’s Grave” in which a patch of grass is unusually unable to grow no matter what… Soji Shimada’s “The Executive Who Lost His Mind” involves someone who was murdered only minutes ago, but their corpse suggests that they’ve been dead for years…
15.) The Lonely Boat
A boat floats in the middle of a lake with a lone fisherman in it. The fisherman suddenly keels over and dies, and when the boat is recovered he’s found stabbed to death! Such a death is impossible — it would’ve been impossible for anyone to approach the boat without attracting attention or getting wet, so how much a man wind up murdered while isolated in the middle of a body of water?
I was initially unsure about whether or not to include this one, as most variations on this problem strongly overlap with the “invisible murderer”. However, I believe this problem meets all three of my criteria in theoretically creating a significant distinction in how the crime is presented and resolved…
Such a problem occurs in Joseph Commings’s “The Spectre of the Lake”, in which two men are shot from close-range in the middle of a lake, and both of John Dickson Carr’s “The Wrong Problem” and W. Shepard Pleasants’s The Stingaree Murders, in which a man is stabbed in an isolated boat.
(*Note, although this is the tenth in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)
Volumes 6 to 8 were a breath of fresh air for a series that started off so mediocrely. Although Volume 9 stumbled a bit, with a very uneven assortment of stories, it evened up by the end with a pretty good alibi trick inside of a decent, if underrealized, mystery tale. The average quality of the stories has improved considerably since the first few volumes, and I now found myself reading Detective Conan again casually, instead of beating out volumes “waiting for it to get good”. Even a mediocre story from this stage of the game is considerably better than a good story from the first three volumes…
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
Volume 8 opens withCasebook 25 – Diplomat Murder Case (Chapters 2-6), in which a woman summons Richard to her husband’s study to help with a background check on her future daughter-in-law, who is “too perfect to be good”! However, when the gang arrives at the scene, they find that the husband, a diplomat, has been killed by a poison prick-pin! Worse yet, the room was locked-and-sealed, and when the murder must’ve occurred, not only did everyone have an alibi but one person, but the only keys to the door were either in the victim’s pocket or the wife’s pocket (who was away from the house).
While struggling to piece together the mystery, Conan struggles with a fierce fever. Worse yet, a new detective named Harley Hatwell has shown up and named himself Jimmy’s rival — and he’s about to walk into the killer’s trap and blow the whole case!
This one’s fun, I really like the introduction of Harley as having him bounce ideas off of Conan and also butt heads with him makes the reasoning/deduction segments of Detective Conan more engaging and fun. The mystery itself is a bit minor for a feature-length story, though, as a lot of the story was basically dedicated to the locked-room mystery’s false solution as well as setting up the final confrontation between Jimmy (Conan) and Harley.
The locked-room mystery is fairly basic. The solution is a decent reworking of an age-old trick. However, the way it’s applied here is a lot more elegant on account of the way the presentation of the locked-room is handled. It makes the killer’s actions more natural so that the age-old solution doesn’t quite jump out at you like it would if this story played it entirely like those other stories tend to… This reworking of this particular solution type also lends itself to some fun cluing.
This is a decent story. The introduction of Harley is significant, and the denouement is a very good scene, but the mystery plot is just mediocre.
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
Immediately after this is Casebook 26 – Library Employee Murder Case (Chapters 6-8), the first story in the series to share chapters with another story, as chapter 6, the ending of Diplomat Murder Case is a direct tie-in to the beginning of this case (not that it matters to the plot).
Newly reinvigorated with the knowledge of how to return to his adult body, Jimmy accompanies the Junior Detective League on one last case where they investigate the disappearance and presumed murder of an employee… While there, they hunt for the secrets of the owner of the library while their life is in danger!
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
Okay, fine! I really liked this Junior Detective League story! There’s a fairly-clued, if obvious, “Purloined Letter”-esque trick with the hiding place of a particular item in the story. The real puncher here, though, is the hiding place of the body, which is just mildly clever on its own, but is further elevated by a really clever piece of mathematic misdirection.
Not an astoundingly brilliant one, but I really enjoyed this one.
