Uncivil War

"Avengers... assemble."

"Avenger: End Game"

So I will never forget that when I watched Avengers: End Game in theaters, just before Captain America said the line, a kid in the audience cried "Assemble!" just before Captain America could, kinda drowning him out...

Official crossovers between different mystery series from different authors are not non-existent, but they are certainly not common. And most of the time, you can guess that these crossovers will follow the familiar comic crossover pattern, which even people who don't read comics will be familiar with due to its usage in for example the Marvel Cinematic Universe: heroes first have a confrontation with each other due to a misunderstanding or shenanigans cooked up by the villain, and eventually the heroes work together to take the villain down together. But what if you had a crossover with various detectives who aren't series detectives? What if you had detectives with different powers (deduction methods) who would compete. Who would be the best one? That is the question in Nitadori Kei's Suiri Taisen ("The Great Deduction War", 2021), which also has the less interesting English title of Who is the Best One?. The grandfather of the two cousins Yamato and Meguru (the narrator) was a big fan of mystery fiction, and when he obtained a Christian relic, he saw his chance. He contacted several churches across the world and invited them to participate in a special game of wits, in which the winner would be awarded the relic. Yamato and Meguru were to help out with the game, but their grandfather passed away just before the game starts, meaning now they have to lead it together with the family attorney. What they had not expected however, was that the various churches across the world would send almost superhuman (or even non-human!) detectives to represent them in the big war for the relic. Yamato and Meguru had perhaps at best hoped for a Father Brown-esque person to participate in the mystery game their grandfather came up with, but instead, we have a detective who can detect lies just by listening to someone speaking, a detective with super-heightened senses who can see, smell, taste, hear and feel the smallest details, a detective who can "clock up" his brain to consider every possibility within seconds and there's even a detective AI! Who will be the greatest detective of them all when the game starts!?

Okay, this is one of those books that I basically bought based on the title alone, and a quick look at the blurb. Having detectives with different work methods duke it out sounds like an amazing premise, and whereas in series, you often end up with a foil detective who obviously isn't going to beat the series detective, or you have the crossover where "everybody has to win" at the end, having a single (standalone) work with different detectives, and giving them all a reason to want to win the game individually (because they are all hired to win the relic), sounds exciting, right? I had only read one other work by Nitadori before this one, Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu, which was a comedic book where each story featured a feat of narrative trickery, but with a much moodier cover and a more "serious" set-up, I was curious to see what Nitadori would do with the idea of a "war" between the detectives.

Though it takes a while before we get to the war! For the first half of the book is used to introduce the various detectives from the different countries, with all but one of the participants getting their own chapter/short story where we see them solve a case in their home country, using their own unique powers. The opening chapter for example introduces us to Charlotte, the "operator" of the AI Detective Judas, which can solve cases with its computing power, of course if and only if the correct and relevant data is entered in the program. Her case involves a rather interesting decapitation case inside a room which only one person had the key to, but it doesn't appear he is really the murderer, so how does this work out? This is a pretty clever locked room mystery, but it's not really realistic. I think the trick is brilliant actually, and like it a lot, but I hadn't really expected this trick in this book, and especially not as the opening story. I can imagine myself accepting it easier if this had been presented in a comic format or something like that, because I'm not sure whether this really works like this physically, and 'reading' the trick somehow feels less convincing than seeing it. The other introducing chapters are all relatively short, and usually revolve around a one-trick idea that is used to show off the different powers of the detectives. The Ukrainian detective Bogdan Korniyenko for example has "Clock Up" (no, he's not a Kamen Rider), meaning he can speed up his thought process and consider countless of theories and possibilities within a second (though this takes a physical and mental toll, of course). This not only means he can solve cases relatively fast, but he can also do things that normally would take hours and even smaller actions, like stumbling over something, could be avoided if he starts Clock Up to take the best actions "during" the fall. Maria from Japan has heightened senses, which is not super interesting because it basically only means she can find small clues normal people usually can't, while Brazilian Mattheus can detect someone lying with a 100% accuracy by listening to them. Each of their cases of course introduces an element that requires their specific powers to find certain clues or to make certain logical deductions, but I think that as a standalone story, the first one (AI Detective) is the most memorable, and the others are more "functional" than really memorable, so I'll not write more about them.

