Spiral 1

Kyo Shirodaira / Eita Mizuno – Yen Press – 2007 – 15 volumes

I really, really liked Record of a Fallen Vampire, also by Kyo Shirodaira, so… you know. We also have this in English, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t read it. I think RoaFV has an advantage in that the twisty, winding story that repeatedly flips itself on its head also involves dark, brooding vampires and lots of inherent emo, but I still think he’s good at making a mystery and revealing key points at just the right time. So I dug into Spiral.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to be a straight-out mystery. Someone is murdered on the first page, and from that point on, prickly and somewhat apathetic (at first) Ayumu is saddled with finding the killer or winding up being accused of a crime he didn’t commit. The structure is very similar to Case Closed, where there is a crime, Ayumu gathers the details and figure things out, then there’s just a bit more poking around to encourage the reader to figure things out before Ayumu reveals the bad guy in grand style.

It is exactly like Case Closed, actually, except each mystery leads into another one that is slowly leading back to the disappearance of Ayumu’s brother two years ago. Ayumu’s brother was a brilliant detective on the police force, and I’m half expecting him to be an adult Shinichi Kudo. Ayumu is what Conan would be, attitude and all, had he not been shrunken down.

It seems unfair to compare it to Case Closed, the most popular mystery manga and one of the most popular manga of all time, but they really are similar, and not just in a “they’re both episodic mysteries with a schoolboy detective” way. Most mystery novels I read are more along the lines of the main character groping blindly through a series of clues before finally putting the pieces together, usually right before something terrible happens to them in the climax of the novel. Both Conan and Ayumu are geniuses who sleuthing just comes easy to. They don’t grope blindly for anything, they just pick things up at the crime scene and figure things out almost instantly. The reader often can’t make sense of what’s going on until it’s spelled out explicitly. And neither Conan nor Ayumu need to do research or use additional resources to find out the meaning of a clue. They just know. Format has a lot to do with that, since with a chapter a week, it would be boring to dwell on the same case for more than a couple months. And it seems like, with the structure of this series, it will move away from the episodic mysteries and more into an issue that will be central to the plot. The “blade children” and the disappearance of Ayumu’s brother seem like they will take center stage before too long, we just have to make it there first.

And to be fair, one difference in Spiral is Hiyono, a friend Ayumu picks up in the first chapter. She’s a bouncy, spirited girl who is editor of the school newspaper and has the frightening talent of picking up any and all gossip you could possibly want. Ayumu and she, after starting off on the wrong foot, form a team, and frequently Ayumu would’t be able to solve cases without the social insight Hiyono gathers on the people involved.

Comparing it to Case Closed isn’t an insult, either. I love that series, and this one works just as well as it does. It is well-written, and as far as I’m concerned, as long as the mysteries continue to be interesting and different enough in their own way, there’s no problem. I doubt it’s even really copying Case Closed, since this is also a valid approach to writing a mystery story, especially one told in a short format like this. I do wish I could compare Kindaichi Case Files to these, but I’ve never read it.

The characters do evolve through the course of even this graphic novel. Where at first Ayumu sees being a murder suspect as a major pain, he willfully involves himself in all the cases after that, possibly in order to find out what happened to his brother. And Hiyono mellows out, though she keeps her bouncy, pleasant edge. The other characters, including Ayumu’s older sister (?) and her partner on the police force, are still mostly just serving a role in the story, but I’m interested in seeing where they go from here.

So far, so good. I like a good mystery, and this looks like it’s going places before too long. After seeing how many good turns Shirodaira gave us in Record of a Fallen Vampire, I definitely have high hopes for this series.