The volume ends on Casebook 27 – Medical Professors Murder Case (Volumes 10-11, Chapters 9-1), in which the Moores are stranded outside on a ski trip after Richard loses their lodge keys. The family is, fortunately, saved by a band of medical professors who invite them to spend the night at their private lodge. However, while there, the head professor under which the others study is murdered violently, and it appears he’s left behind a message identifying his killer…!
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
This one is ingenious in all of the ways that dying messages tend to be, but also absurd in all of the ways that dying messages tend to be. The message involves intimate knowledge of Japanese culture and language, and also demands you be reading the story in Japanese or else you just won’t get any of the clues that actually reveal the solution to you in the character names…
I think this one is wildly ingenious, but for some reason I just didn’t find it very satisfying. I give it points for cleverness, but I didn’t actually really enjoy this one.
Volume 10 is much more even than Volume 9! While it never quite reaches the highs of any of the volumes before it, there are no standout bad stories in this volume! This is all-around a good, balanced collection of Detective Conan tales.
(*Note, although this is the ninth in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)
If you’ve been reading this series of reviews from the beginning, you’ll probably be struck by the fact that there has been a massive uptick in quality. For the first few volumes, I was giving metered, measured, and reserved praise to stories that were “good… for this point in the stories”. Since then, I’ve started throwing out words like “brilliant” and “classic” and making lofty comparisons to Brand and Christie. Volumes 6 to 8 have all been consistently on-point with only the occasional stinker among them. We can only hope that this upward trend will continue in Volume 9…
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
…which opens with Casebook 22 – Ayumi Yoshida Kidnapping Case (Chapters 1-3), my least favorite story in the series so far. The Junior Detective League are out playing hide-and-seek when Ayumi gets into the trunk of a suspected kidnapper-and-serial-child-murderer! The kids chase her down on Conan’s rocket skateboard as she describes sounds to them that give them clues to her location.
It’s a three chapter long chase scene with a joke ending that isn’t very funny. The descriptions of the locations are pretty obvious as to what they’re vaguely supposed to be. Worst story so far, there’s basically nothing of interest here worth reading for any reason. I really do not care for these Junior Detective League stories one bit. Hopefully there’s a really good one involving a library to look forward to in the next volume!
Casebook 23 – Kogoro Richard’s Class Reunion Murder Case has the Moores attending a reunion of Richard’s university judo club. Unlike many other clubs we will see in this series, there are no “two-year-old secret deaths we promised not to speak about!” In fact, the reunion goes pleasantly, with the members teasing Richard for his poor attendance, much banter ensues, and it’s clear the familial bonds of the Judo team are in tact even after 15 years!
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
After the team goes to the fireworks showing without Yumi Horikoshi, a member of the team, they return to find her in her room dead from a gunshot wound to the forehead. Based on the rigor mortis, she had to have died when everyone was together in the ping pong room earlier and everyone had an alibi…
I know this one is apparently a favorite of a lot of people’s, but I’m sorry to say I really didn’t think it was too great. Seeing Richard momentarily mature into a suitable detective to solve the murder was really fun, and the moment-to-moment detection as well as the cluing were all very well-done.
However, the problem is just a fundamental one with this kind of story. As I mentioned in my post on “impossible alibi problems”, there are two ways to construct a problem like this. One is “we know who the killer is, but we have no idea how they established an airtight alibi”, which features in Mysterious Shadow Case (Volume 2 Chapters 1-3). The other is “a murder committed when everyone has an alibi” — this story — and this premise only has arguably three or four total basic solution types. Unfortunately, the story also quickly reveals which of these types has to be at play, and the second that happens it basically just comes down to the minutiae of applying it, which in this case I really did not care much for, being a unique facepaint on what’s still a very old type of biological trick.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s, technically, a perfectly-constructed detective story, with cleverly-placed clues hinting at the true solution, including a very neat piece of Japanese folklore, and the solution’s unique application of an old premise lends itself to very clever cluing. This type of perfect composition is a mark many other Detective Conan tales miss, but, gun to my head, I’d prefer a story with flawed construction but brilliant heights and shocks like Night Baron Murder Case (Volume 8 Chapters 2-7). Nonetheless, this story just gets marks for being well-realized, even if I don’t believe it’ll bowl many people over with ingenuity or surprise.
