Overwrite

「私が見聞きした殺人の動機は過去の罪や、根深い怨念が多かったけど、あなたの場合はもっとシンプルだ」 

『金田一37歳の事件簿』

"Most motives I know of here about crimes committed in the past, or some deep-rooted hatred, but it's much simpler in your case."

 "The Case Files of the 37-year Old Kindaichi"

Oh, wow, it's been more than three years since I last did a double Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo review!

Like I mentioned in all of my Detective Conan-related reviews of this year, author Aoyama Goushou had a short break from the end of last year (around the release of volume 94) until one or two weeks before the release of Detective Conan: Zero the Enforcer in April this year. This of course meant that the weekly serialization of Detective Conan had also stopped for those four months. Usually, about three or four volumes are released each year, and at the very least, one volume is released in April to coincide with the annual theatrical release, but with no serialized chapters for four-five months, this was impossible of course and even after Aoyama resumed his work, it would take months to create enough material for a new collected volume. So Detective Conan 95 was finally released in the second half of October and it's not only the first Detective Conan volume to be released in 2018, but actually also the only volume of this year, as the next volume is slated for an April 2019 release! Guess I'll have to be grateful with the little Conan I did get this year....

Volume 95 starts with the final chapters of The Scarlet School Trip, which started in the previous volume. Thanks to some help of his friends and the experimental antidote, Conan is able to (temporarly) change back to his true Shinichi form, and participate in the Teitan High school trip to Kyoto. Shinichi and Ran run into the actress Kurachi Keiko (and old friend of Shinichi's mother Yukiko) at Kiyomizu-Dera. Keiko wants Shinichi to make sense out of a coded message left by a friend who committed suicide at Kiyomizu-Dera only a few weeks earlier. Her latest film is also set at Kiyomizu-Dera, and is a remake of a film she and her friends made as a graduation project for art college, and like Keiko, her college friends have all become famous people in the industry as actors/directors/screenplay writers etc. Not even half a hour has passed after Shinichi and Sera have left Keiko and her friends to think about the code, when they are called back to the hotel room of one of them: the screenplay writer was found stabbed to death inside his hotel room, and bloody footsteps left on the ceiling suggest something pulled the man up to the ceiling, stabbed him mid-air and dropped the victim on the floor, and then walked on the ceiling to the window to fly away. Almost as if the Tengu from their film has come to life! While Shinichi, Sera and even Hattori ponder about this case, more attacks are made, with bloody footsteps appearing out of nowhere on walls and other places.

I already mentioned last time that this is a packed story, and for a reason: the opening chapter of The Scarlet Story was chapter 1000 of this series, so Aoyama went all-out with the characters. Lots of fan service and guest appearances in this story, and a lot of the typical rom-com you'd expect from a school trip story with Shinichi and Ran, but the core mystery plot is... not as entertaining as everything around it. The culprit stands out like a sore tooth, and the various "strange" incidents aren't really that impressive: one murder committed behind a restaurant for example seems more like an afterthought than anything. The main murder of the screenwriter with the footprints on the ceiling has an interesting idea behind it, but would not ever, ever work practically speaking. The trick of how the footprints appeared on the ceiling is not original per se, but what it uses for that end is definitely something new, and a perfect example of Detective Conan using modern-day objects to find new possibilities for mystery stories, but no way everything that had to be done to create this specific murder would go as planned, and that goes for most of what's going on in this story: the basic ideas might work, but it can not work in those particular forms, under those circumstances. The murderer basically re-uses the same idea from the first murder for the final murder, but that is utterly impossible to do at that specific location. I mean, you'd physically not have the space to do that without everyone noticing you, and even then it'd be hard to do! So The Scarlet School Trip is best enjoyed as a special story to celebrate the fact the series reached a milestone and there's plenty of character development here, especially for the Shinichi/Ran fans, but it won't really satisfy as a standalone mystery story.
 
...I had totally forgotten Yaiba has a sister...

The True Identity They Found is a transition story, dealing with the aftermath of The Scarlet School Trip, combined with a cute Detective Boys story. The story about a treasure hunt the deceased grandmother had laid out in her home for her granddaugher (one of the Detective Boys' classmates) is nothing special mystery-wise, fairly simple stuff that kinda invokes the earliest Detective Boys stories (which Genta actually comments on). This story however is also about a certain post on SNS, that says the poster saw Kudou Shinichi solving the case of The Scarlet School Trip. Which is very troublesome, as "Kudou Shinichi" has disappeared from the public eye ever since he was turned into Edogawa Conan, and he is thought dead by the Black Organisation that turned Shinichi in a kid. If they would learn that Kudou Shinichi is in fact alive, his life and those close to him would be in immediate danger. While efforts to surpress the rumors are made, it seems this will turn into a story-driving force for the moment. Oh, and the obi explicitly mentions this, but this is also the volume Conan finally learns the name of the boss of the Black Organization!

