The Man Made Murder

"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic."

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"

Always welcoming specific story/volume recommendations for this series!

I have mentioned earlier that while there are definitely stories I enjoy from Katou Motohiro's Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou and its sequel series iff, I don't like the series enough to want to read all of the adventures of the brilliant prodigy Touma Sou and his energetic sidekick Kana, so now I'm picking my stories. Last year, three special "The Best" anthology volumes were released with stories selected by prominent mystery writers, and I already read the volume edited by Arisugawa Alice. Earlier this year, I also read an edited anthology of the spin-off series C.M.B. But now I'm back at Q.E.D. and it shouldn't be a surprise that my return to this series is once again through one of these anthology volumes: Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou The Best - Tanaka Yoshiki Selection (2019) is of course edited by Tanaka Yoshiki, who most people will probably not immediately associate with mystery fiction, as he's best known for his epic novel series like the space opera The Legend of the Galactic Heroes and the fantasy The Heroic Legend of Arslan. Like the Arisugawa-edited volume, this The Best volume contains five stories chosen out of the 50-volume run of the original series.

While I started reading Q.E.D. more seriously from 2018 on, I had already read a bit of it over a decade ago (also watched the drama!). The Faded Star Map (originally from volume 3) was probably the last story I had read before my reading hiatus, because the first three volumes of Q.E.D. have been in my bookcases for ages. The story introduces us to a derelict star observatory on a mountain, once the property of the amateur astronomer Tsukishima Fukutarou. He disappeared twenty-five years ago, but as the surrounding mountains are now all turned into a ski resort, the local authorities want to break the building down, and the local court has invited Fukutarou's two sons (and granddaughter), his brother-in-law and a close friend to the building, to determine who will become the legal owner of the observatory and to work out the financial side of the story. While they poke around the observatory reminiscing about old times, they stumble upon a horrible corpse inside the telescope. It appears someone, probably Fukutarou, had fallen inside the telescope and had been burnt to death by the sun, which would explain his disappearance. Given he was dead and all. The man from the court is sent back down the mountain to fetch the police, but a sudden snowstorm prevents them from climbing up to the observatory. It's the same storm which brings Touma and Kana to the observatory, as they are on a school trip nearby but got lost in the snow. The group is forced to spend the night here, but while the building is old, it doesn't take long for everyone to make the building suitable for shelter again. The following morning however, they find the brother-in-law hanging outside the bathroom window, but determining who could've killed him (and why) that night proves to be quite tricky. A story that makes very good use of its unique setting of a star observatory, but also a story that is a bit predictable exactly because of that, as you can make fairly educated guess about what happened simply based on the very long lead-up to the murder, which has quite a few scenes that don't do much to hide the fact they're going to be important later on. The murder itself has some links to the impossible crime trope, but I think the dramatic underlying back story leaves a bit more of an impression.

A Frozen Gavel (volume 9) starts with a scene beneath the Kachidoki Bridge, one of the many bridges that cross the Sumida River in Tokyo. A decayed hand falls on one of the boats going beneath the bridge, and when the authorities investigate, they find that a corpse has been stuffed inside a pipe, and the pipe itself has been jammed inside an opening between the sides of the lifting bridge. The police can only get the pipe out by raising the sides of the bridge again, which is easier said than done: Kachidoki Bridge has actually not been raised for thirty years due to the relentless streams of traffic here. But obviously, the pipe and the body need to be retrieved and so the bridge is raised again for the first time since 1970. Two surprising discoveries are made: the victim had a strange note in his pocket, but the victim was also wearing a special watch dated 1975, five years after the bridge was last raised! So how did the culprit manage to get the pipe wedged in between the sides of the bridge? While Touma and Kana poke around, they are approached by a strange, old man who seems to know more about the note, and perhaps even the victim, but why would he approach the two of them? A strange tale that has few interesting elements taken on their own, like the impossible problem of the pipe got wedged in the bridge, a strange old man who challenges Touma to solve the mathematics problem of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg and the mystery of the old man's personal history, but I feel it doesn't really work together. The pipe problem is pretty smart, but completely impractical in this specific setting (how would the culprit actually be able to do that on the Kachidoki Bridge?) and the reason to do so is also incredibly vague, betting on a one-to-a-million chance that things may occur in that manner. The same with the Seven Bridges of Königsberg: the solution and the way it relates to the actal case is interesting, but in the end, why go through all that trouble on some extremely minor chance things would go like this? This is a story where the parts taken seperately are far more interesting than the sum.

Crime and Punishment (volume 24) is obviously inspired by Dostoyevsky's book of the same title: we follow the graduate student Sendagawa, who hates how unfair life can be: how can a brilliant man like himself be so poor? When he hears of the news of a burglar being active and succesful in his neighborhood, Sendagawa decides to take matters in his own hands, and commit a burglary too and pin his crime on the real burglar. Sendagawa isn't stupid though, so he first plans to fake a burglary on his own room so the police will think of him as one of the victims. That part of the plan goes well, but his attempt at theft goes horribly wrong though: the moment he realizes the owner of the house he had wanted to burgle was in fact lying very dead in the living room, he also understood that things looked pretty bad for him, as it's a bit suspicious if a burglar is standing next to a dead body. He quickly runs away from the scene, but to his great surprise Inspector Mizuhara (Kana's father) seems to harbor suspicions about the theft at Sendagawa's place, and now he even thinks Sendagawa might've committed the murder! Desperate, he tries to plead with Kana and Touma to help him, and Touma is of course able to pinpoint the real murder rather easily. This was a story with a fairly limited scale, but I do quite like it. Like the original novel, it reads like an inverted detective, as we see how Inspector Mizuhara slowly starts to suspect that Sendagawa faked his own burglary to get himself off the hook, while Sendagawa obviously wants to not only hide that, but also avoid being accused of the murder. The clues that eventually lead the real murderer are a bit basic, but on the whole, Crime and Punishment is a fun story to read.