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
The volume, being the first in a while to feature three stories, ends on Casebook 24 – Wealthy Daughter Murder Case (Volumes 9-10, Chapters 7-1). At a party hosted for a wealthy daughter to select her desired suitor for marriage, of which many of the guests are from the host’s old yachting club, many people’s car tires are slashed, scaring people into fleeing the party. The few who remain intend to finish the party and walk away with a new bride…
However, the festivities are finally disrupted when the body of one of the suits is found drowned in the fountain outside of the house! With the debutant missing from her own party and under suspicion when Rachel is the victim of a murder attempt in which her head is forced under the water in a bathroom sink, Conan is underway to find this would-be serial killer…!
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
I mentioned preferring brilliant heights with flawed construction, right?
There’s a very clever alibi trick at play here that, similar to Moonlight Sonata Murder Case (Volume 7 Chapters 2-7), effectively relies on the fact that it could only work in the context of a serial killing and would not be nearly as effective in a one-off murder. Both that story and this one ultimately feel like a case of the first two murders merely being a means to one big misdirection in the final murder, and it’s an interesting plotting device that I found neat and effective.
However, construction-wise, this story is just as weird and messy as the aforementioned Night Baron Murder Case, for a lot of the same reasons (see my review of Volume 8). There’s a scene where an old lady at the scene of the crime compare’s Rachel’s appearance to that of a young woman who drowned to death a few years ago (like every non-Judo club in the Detective Conan universe). The scene is presented with considerable weight and importance, but this little detail of Rachel’s resemblance to the dead girl is neither paid off nor followed-up on at any point in the remainder of the story. Similarly to Night Baron this also feels like two stitched-together premises — a murder at a yacht club reunion, and a murder at a groom-selecting ball. This is ultimately and most importantly a murder at a yacht club reunion, and the entire set-up of this party being meant for the selection of a young woman’s husband is a detail that gets laid at the wayside and never called-upon for any meaningful reason.
Nonetheless, I think of this story highly. I think the alibi trick is clever enough to save this story, although I think it’s a step below Night Baron in sheer brilliance and ingenuity, even if the construction is equally bizarre.
This volume started out rough, but managed to find its footing near the end. Nothing here that I’d say is a classic of the series worth going out of your way to read, but Wealthy Daughter is a good read for signed-up fans, and most people think more highly of Richard’s Reunion than I do, so maybe you will too…?
Now that I’ve broken the 20 stories mark, I’m going to start arranging these stories more clearly based on rough quality! I’m worried the ranking is getting a bit messy and hard to read though, so let me know if this knew formatting decision is good or if I should abandon it and just let the ranking speak for itself.
(*Note, although this is the eight in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)
Back-to-back Volumes 6 and 7 gave us some absolute stunners. From a brilliant inverted mystery at a fire festival, to a somber murder to the beat of a piano, to the shocking murder-by-swordfight of an art collector, Detective Conan has started to produce some genuinely great stories that fans of detective fiction would be doing themselves a disservice to ignore…
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
Volume 8 opens with Casebook 20 – The Night Baron Murder Case (Chapters 2-7), as the Moores attend a bizarre competition at a hotel. A person will dress up as the fictional phantom thief, Night Baron, and roam the hotel committing petty crimes. Whoever first discovers the identity of the masked man will be given free room and board at the hotel. However, as Conan investigates and finds out nearly everyone present is a respected computer programmer, he discovers that there’s another, secret prize in the competition: a virus named after the Night Baron character…
During their stay, Conan is thrown off of his balcony by the Night Baron! Now concerned about the true nature of this competition, Conan is on the hunt for the Night Baron… The Baron’s identity is quickly revealed when the character is too cast from a balcony, and lands on the spear of a statue, getting impaled and dying immediately. When the mask is revealed, the identity is revealed to be programmer Tokio Ebara… however, Conan is not convinced this is the real Baron. The Moores begin their search for the culprit of this murder and the true identity of the Night Baron…
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
And during their hunt, they find the victim’s room, locked and sealed from the inside, barring access…
I want to get this out of the way now, there is some beautiful cluing towards a brilliant murder trick in this story. In my opinion, in fact, this is the most brilliant piece of misdirection in the series so far. The locked-room mystery itself is minor and resolved immediately, but the locked-room itself is merely a form of misdirection that contributes to the greater solution — the true solution. It’s a brilliant mystery puzzle, so I wish I liked this story more…
The story, bizarrely, feels like two disparate premises stitched together. The murder at a gathering of computer programmers and the ne’er-do-wellery of a fictional Great Thief come to life are, individually, two fantastic premises, but stitching them together by naming a virus after the character makes the whole thing feel confused and muddled, and leads to neither idea really feeling like it gets sufficiently payoff come the end.
