Case Closed 35

Gosho Aoyama – Viz – 2010 – 72+ volumes

It’s been so long since I read a volume of this series! This was a bad place to step back in. It’s good, but a little ridiculous. It’s a flashback to a trip that Jimmy and Rachael take to New York with Jimmy’s mom, and the mysteries just keep piling up one right after the other. After dealing with the plane ride stuff last volume, Jimmy meets with his mom and rides with her to a theater, where he gets to solve a murder. While taking a taxi to the hotel after that, he and Rachael run into an escaped serial killer. It’s easy to take these coincidences when there’s a break in the timeline, I suppose, but one right after the other? I’m not sure why that was triggering my “unlikely” meter so badly here. I suspend my disbelief about a lot of other things.

Anyway, the theater mystery was quite good. A handsome lead actor with at least four lovers is murdered as he is performing on-stage with all four women. Is it a sniper, or one of the women? The sniper seems like a red herring, but then again, it’s impossible for the women to have shot him, since the bullet trajectory was pointing down, and he’s such a tall man. The solution is a clever one, as always, and I liked the attention to the details of the stage and the work that went into describing the plot of the play they were performing, as well as the myth behind it.

The serial murder thing… the less said, the better.

The flashback was pretty great, too, since we got to see Jimmy as himself rather than the diminutive Conan. I took it for granted at the beginning of the volume, but stories like that only make the humiliation of Jimmy having to act Conan all the sweeter.

The next mystery was a good one too, where Conan, Rachael, and Detective Moore travel to a haunted house for no adequately explained reason, then listen to the ghost story from the point of view of the four residents of the building. There are symptoms of a haunting, all right. Surprisingly, the story wasn’t about Conan tackling the haunting events logically, but more about the different points of view from the people in the building. It was a pretty interesting take on this type of story. And the haunting symptoms were great, too. Especially the blood in the filthy toilet.

Next was a story about Conan’s elementary school classmates and Anita. I tend not to like these types of stories, but this one was about Mitch wandering off by himself and going to great lengths to get lost in the woods with a murderer on the loose. The murderer’s story, his reaction to Mitch, and Mitch’s reason for being there, were all fairly interesting.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t too much character-driven story in this volume. Case Closed is definitely not a series that exercises those muscles very often, but I enjoy it when it does. There’s a hint of it at the end of the New York flashback, but it doesn’t last for more than a few panels. I really like the characters though, especially the hilariously surly and apathetic Detective Moore. Any story where he’s left to his own devices, like the ghost story here, is bound to be entertaining.

Next volume starts with a language riddle. These always fall a little flat in translation, unfortunately, but I doubt it will keep me away for very long.

Also, the detective profile in the back of the volume was on Ellery Queen’s Drury Lane. I need to find a collection of those stories immediately.