Caff's Memories (volume 41) starts with a call by Lin, an old friend of Touma's from Taiwan. Lin had gone to the United States to study when Touma was attending high school there, and Touma helped Lin with her English lessons. Later, Lin married Caff Darby, a highly succesful financier, and they lived a happy life together, but Caff is now in prison. Lin begs Touma to visit Caff and to go over Caff's case with him, and that's how we find Touma visiting Caff in prison. At first, the arrogant Caff wants to throw Touma out, but when he hears it was Lin who sent him hear, he calms down a bit, and Touma asks him to tell him his story, and how he ended up in prison. Caff claims he's been set-up, and starts his story how he first met Lin, how he became impressed with her fortune telling skills, and how they eventually fell in love, married and became rich as an investors thanks to Lin's powers. Eventually, Touma points out to Caff what really happened based on the story, but overall, I wasn't too big a fan of this tale. Like many of Q.E.D. stories, the core mystery plots revolves around Touma interpreting long chains of events (often a life story) differently than the persons who experienced it themselves and I think the basic idea isn't bad per se, but come on, Katou is cheating a bit here. It does result in a very emotional story that leaves an impression, but it feels like the story is just written completely around this punchline. It's not a story you'd see in Conan or Kindaichi Shounen, granted and if you're into reading more character-focused mystery stories, this is a good example of Q.E.D. being far superior to those series in that respect, but still, I feel cheated.

Touma meets up with Koyuki, a professional editor who sometimes needs to pick Touma's brain for her work regarding specialistic topics. In Pilgrimage (volume 46) however, she wants Touma's help for a more personal reason. Her deceased father was a well-known writer of non-fiction books, always based on meticulous research and great journalistic work. A while back, she came across an unpublished manuscript by him titled Pilgrim. The words "Coincidence? Or Intentionally?" scribbled on the folder seem to point to the reason why it was never published, but she doesn't understand why her father held on on this story, and she hopes Touma can shed light on the matter. Koyuki's father had done research on Usui Shigeru, a talented man in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during World War II. His wife had been murdered soon after they had gotten married in 1940. The murderer was an ordinary street robber Yamai Seimei, who had immediately fled the country. With the ongoing war, not much could be done about Yamai, but when the Japanese army occupied French Indochina, they stumbled upon Yamai, who was now finally captured for good and had to await his trial in Hanoi. Usui is given permission to travel to Hanoi to attend the trial of the murderer of his wife, but after passing Shanghai and arriving in the city of Nanchang, he gets off the train and tells his assistant he plans to walk the remaining 1000 kilometers to Hanoi. While the assistant tries to talk him out of it as it's not only an extremely long trip, but also very dangerous, Usui has made up his mind. It takes a harrowing two months for Usui to arrive in Hanoi, but at the trial, Usui makes a surprising statement: he advises the court not to give Yamai the death sentence, even if Yamai did kill his poor wife. In the end, nobody knew exactly why Usui made his pilgrimage on foot and why he had forgiven Yamai.

First of all: wow, I can safely say I'm absolutely sure that this is the first time I've read any story set in French Indochina during the Japanese occupation in World War II. So cookies for originality. Like Caff's Memories, this story is about Touma reinterpreting the events in a way completely different from the other people, though I think the reader can probably make a guess as to Usui's motives for pleading for Yamai's life and for going on the pilgrimage (especially as the other characters in the story propose a lot of theories, but seem to be avoiding one certain line of thinking). Ultimately though, I think Pilgrimage is an excellent example of the human-drama focused mystery tale that you definitely don't see in Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen and what really sets Katou's style of storytelling apart. These stories that focus on stories set in the past (often related to some actual historical event), about characters with very unique and strong-headed personalities that clash with each other and eventually do something that seems like a total mystery until Touma shows how one can interpret their actions in a way that seems logical to those specific characters.

By the way, I can sorta get Touma always flying across the world for a case, but how come Kana's also often going along abroad in this series? It's like these high school students get to go abroad every other volume...

Whereas the Arisugawa-edited volume seems to have focused more on stories with tropes like the impossible murder, locked rooms and serial killings, Tanaka Yoshiki's selection seems to be focused more on stories that focus on the human drama that eventually results in death. In that sense, I think Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou The Best - Tanaka Yoshiki Selection makes a better case for this series to show what makes it unique and distinct from other mystery manga series. For people who want more fleshed-out characters in a mystery tale and a focus on their drama and motives, Q.E.D. seems a far more logical choice than Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen, which focus more on the case-of-the-week. I do like how these two The Best volumes are so radically different in terms of theme, so it's likely I will eventually pick up the The Best volume edited by Tsuji Masaki to see what his take on the series is.

Original Japanese title(s): 加藤元浩（原） 田中芳樹（編）『Q.E.D. -証明終了- The Best 田中芳樹Selection』