What makes this even more bizarre is that there are multiple instances of characters doing wildly suspicious things, and there’s… no explanation for it before or during the denouement. The suspicious activity is hand-waved over the course of what basically constitutes an epilogue, with multiple characters basically giving an apology that amounts to “hehe, whoops, we were so silly!” Very half-baked, artificial attempts to cast suspicion onto another character.
This also returns to the feature-length story trope of having a character make a weak dodge to attempt to deflect suspicion from the culprit, but inadvertently do the opposite and point big, blazing, neon arrows in the killer’s direction. It works here, though. Not from a misdirection standpoint, but just from a storytelling and character standpoint the attempt here actually adds a little to the story and gives Rachel a very compelling WWJD (What would Jimmy do) moment.
Anyway, the central trick here is brilliant and it elevates this story well beyond where it would’ve been with a lesser murder plot, being so loosely-plotted, frustratingly lazy and half-baked in places, and muddled. I’m almost certain this was once-upon-a-time a standard-length story, and it was extended when they realized they wanted it to be relevant to the series’s overarching plot for XYZ reasons… Only it would’ve been much better if it stayed that way. Still worth reading for the trick, but don’t make this your first Detective Conan you seek out.
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
The second and final story this volume is Casebook 21 – The Poisoned Bride Attempted Murder Case (Chapters 8-10), which has the Moores attending the wedding of a police commissioner’s daughter — who also, as it happens, turns out to be Conan’s persnickety former teacher. Before the ceremony can commence, however, the bride is non-fatally poisoned by a packet of sodium hydroxide left in her favorite drink, a can of lemon tea! A video camera that recorded the gang’s entire interaction in the dressing room became a central piece of evidence in the murder…
This one is very good! The alibi trick for the poisoning was very clever, if not entirely unique, turning on a principle that has fundamentally been used a few times in the series already. It’s a fairly distinct interpretation of the idea though, as it relies on a certain character’s assistance to operate under the restrictions of poison, and the visual clue that reveals everything is very neatly handled!
The motive is touching and fairly clued, and the ending is very sweet, even if it a bit on the side of rewarding people for doing bad things…
It’s hard to match peaks, but Volume 8 of Detective Conan makes a valiant effort with its two stories. Volume 8 is absolutely worth reading once you’re a signed-on fan of the series, especially for the brilliant trick buried in the otherwise messy Night Baron Murder Case…
(*Note, although this is the seventh in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)
Volume 6 of Detective Conan was simply fantastic. The two absolute best stories we’ve seen so far featured in that volume, and while there was one pretty uninspiring story in the middle it didn’t spoil what I consider the first absolute must-get volume in the series… Now that we’ve reached this point in the Detective Conan franchise, standards are high! One can only hope that we keep getting more fantastic stories like we saw in the previous volume…
First up to bat in Volume 7’s two stories is Casebook 18 – The Moonlight Sonata Murder Case (Chapters 2-7), a six chapter feature-length, opening with a mysterious letter addressed to Richard Moore summoning him to Tsukikage (Moon Shadow) Island with the warning that the island will once again be cast in darkness… The sender? A man going by the name of Keiji Asoh…
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
At Tsukikage Island, asking about the identity of Keiji Asoh reveals that the man has long since passed away. It was 12 years ago, in fact, when world-renowned pianist Keiji Asoh went mad, killed his family, and proceeded to light his home on fire. While the wood of his house scorched and embers danced hungrily around him, lapping at his skin and threatening to devour him, Keiji Asoh calmly sat at his piano and played his favorite song, the Moonlight Sonata, up until the very moment he was engulfed in flame and passed away… Thirteen years later, the sounds of the Moonlight Sonata playing from the community center summoned witnesses to find the dead body of the Tsukikage Island mayor… The piano’s story history has led to it being isolated in the city center away from everyone else, derided as a cursed artifact of the island’s colored history.
