Secret Seven Mystery

Seven little Soldier Boys chopping up sticks;  

One chopped himself in halves and then there were six

"And Then There Were None"

A series about a number of buildings built by the same architect that were designed to be used in murders? Well that sounds familiar...

Xeno is a young man who was once found lying passed out on the street, but when he woke up in the hospital, the doctors learned two things. First was that Xeno had lost all memories of his past and nobody knows where he came from or why he's now suffering from amnesia. The second thing they learned was that Xeno was a brilliant detective: the moment he woke up, he managed to solve a case involving one of the doctors present in the room just by looking at him. With the help of some sponsors, Xeno has now managed to set himself up as a detective, and a succesful one at that too, because there are few people in Imperial Japan who can claim to have never heard of the detective with amnesia. During the investigation in a baseball stadium into an impossible murder on a pitcher during a game, Xeno learns that the criminal mastermind who had been acting as a crime consultant he had been hearing rumors about is in fact the famous architect Kai Shichirou, Kai reveals to Xeno that he has secretly prepared seven of his creations in such a way they can be used to commit inexplicable, impossible murders like locked room murders and he challenges Xeno to solve all seven of his locked murder rooms. With the help of his newly recruited assistant D-Zaka Eira, a former assassin, Xeno travels across Japan to solve Kai's devious death traps in the manga Tantei Xeno to Nanatsu no Satsujin Misshitsu or Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms, written by Nanatsuki Kyouichi and illustrated by Sugiyama Teppei,

Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms is a manga series which was originally serialized in Shonen Sunday (alongside Detective Conan) between 2018 and 2019, and ultimately collected in 8 volumes. I first learned of its existence through those publisher's pamphlets you always get with new manga releases (in my case, the most recent Conan volume at the time) and while the premise sounded interesting, I never really got around to it, and when I heard it had ended at 8 volumes, I also assumed its run wasn't anything exceptional, because... well, the title says The Seven Locked Murder Rooms, so either you'd have about one murder room per volume/10~11 chapters and very little room to do anything else (like the Kindaichi Shounen series), or each murder room story would have to be relatively short, which worried me in a different way because then it seemed the locked murder rooms wouldn't be as important as the title would suggest! At 8 volumes, I doubted Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms would be a mind-blowing series, and going in with those expectations... Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms was on the whole entertaining, even if not without its flaws.

Considering the series ran next to Conan in Shonen Sunday, it's more than tempting to compare the two series, especially as storytelling-wise, the two do feel similar. Unlike Kindaichi Shounen's long stories, Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms in general did seem structured closer to Conan, with short stories about four chapters long, though Detective Xeno has more direct connections between each story, with events in one story often being directly used as the set-up for the next story.  When it comes to mystery plot however, there's an obvious difference in style of plotting, and it's one of the weaker points of Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms: a lot of the individual stories revolve around one single idea, which makes them feel very empty. The first of the Seven Locked Murder Rooms Xeno and Eira encounter for example is the Tombstone Manor, where a man is seen to be stabbed with the murder weapon, but no attacker is seen, suggesting the presence of a ghost, a ghost who later in the story is even able to throw policemen out of the windows! But the story is really short, and ultimately, it's all made by possible by the secret death trap-like idea Kai Shichirou has installed inside the Tombstone Manor and once you figure out what that is, you have solved everything, as there are basically no other mysteries in the plot. Clewing is also fairly sparse in these stories, so you don't even feel really rewarded for figuring these stories out: you either happen to think of the death trap, or not, as the clues are so little and uninspired, they don't really work as a guide for those who try to piece the things together based on the presented clues. And that's how the stories mostly are in this series: a mystery (often impossible) that is just one trick that's being played, and once you solve that, you know everything. In Conan, even the shortest stories often consist of multiple minor tricks strung together, not relying on one single idea but stringing a few together to make what could've been a minor story into something much more rewarding, but Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms very, very seldom does that, making a lot of the stories feel like one-trick ponies.