In Don't Come To The Black Bunny's Club, Mouri Kogorou is hired by Moro'oka, a wealthy man who has received a threatening letter, telling him to stay away from the Black Bunny's Club (where the waitresses dress like bunnies. And no, you can't touch them). Kogorou is not only joined by Ran and Conan, but also his "disciple" Amuro, who seems to have his own agenda too to accompany the three. During dinner, Yuri (a bunny who was becoming close to Moro'oka) is poisoned, and it seems three persons had the opportunity to add poison to Yuri's wineglasss: Moro'oka himself, his butler and a rival bunny. The way Conan and Amuro rule out two of the suspects seems a bit hasty, but I do like the solution to how the poisoning was done: it builds somewhat on an old trope from whodunnit puzzle plot mysteries, but is again a good example of Detective Conan using modern day objects to create original solutions to what would seem to be "classical" mystery plot. The ending of this story also shows that Aoyama is busy moving his chess pieces for an event which might very well be the ending of this series.

Volume 95 ends with the first few chapters of The Targeted Female Police Officers, where a few of Yumi and Sanae's female patrol officers are killed by a horrible serial murderer, who is luring the women away and killing them off one by one. But we'll have to wait for volume 96, to be released in April 2019, to see how this'll end.

Detective Conan 95's release was followed a few days later by Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo 2 ("The Case Files of Kindaichi, Age 37"), the second volume in the new Kindaichi Shounen series which is, as the title suggest, not about the 17-year old high school student Hajime anymore, but a 37-year old Hajime who now works as a single, low-ranking employee at the firm Otowa Black PR. In the first volume, we learned that 37-old Hajime is quite tired of solving mysteries and he just want to live his life, but fate has something else in store for him. His firm is organizing a new dating tour: five eligible men and five eligible women will spend a few days in a resort hotel on a faraway, small island, where they'll get to know each other and hopefully find a partner. Hajime and his cute subordinate Hayama are to supervise the tour and make sure everything goes well. Hajime's Spider Senses however go nuts when he notices the "faraway small island" for his tour is in fact Utashima, the place where Hajime as a teenager solved no less than three seperate murder cases, which were all connected to The Phantom of the Opera. Despite Hajme's best intentions to run the tour as best as possible, his fourth visit to the island seems to be cursed, as one of the bachelorettes is killed, with the body first disappearing, and then re-appearing hanging from the bell in the chapel tower, and later another bachelor learns why you should NEVER EVER trust the chandeliers in buildings on Utashima. For yes, they have a tendency to kill people, the past has told us. With his tour (and by connection, his job) at stake and a storm cutting the island off from the outside world, Hajime has no choice but to play the detective again like he used to and figure out who the murderer is.

The Utashima Resort Murder Case started in the first volume of this new series, but the remainder of this story still takes up most of volume 2. As a mystery story, it's not exceptionally brilliant compared to other stories in the series: we've seen the "perfect alibi" type of trick very, very often in this series, where it seems all the suspects have an alibi when a certain incident happens, and most of what occurs in this story are variations on this plot device. The tricks used in this particular story aren't really original on their own either, so you end up with a mystery story that isn't really outstanding, but does everything kinda the way you'd expect it would, without ever really falling beneath the standard of expectation. The story also doesn't play fair with the motive at all: Hajime is told something by Kenmochi that basically solves everything, but we are not told the details. Sure, we can figure out who the murderer is without that, but why do we need to do that if Kenmochi basically just told Hajime!? Also: the physical change in that one character was extreme. Nice touch with the nature/motive of the murders though, as it's not something often done for the whole series of murders and it definitely sets this murderer apart from other murderers in this series.

The Utashima Resort Murder Case did manage to entertain me a lot by the plot device of having a 37-old Hajime now though. Most of the time, the story does feel like a "normal" Kindaichi Shounen story, and you wonder whether it's really necessary to make him twenty years older than the other series, but at times, it really manages to hit the right (comedy) marks by subverting the expected tropes of this series. We already know that there's some kind of incident, or at least something on his mind, that made Hajime turn away from his teenage detecting days, but the timeskip is also used to reflect a bit on the old stories. One of the best moments of this story for example is when Hajime asks everyone to gather at his room so he can explain who the murderer is, like he did in the old days, and he finds nobody has come except for the murderer themselves. Heck, even Hajime notes that the motive is something he hardly came across in his teenage detecive days. Things don't always go like in the old stories, though it's still obviously the Kindaichi Shounen we know.

The end of the story also sets up the overall storyline for this series, as it seems Hajime will have to face multiple grown-up "seeds" planted by his greatest nemesis and we might get a more storyline-focused series like Tantei Gakuen Q. Volume 2 ends with the first chapter of The Tower Block Madam Murder Case, which seems to be shaping up to be a kind of inverted story like we occasionally saw in the old series, with Hajime helping his (single) neighbor with her catering service at a party at a high-rise apartment tower organized by some of the women who live there who seem to hate one certain woman a lot.

Both Detective Conan 95 and Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo 2 were not particularly impressive as mystery stories, though for long-time fans of both series, both volumes had a lot to offer: Conan 95 is one of the clearest signs Aoyama is thinking of the end of the series, while Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo 2 is in essence a very familiar sight, but with a few funny surprises here and there. Anyway, the next volumes of both series won't come until next year, so I guess we'll have to wait and see what direction both series will turn to now.

Original Japanese title(s):  青山剛昌　『名探偵コナン』第95巻
天樹征丸（原）、さとうふみや（画）『金田一37歳の事件簿』第2巻