Phantom of the Knight

"Only you can put the king in check, vigilante. Move according to the rules, or it's the end of the day."

"Batman: The Animated Series"

I wish we could return to the schedule of having three or four new Detective Conan volumes a year instead of the barely two we get now...

It's been about six months since we last saw a new Detective Conan volume so here we have volume 104. I am not really sure why they didn't time the home video release of this year's theatrical release, Kurogane no Submarine, with this volume, as there's a gap of over a month now even though they are usually quite good at timing these kinds of releases, but this is the way things go, and what do we have this time? A very, very disappointing volume indeed, that is only kinda saved by one story, but also not really. The volume opens with The Knight Was Witness, where we learn Inspector Shiratori is participating in an amateur chess competition. His girlfriend Kobayashi is there to cheer him on, as is fellow teacher Wakasa, and their pupils the Detective Boys. They also run into Kuroda, the Managing Officer of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police (so Shiratori's superior), who also turns out to be quite the mean chess player. During the first round, someone plays Amazing Grace, which seems to unsettle a few of the players, who say something similar happened last year too. During the down-time between rounds, a few players who finished their games early chat and have some drinks, but then one person in the room suddenly has his drink shot into fragments by an crossbow arrow! Kuroda and Conan run into the hallway in the hopes of finding the assailant, but they onyl find a second victim in the men's bathroom, who not only has an arrow shot in his stomach, but next to him lies his belongings.... and a keychain figure of a Knight's piece, which Kobayashi had gifted Shiratori earlier.  He claims he lost the figure and that he had been making a call at the stairs. Security footage confirms nobody took the elevators after the victim arrived at the floor, limiting the number of suspects to three, plus Shiratori, who seems to be the main suspect considering his keychain was found next to the victim. But what are those blood smears in that magazine of the victim?

A dying message of course, and not a very interesting one either. Wordplay dying messages are seldom my favorite, and one major clue that serves as a kinda twist is telegraphed with such enormous lights, it's hard to miss. The story also seems only to be an excuse to serve as a prologue to the next story: Kuroda sees Conan solving the riddle of the Knight so fast, he decides to confide to Conan about an incident he got involved with 17 years ago in the United States, involving a bloody knight's piece...

And fans who have been reading Conan this whole time of course know what Kuroda's finally going to tell Conan about, as we have been getting hints about a murder case involving a wealthy person that occured 17 years ago for a long time ago, and we know the incident also involved Rum, the second-in-rank in the Black Organization that created the drug that shrunk Kudo Shinichi to his current child-form, forcing himself to play the role of Conan. We also know other suspicious figures were involved one way or another with this case, but not exactly how, so in The Truth of 17 Years Ago, we finally get the story told completely, via flashbacks of both Kuroda and Rum themselves, who has plans to assassinate a certain person involved with this incident. The case involves the death of the wealthy Amanda Hughes, an elderly lady with both financial and political powers, who is also an amateur chess player who recently became friends with a young, but very talented shogi player. She has caught the attention of a certain crime organization however, who plan to assasinate her at her hotel, where the shogi player is also staying. She indeed ends up dead, and others fall victim too to the organization, but Amanda left one curious message as she died, leaving lipstick on her watch and smearing her blood on a knight's piece on her chess board. Kuroda now hopes Conan can solve this message for him.

While this incident taking place 17 years ago is important in Conan-lore as it connects several characters to each other, and also clarifies the actions and motives of a lot of the characters finally (we only got hints and fragments telling us about that before), The Truth of 17 Years Ago is not a very interesting story mystery-wise. Not at all. The fact we got another dying message involving a knight's piece one after another doesn't really help, but the message as Conan solves it doesn't even really tell either Kuroda much, nor the reader: because the reader is also shown flashbacks of Rum (who was involved in the murder 17 years ago), we know exactly what occured when Amanda died, and while Kuroda and Conan didn't know, the message that is decyphered doesn't tell them much in the first place, and it tells us the reader absolutely nothing noteworthy, as we already know the contents of that message via Rum's own flashbacks! So as a mystery, the story isn't interesting at all. There's a secondary plot, where in the current day, we see Rum bossing his sniper assassins Chianti and Korn around to assassinate a certain person, but this plot point also didn't really work for me, because for some reason Conan, after hearing about Kuroda's story, somehow guesses an attempt at this person's life might be made this very moment, and while that is, miraculously, really the case, there is no way Conan could've known that Rum would attempt such a thing on that day at that time, and not on any other day. The created tension thus feels very fake, and ultimately, this story offers nothing mystery-solving-wise. It is just a gigantic lore dump. Which makes this story a must-read for people who want to follow the story, but that is the only reason why you'd be reading this story.

The Ghost Tale of the Man-Eating Classroom is set at Teitan Elementary, where a new transfer student in the class next door has been telling the kids the tale of a ghost who roams classrooms, demanding for food or else it will cause fires or destroy pots and things. Some kids believe him, though Conan is of course sceptical. But then, during lunchtime, the flower bed just outside the classroom catches fire! While Haibara manages to quickly stop the fire with water from a vase with flowers, Conan suspects it's certainly not a ghost who set fire to the flower bed and he even has an idea of what people in the class might have a reason for causing an incident, but on the other hand, nobody saw anybody near the flower bed before the fire started, and besides some burned chips, he also can't find evidence somebody set up some time-mechanism to set fire to the flowers (so the culprit wouldn't need to be there at the time the fire started). The story is... okay? I don't think the fire incident meshes that well with the ghost story (which is more about a ghost demanding food or else it gets hangry) and there's no way you're going to figure out howdunnit based on the hints given, but I think that as a whodunnit, it worked surprisingly well, because the howdunnit feels very natural in relation to the culprit (i.e. the actual means available to that person to create this incident), as well as the whydunnit. As in, the way the incident was started fitted well with the classmates of Conan as we know them from previous stories and also with their characters, so it didn't come out of nowhere. But still, the actual howdunnit is a bit lacking in clues, and there's just no way you'd arrive at that conclusion based on those hints.

Volume 104 ends with the first chapter focusing on Heiji and Kazuha taking the train with... Momiji (Kazuha's rival in love) and her butler, who seems to get involved in a rather mysterious incident while on the train. I am actually curious to how this story will develop further, but we'll have to wait for next year, when the next volume is released...

Anyway, Detective Conan 104 was not one of my favorite volumes of this series. The main story is important lore-wise, but not interesting at all as a standalone mystery tale, and the other two stories which are fully included in the volume are not very memorable either, either because it's another far-fetched dying message, or simply because it was a story that is intentionally not very big: you usually have such "smaller" stories after bigger event stories, which The Truth of 17 Years Ago technically is, and while I understand not all can be as good in bringing a lore-important, action-packed story while also providing a good mystery as volume 100's The FBI Serial Murder Case, this is the other end of the extreme, where it focuses so much on finally conveying some context to an event that had been hinted at over the course of many years, to the extent it forgets to be interesting as a standalone mystery too. Let's hope volume 105, scheduled for next year (probably when the new film releases in April), is better!

Original Japanese title(s): 青山剛昌 『名探偵コナン』第104巻