Teeny Tiny Murder

So when in tears 

The love of years

Is wasted like the snow

"The Forest Reverie" (Edgar Allan Poe)

Oh man, I really only reviewed only one volume of Detective Conan last year! Let's hope this year the comic will have more regular releases...  Really excited to see how the current four-part anime original story will turn out though!

Volume 97 of Detective Conan was released in the second half of December 2019 and opens with the final chapter of The Deadly TV Drama Shooting. The previous volume ended with Kyougoku Makoto (boyfriend of Sonoko and unbeaten karate champion) considered a suspect in the murder of Tokuzono Saiya, lead actor of the TV drama Detective 48. Earlier in the day, Kyougoku had mistaken one of the stunt actors for a real robber and knocked the poor sap out. Kyougoku was asked to fill in as the stunt actor, which he did surprisingly well, earning the praise of everyone, except for Tokuzono himself. Tokuzono dies after he falls off the fourth floor of the abondoned school building where they were shooting, but the only other person on that floor was Kyougoku, as he was preparing for his next scene (and everyone else was outside on the ground as the camera would be shooting from there). There seems to be no reason why Tokuzono would've jumped off the building himself, so suspicion falls on Kyougoku, but later, the assistant-director dies of poisoning. As it doesn't seem like anyone had poisoned his drink (no traces of poison in either the drink or on the straw), it's suspected the man may have taken the poison on his own will, which would make him the more likely suspect for the murder on Tokuzono. Of course, neither Conan nor Sera believe that's the case, but after the events in the Scarlet School Trip, Sera is quite convinced Conan is in fact Shinichi and tries to find evidence to support her suspicions.

Plotwise, this is a fairly minor story. The two deaths are basically discrete situations, with the tricks behind both murders having no direct connection to each other whatsoever. Both ideas are also very simple: the Tokuzono murder is perhaps clewed too obviously, as it shouldn't be hard to guess what the murderer did to trick Tokuzono into falling to his death. It's an idea you also often see in Conan anime original episodes and we've seen countless of variations of this, so it's nothing that'll make an impression. The second murder is more original in terms of whether we've see in it in the series before, but it's almost disappointingly simple. I did like the way the method eventually tied back to the evidence that'd prove the murderer's guilt. But on the whole, this is a very minor story, obviously one conceived to coincide with The Fist of Blue Sapphire, which also featured Kyougoku.

Minor stories is in a way the keyword for this volume, as Deathly Intent Hidden Within The Coded Message is also mostly built around minor ideas to bring a rather classical type of story, but things do happen in the background related to the main story arc. Kogorou has been sent a letter by a client who wants to meet with him at an abandoned church in the Nagano Prefecture to investigate the death of a friend who committed suicide there and the mysterious note left at the scene. Kogorou is asked to take along three other people and his client will drive them to the hotel after meeting at the church. Initially, Conan, Ran and Sonoko were supposed to come along, but Sonoko's ill and Ran decides to stay with her best friend, but two unlikely replacements are quickly found. The ever-enigmatic Amuro decided to join his "teacher", as well as the sushi chef Wakita, one of the persons Conan suspects might be RUM in disguise, the right hand to the boss of the Black Organization. At the church, the gang runs into a group of old school friends, who all have been called here under false premises. Their friend had committed suicide here, and it's then that Kogorou learns that his "client" used the name of that deceased person too. After realizing they have all been gathered in this church for a reason, the situation quickly turns into a closed circle one: the parking lot was rigged to break down, toppling all cars there off a cliff, and a snowslide also blocked the one tunnel on the road to the church. While the police has been notified of their plight, the group also tries to figure out why they have been gathered here and what the meaning is of the coded message they all received, but while they explore the church, they're targeted one after another...

Wait, a closed circle situation in some remote mountain church with Conan on the scene? I have the feeling we haven't seen one of these stories in ages in this series! Most of the stories lately have been far more urban, and the few times they do get out, it's not really a closed circle situation. In a way, a refreshing story. The core mystery plot is really simple though. The murderer uses a few tricks to guide their victims to the place they want them to be, but it's rather obvious who the murderer is and the tricks used are basically simple stage magic staples. The code is also not particularly interesting: it's a 'ok, it makes sense in hindsight' but don't ever expect me to solve that before the reveal. The story is more interesting as part of the big picture, as Wakita is acting as suspicious as ever, and at the end of the story, Aoyama is sure to pick up on the revelation of the last volume, which showed that unbeknownst to Amuro, he had a connection to an unlikely person.

My Darling is a Corpse is one of the rare short two-chapter stories in this series and features yet another one of the persons Conan suspects is more than she appears to be: his teacher Wakasa. The Detective Boys join their teachers Kobayashi and Wakasa as a test panel for a planned class outing to the nature found in the mountains of the Gunma prefecture. Their guide is Maika, a colleague teacher from Gunma. What they don't know however is that she's the victim of a marriage swindler, and that she has just killed the man because she found out. She plans to use the children and the teachers as her witnesses and indeed, the plan seems succesful at first. The body of the man is found lying against a tree next to where they parked their car in the forest. Maika wasn't away long enough to have committed the murder and dragged the body all the way to the car, nor could she have hidden the body in the forest in advance and moved the car to make it seem like the body wasn't there when they first parked first (the car would've made quite some noise in a silent forest). The solution is, again, a practical, but simple trick, but fairly competently clewed. Part of the story is to reveal a bit more about Wakasa's real intentions though, so once again, it's more a story that functions as a device to set-up future storylines.

The volume ends with the first chapter of The Antique Appraiser Murder Case, which starts with a surprising call-back to a very early Conan story, when the Detective Boys visited the house of Dr. Agasa's deceased uncle. He found an antique plate there, which he had appraised by the famous antique appraiser Nishitsu. Conan and Haibara join Dr. Agasa on his visit to the appraiser, as do Okita and Sera, who not only has suspicions about Conan's identity, but also about Haibara's true age and who has been trying to get something out of Haibara. Meanwhile Nishitsu has been approached by three different clients, who all brought him the same antique Chinese decorative Phoenix plate. Obviously, only one of them is real, making the other forgeries. Nishitsu is first fatally wounded by the owner of one of forgeries, just as Dr. Agasa arrives at the house. On the verge of death, Nishitsu tells Agasa which of the plates is real, but not knowing the murderer was still hiding in the room, Dr. Agasa ran off to call for help. Nishitsu is then finished off for good, and all the plates are returned to their containers, making it impossible for Dr. Agasa to tell which one of the plates is the genuine one. For the moment though, the character interaction that plays in the background seems to be like a minor set-up for the 2020 Detective Conan film The Scarlet Bullet, as it also focuses on several of the key characters of that movie.

Detective Conan 97 was not an outstanding volume on its own, but I did enjoy it better than the previous volume. The stories here were very simple in comparison to the usual standard, but it's also clear Aoyama is trying to push the overall storyline a bit forward by having these simple stories act as the backdrop during which other developments occur. Of course, this is something that works with Conan especially because it always uses the episodic story structure to also tell a larger mystery story. Lately, Aoyama hasn't been able to find the perfect balance between the episodic mysteries and the larger story, partially because of the irregular publishing schedule now meaning he's just not outputting as much as he used, but the trend of the last few volumes is definitely you can feel something big is coming. And I hope it's sooner than later!

Original Japanese title(s): 青山剛昌　『名探偵コナン』第97巻