Despite thinking of the letter as a cruel-hearted prank, the Moores and Conan stay at Tsukikage Island to soak in the local politics of the upcoming mayoral election and even attend the late mayor’s funeral. While there, they hear the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata and run into the room with the cursed Asoh’s piano only to find Hideo Kawashima, a mayoral candidate, drowned to death, at the helm of the piano!
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
While the mystery is underway, Conan realizes that the letter only says that a shadow will begin to fall over Tsukikage Island. And, as the Moonlight Sonata has two more movements that they’ve yet to hear, the damning realization dawns on the Moores that there may very likely be two more murders committed to this musical motif in the shadows of Tsukikage Island… And when another mayoral candidate is found murdered to the second movement of the Moonlight Sonata during the investigation, their worst fears are realized… A serial killer is out for blood.
There are only so many ways to call a story brilliant, but this one is… well, brilliant! What initially seems to be a very clues-light detective story is revealed to be a subtly complex tale of murder and deception. The haunting motif of serial killings inspired by a cursed piano lend itself not only to atmosphere, but also to a delightfully simple and elegant if technical misdirection of alibis and time-manipulation. The central misdirection here is wildly unique and very naturally implemented, clever and very credible. What’s more is that the trick almost relies on the fact that this is a serial killing, and wouldn’t be nearly as effective in a single, isolated murder case. This is also the first feature-length Detective Conan in which the killer doesn’t make a weak double-bluff that immediately reveals their identity, and I was in fact pleasantly surprised by the denouement!
The ending of the story is very touching, and I think the most character-oriented the series gets. The killer’s motive is touching, even if not unique, and the way the character is sung off for the last time beautifully reflects on and calls back to the first death of the story. In a heartfelt scene of redemption, the killer seeks retribution in saving Conan’s life…
I do feel compelled to point out three minor faults with the story. Firstly, I feel like the supernatural undertones of the cursed piano are abandoned really quickly when it’s revealed that the music is being played from a sound tape during these murders (the piano isn’t even present for the most important murder…). The story also engages in some classic Detective Conan sexism, and it’s a bit harder to ignore here because it’s a very important part of some of the deductions that move the plot along. For a moment during the denouement, you actually think they’ll double-back and make a point about the sexism being wrong but… they absolutely do double down on it. Similarly, there’s a clue involving the way a character’s name is written in Japanese… something entirely removed from the English translation with I think little hope of figuring it out otherwise.
But never you mind those quibbles. This is a beautiful, touching, and brilliant Detective Conan story that succeeds on every level from plot to character. If I were to name a single Detective Conan story that fans of classical detection should read, it would probably be this one.
Interestingly, this is when I noticed Gosho Aoyama stopped trying so hard to write around the fact that Conan is in a child’s body. During much of this story, Conan just… makes deductions, and characters either humor him or take him and everything he says 100% at face value. Occasionally Richard will hit Conan (usually implied to be because he’s showing him up), but for the most part Conan just gets away with playing detective much more blatantly. I wonder if the premise started to get a bit problematic for Aoyama to write for…
Screenshot from the anime series and provided by Detective Conan World wiki
The second and last story in Volume 3, Casebook 19 – Soccer Player’s Brother Kidnapping Case (Volumes 7-8, Chapters 8-1), involves a young woman coming to the Moore house, claiming to be looking for Jimmy (Conan) because they were dating before he vanished… Because Conan knows he’s never met this woman before, he is curious as to the real reason why she’d be looking for him… And when the two accompany the woman to her apartment, he finds a ransacked child’s room and believes a kidnapping may have taken place here!