But I did say I did ultimately enjoy the series. The atmosphere, while often comedic, is at times also darker than Conan and I think that most of the Seven Locked Murder Rooms, even if they are all built around one gimmick, are pretty fun, in the "okay, that's just silly and in the real world that'd be impractical, but guys, this is fiction and man, that' s fun!!" sense of the word. The murder gimmicks Kai has built in his seven buildings are like the ideas you'd expect from early Shimada, so like the ideas seen in Murder in the Crooked House. Things moving around, gigantic mechanisms, the kind of ideas that are absolutely grand, over-the-top, but oh-so-memorable and the kind of things that remind you detective fiction doesn't need to be realistic to be entertaining. The ideas behind the first two Locked Murder Rooms we see, the Tombstone Manor and a music university campus, are really silly but deliciously entertaining as mystery fiction for example. I do have to say some of the Seven Locked Murder Rooms don't actually... create locked room murders. Only about half of them have tricks that create locked room/impossible murders, while others are just elaborate death traps that make it very obvious what happened to the victims: the traps would not leave the scene in a way that'd seem "impossible" to the police, only as "implausible" that something like that would've happened... So that's a bit disappointing. Luckily. the series doesn't revolve solely around the main Seven Locked Murder Rooms: there are a few shorter stories in between, and some of time are interesting mystery stories, even if they too are often written around one single idea. One involves a mercenary of a PMC who wants Xeno to explain how how his unit got annihilated in Kabul: this style of a person talking about a past incident that Xeno explains by reinterpreting the events reminds of the type of storytelling found in Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou and C.M.B. and while very simple, the story is quite enterrtaining. Another story involves a female fashion designer and her stalker, and this short, but memorable inverted story feels like it could've been in Sherdock or a similar series. Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms will seldom truly astonish the reader, but the presentation is fine and the ideas, even if they could've been developed more, can be fun.

I do think the series is at its best from the start up to the mid-way point. At first the series seems like it will focus on the Seven Locked Murder Rooms, but it introduces a lot more diversity with the shorter stories (like the two I mentioned above), with different kind of mysteries for Xeno to solve, and more characters appear too. This builds up to a major case about half-way the series, which involves Xeno and Eira travelling to Kai Shichirou's paternal island, where his wealthy family (his father Kuga Ichizou and his half-brothers of the Kuga family) still reside. While technically, the series divides all the events that occur here as seperate stories, they all happen one after another and are interlinked, so basically form one large story in the style of Kindaichi Shounen. For example the story opens with a person being stabbed by a knife in the waiting room of the ferry that's going to bring Xeno and Eira to the island, and it's here where they first meet with Kai Shichirou's niece Kuga Manami. On the island, Xeno and Eira get involved in a case involving the disappearance of Kuga Ichizou from his personal retreat, a series of (attempted) murders on Kuga family members and a secret tied to the island's past, and on the whole, the story is pretty amusing, even if the individual mysteries do feel very "isolated" from another (i.e. it's really a series of seperate events strung together, even if they do form one narrative together).

However, while the series had been dropping hints about links between Kai Shichirou's Seven Locked Murder Rooms and Xeno's own forgotten past from the start, it appears that after the mid-way point the writer got a note from his editors to start wrapping things up, and suddenly we get info dumps and reveals out of nowhere, and the story starts sprinting towards the finale from that point on. This is when the Seven Locked Murder Rooms become less interesting, though the murder gimmick in the fortress in the bay of the imperial capital was one of the better ideas in the series. But the story has to wrap up too many things in too little time, so the concept of Eira, a former assassin who's acting as Xeno's assistant (and voice of reason, and source of comedy) feels a bit underdeveloped, like she should have been given one or two more stories focusing on her to really wrap her story up, and some characters suddenly make a surprise apperance near the end, as if they were established, beloved characters when in fact they had appeared only once before: they probably would've been developed as more interesting recurring characters had the series been longer, but now their later appearances feel like cameos rather than triumphant returns. The mysteries do feel a lot less interesting in the final half of the series in general, which is a shame, as I do think the first half showed a rising line in terms of mystery, with the series slowly introducing more diversity (inverted stories, psychological mysteries, "situational" mysteries) and a grander world with each subsequent volume and then it suddenly becomes very narrow again.

For me, Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms is perhaps a perfect example of "Yes, but...". If you ask me whether I enjoyed reading it, it's a definite yes, because I read it in just four or five days, so that definitely means I felt the series brought me more entertainment than frustration and there are some fun, memorable murder tricks shown off in this series, but... yeah, it's undeniable a lot of the cool ideas feel like they could've been developed even further into something much more, and because of the relatively short run of eight volumes, the story has to start preparing for the finale soon and a lot of characters and storylines come out rather rushed because of that. There are plenty of series that feel complete and completely developed within a very limited number of volumes, but you can definitely feel that Detective Xeno And The Seven Locked Murder Rooms has a set-up for a series that was supposed to be longer, and that's why a lot of ideas don't go anywhere ultimately. I'd try to read until the long story halfway the series, and if you like it up to that point, you might as well read the remaining two volumes for the hasty closure it brings. I'd be interested in seeing more of the world (but not focusing solely on a story-related gimmick like the Seven Locked Murder Rooms), but I doubt this series will ever see a sequel.

Original Japanese title(s): 七月鏡一（原） 杉山鉄兵（画）『探偵ゼノと7つの殺人密室』