In the second half of the story, the detectives arrive in Hokkaido, where they are to participate in the game to win the relic, with the cousins Yamato and Meguru, and the attorney Yamakawa organizing the 'war for the relic', even though Yamato and Meguru don't really know what the game was their grandfather planned before his unexpected death: they only know the idea is that there'll be a battle of the wits between the detectives and that the winner will receive the relic. The detectives and the organizers are all staying in cottages in a snow-covered camp, divided in two sides by a river, but the snowfall is pretty heavy, covering large parts of the camp. The first day is just the arrival, but the following day, they find the attorney Yamakawa murdered in his room. It appears this is the game of wits, and the detectives are all eager to solve the murder of Yamakawa and obtain the relic for their employers. What follows is an entertaining back-and-forth of different theories about who the killer is and how the murderer managed to kill Yamakawa without leaving clear clues (like footprints in the snow). Each detective is intent on winning the relic, and because they all have different powers and don't work together, they all obtain different clues, which allows them to come up with different theories which of course point at different people. It reminded me a bit of Yamaguchi Masaya's The 13th Detective, which was originally a game book and at the start of the story, you can choose one out of three different partner detectives, who will lead you down a different path and allow you to find different clues (disclosure: I translated Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead). Here too you have different detectives competing, each holding on on clues only they have, with for example Mattheus being able to detect any person lying but of course not willing to share that information, or the AI Detective being able to make certain calculations no person can. Because the crime scene is on one side of a river, with an observed bridge, and some people staying in cottages on one side of the river and others on the other, there's also a nice "is it an impossible crime?" angle to it: if the murderer is one of the people staying on the side of the crime scene, how did they come up with an alibi (an impossible alibi [time] angle), and if the murderer was on the other side of the river, how did they make their way to the crime scene unseen (an impossible alibi [space] angle). This whole set-up is defnitely the best part of the book, with one case offering many solutions because everyone tackles it from a different angle, and while some solutions are a bit too simple, others are quite interesting and could've been used as "real" solutions too. And because we got the introductions of the abilities of the various detectives earlier, it also feels 'fair' in the sense we don't hear about Mattheus' lie detector ability midway.

Though I have to say, I was a bit disappointed not all the detectives' abilities are equal. An ability like having better senses, or have an AI do complicated calculations are still on the realistic side of things, and even a person being able to think faster is okay, but Mattheus can literally just sense people lying as if it were a mutant power, and a fifth detective introduced in the second half of the story has a power that is really far beyond anything realistic, so the balance is kinda off. The book is set in an, on the whole, realistic world, so having supernatural powers, rather than slightly better than normal human powers, felt a bit weird. The tone of the book is also a bit weird at times: it is not as blatantly funny as the other book by Nitadori I read (Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu), and most of the time definitely more serious, but there's also a lot of light-hearted banter, pop culture references and other comedic touches like the cheeky attitude the AI Detective has towards Charlotte, but it's not always funny, so like the detective powers, it sometimes felt like Nitadori didn't know exactly what the exact tone or setting of the story was supposed to be.

I have to admit though that when the battle for the relic has been fought and the war is over... the ending is not nearly as satisfying as the preceding parts. Of course, with all these detectives competing for the relic, the book needs to work towards a conclusion that gives everyone *something* and still resolve the matter of who gets the relic, but the final solution presented to the reader is not nearly as clever as some of the solutions presented earlier, and on the whole, it's not a solution I like in general. Sure, there were clues, but I have seen Nitadori use the same type of clues in this book and Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu in more convincing ways, so it was a bit disappointing to see a less impressing example used for the final solution. It's of course difficult to come up with different solutions for the different detectives, and a final solution to surpass those ones too, but the way it suddenly shifted towards this final solution was just too abrupt, and feels less polished compared to the much better build-up to this moment.

But despite a somewhat disappointing ending, I do like Suiri Taisen, as the parts introducing the detectives and having them compete each other is really fun. It's a book that worked because it was a standalone book though, because you really can't guess who will win and how, but I wouldn't mind seeing for example Bogdan Korniyenko return in his own book. Not all parts of the book are as good, so it's not a book I love unconditionally, but certainly worth a read!

Original Japanese title(s):  似鳥鶏『推理大戦』