This is another kidnapping case. It’s actually the best one so far, with some okay-ish cluing and okay-ish reasoning. The plot, motive, and resolution all just kind of lift bits and pieces from CEO’s Daughter Kidnapping Case (Volume 1 Chapters 2-5)and 1 Billion Yen Case (Volume 2 Chapters 4-7), but the individual parts taken all work better when combined in this story.
What is my favorite clue in this story is there’s a clue that is only debatably fairplay, which ties into a fictional video game called Onimaru Quest. Onimaru Quest is a fictional reference to/parody of a specific real-world video game in an actual video game series, as the plot of the Onimaru Quest game becomes important in a minor way, and you might possibly be able to figure out the clue ahead of time if you’ve played the game, Dragon Quest V, before reading this story. It isn’t much of a spoiler, but I love that this specific clue exists in the story.
There’s also a very touching moment at the end not unlike the previous case in which a misunderstanding makes the culprit feel foolish… Rachel’s jealousy here is cute, but it also means the story astoundingly fails the Bechdel test.
Anyway, I know it’s a bit underwhelming after the first case in this volume, but this case is another basic kidnapping base that brings nothing new to the table.
I wholeheartedly recommend Volume 7 on the weight of The Moonlight Sonata Murder Case alone, which many Detective Conan fans will name as their favorite story in the series. While the misdirection at the heart of it isn’t Detective Conan‘s absolute number one best, as a story of detection it’s perfectly composed and pitch-perfect, beat-for-beat…
(*Note, although this is the sixth in this series of reviews, I only encourage you to read my review of the first volume to get a summary of the series and my preamble about the reviews. It is not necessary to read any other entry in the series besides the first)
Volume 5 of Detective Conan was a high-point! Now at Volume 6, we’re still apparently in that “early-series slog”, though we’re pretty much at the tail-end of it. Volume 6 is often lumped in with the “volumes not to judge the series from” era of early Detective Conan, and that’s kind of sad, actually, because I think anyone who judges the series from this volume would would walk away with a pretty high opinion of Detective Conan…
Volume 6 opens up with Richard Moore called in to investigate a case of adultery in Casebook 15 – The Art Collector Murder Case (Chapters 2-5). His client is Denjiro Maru, famous art collector who suspects that his wife may be cheating on him and, unfortunately, Richard has picture proof evidence of this… The art collector is devastated, but in the middle of his meeting with Richard is forced to leave by an insistent telephone and a sudden visitor.
Screenshot taken from the anime series, provided by Detective Conan World wiki.
After he doesn’t return for two whole hours, Richard angrily stomps off to find him. However, Richard is shocked to find Denjiro in a side building, pinned to wall with a sword, and with a sword in his hand! The room has been demolished, marked with sword cuts all over the walls, floor, furniture, and ceiling, indicating indisputably that the victim died of a swordfight to the death! Following the discovery of the body, three men all show up who have appointments with the victim, one of whom is Denjiro’s swordplay teacher, Yuji Suwa, the only man in the known world who could defeat Denjiro in a swordfight…
Yuji Suwa is immediately suspected of the murder of Denjiro, but when Conan notices something odd about the crime scene it forces him and Richard to reevaluate their opinion of the crime…
This one is fantastic. Although it falls into that “three suspects” alibi check formula that is so common in the series, this one’s just great. The traditional Japanese architecture, with a man strung up by an ancient sword, is a great set-piece that weirdly recalls Art Museum Owner Murder Case (Volume 4 Chapters 1-3) but recontextualized in a neat way.
Screenshot taken from the anime series, provided by Detective Conan World wiki.
There are a number of great visual clues, a really clever linguistic/behavior clue, and the reasoning is entirely sound with no hiccoughs. The suspect-juggling in this one is also very, very good. There’s one clue that’s brilliant that demands knowledge of Japanese, but honestly I don’t think even a Japanese speaker would be able to 100% solve the jigsaw puzzle that is this clue. You can definitely probably guess what was supposed to be there, though, and I think that’s good enough to let you reach the conclusion across language barriers.
The solution turns entirely on a classic dodge. The double bluffs and baiting in this one very closely resemble the plotting styles of Agatha Christie or Christianna Brand. This is also another story where modern technology plays into the solution in a very clever way, also recalling Art Museum. This is my favorite story in the series so far, it’s just really great.
