Case Closed 37

Gosho Aoyama – Viz – 2011 – 72+ volumes

To make up for the recent number of stories featuring Harley and the Detective Boys, Aoyama rewards my patience with a story all about Richard Moore. Detective Moore really is my favorite.

But first, we resolve the bomber case from last time. It goes down just about the way you expect. It’s obvious where the bomb is planted, so no surprises there, and the clue on the bomb Conan was deactivating was also obvious, but linking the English word to the Japanese place name (a place name I had forgotten, no less) escaped me. And Sato and Takagi get to do their thing as well. Sato took things a little further than I was expecting, which is nice, but otherwise the police angle was just about what you’d expect.

Second is the Detective Moore case. He gets invited to host a mystery drama, starring an old school friend of his. While he’s on set, a cast member is murdered (which seems to happen wherever he goes now), and Detective Moore has to solve the case. And when I say Detective Moore, I mean that Conan is out of his sleepy-time darts and Detective Moore has to solve the case. He’s not stupid, and I’m glad he gets to do stories like this from time to time. The case itself wasn’t that interesting, but I didn’t care too much since I was otherwise blinded by joy at Moore getting a serious role.

I love that, even during a story where he gets to be more than a rowdy background character, his interaction with Conan stays the same. He just slaps him around for digging around crime scenes and considers him a general nuisance. It makes you wonder what his opinions of the strange boy staying at his house are, or if he bothers to think about him at all. His insight into the parental mindframe in this story also makes you wonder what he’d think if he knew that Conan was really Jimmy, and harbored a huge crush on his daughter.

Anyway, he goes back to comic relief in the next story, when he’s hired to find a missing software programmer. He finds him, all right, and the man is – SURPRISE! – dead in his hotel room. Sleeping Moore solves the case once again. I love that, in the world of Detective Conan, crimes of passion are still elaborately set up to erase all evidence contrary to the idea that the death was accidental.

What’s most interesting about that case is that the man is possibly linked to the Black Organization. Actually, that’s not interesting at all, because I dislike the Black Organization plots. Which is a shame, because that’s the actual plot of the series. All the same, it doesn’t come up that often, so I at least read a little closer when we get stories like this.

This computer programmer was linked to the Black Organization somehow, and Conan rushes through the case in order to get a look at the man’s diary to see if there are any clues about the members and their activities. In the next case, the diary yields many clues, and Conan and Agasa find out that there might be most of a program for the Black Organization available in the programmer’s vacation home. Along the way, there’s all sorts of reports of a jewel heist going on, so that happens too, and the volume ends on a cliffhanger where it’s obvious Conan somehow has the upper hand.

But I still love it. I love every page. Again, probably not for everyone, since the stories are mostly one-shots and fairly repetitive, but I can’t get enough of these silly mystery plot devices and the silly characters. What can I say? I’m a fan for life.