Just one gripe: the adultery sub-plot means nothing and amounts to nothing for, you know, an element that ate up such a big chunk of the early parts of the story…
The middle story of this collection, Casebook 16 – The Twin Brothers Case (Chapters 6-8), sees the official founding of the Junior Detective League — a club of mystery-solvers formed by Conan and his three classmates! Finally a fully-fledged crime-solving group, they’re disheartened when their first case is a mundane case of a missing cat…
Screenshot taken from the anime series, provided by Detective Conan World wiki.
However, things take a turn for the dark when they find the cat emerging from a bathroom window covered in blood. Closer investigation reveals a bloody dead body with its head submerged in the water of the bathtub! The kids immediately call for the police, but when Inspector Megure arrives and he and a bunch of constables go over the place with a fine comb, the body has disappeared! The police immediately name the kids liars, and leave, ignoring their insistence that they did find a body.
The kids immediately begin to investigate yet again…
This one’s pretty mediocre. After so much back-to-back originality, it’s kind of disappointing to see something as uninspired as this one. It has kind of a fun energy, feeling like those juvenile detective stories of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, but overall it’s pretty whatever. There’s only so many ways to call a story generic. I don’t really enjoy these Junior Detective Club stories.
Screenshot taken from the anime series, provided by Detective Conan World wiki.
Norikazu Sasai has murdered his co-writer Satoru Imatake in cold blood. Rifling the room to make it look like a theft has occurred, shooting his co-writer in the forehead in their shared hotel room, and then running out of the room in front of witnesses, down the street, and then to the Tenkaichi Fire Festival where the 天, 下, and 一 characters are burnt into the mountainside to summon a good harvest for that year…
Once there, he grabs Rachel Moore and has her take a photo of him in front of the burning 一. Within minutes, he is grabbed by Officer Yokomizo under suspicion of the murder of Satoru Imatake. He immediately produces his camera, however, and insists that this camera contains proof his airtight alibi. When the film is produced, seven photos are found of him at the festival. One photo places him in front of the 下, and another places him in front of the burning 一. In order for Sasai to commit the murder and produce both of these photos he would need to be able to take the first photo, get to the hotel room, commit the murder, and return to the festival in 25 minutes.
Screenshot taken from the anime series, provided by IMDb.
It is a 40 minute bus ride one way between the hotel and the festival.
Norikazu Sasai’s alibi is airtight. But Yokomizo and Conan believe that only he could be the murderer! How will they prove this man’s guilt in light of the overwhelming evidence for his innocence in Casebook 17 – The Tenkaichi Fire Festival Murder Case (Volumes 6-7, Chapters 9-1)?
Elements of the story recall the first episode of Columbo, particularly the murder of a much more successful co-writer and the story ending on the killer ironically commenting on the one time they’ve ever written a truly good story. The parallels end there, though; this story is grade-A original!
This is the first fully inverted mystery story in Detective Conan, and it’s a great one! While Detective Conan’s fourth story, The Strange Shadow Murder Case (Volume 2, Chapters 1-3), flirt with the inverted mystery genre I consider it more of an “impossible alibi” – we’re guaranteed of the killer’s guilt in spite of his airtight alibi, but see absolutely no part of his murder plot, and the puzzle is figuring out how-he-dunit. There’s still a howdunit element to this story, since we don’t exactly know how Sasai falsified the alibi photos, but I won’t push my luck with the label.
The method for falsifying the 天下一 photos are unique and clever, though I don’t believe it’ll have anybody fooled for too long. The exact way Conan proves the photos were faked, however, is very neat! There’s a visual clue the story doesn’t acknowledge but which also definitely exists and I’m proud to have picked up on.
Another fantastic story from this volume, and a close second favorite. Absolutely check this one out if you’re in the mood for a bite-sized Columbo tale.
Volume 6 is by a massive margin the best volume in the Detective Conan series, boasting the two best stories we’ve read so far! Two fantastic early stories are not let down by the existence of one bad egg. I absolutely recommend this one, it is a gem (just be careful to order Volume 7 as well to finish Tenkaichi).
Solving the Mystery of Murder 