Case Closed volume 56 begins with a whodunit I was immediately attracted to. A famous mystery novelist is going to be featured in a magazine piece, so he, detective Richard Moore, the interviewer, and the photographer spend the night at his house. After we observe him berating his editor over a small, obsessive point, they all retire for the night — but in the morning, the writer is found dead! The attention to detail, the publishing characters, and the classic […]

It’s been a long time — five years and nearly 20 volumes — since I last checked in with Case Closed by Gosho Aoyama. It launched in the US in 2004, and it’s quite impressive to see how it’s still going strong. Although this is the latest book out here, there are 85 volumes in Japan so far, where it began in 1994. Volume 52 was a great choice to try again, since all the mysteries are self-contained, starting and […]

It’s always fun dipping back into the various mysteries solved by the six-year-old-who-is-really-a-15-year-old — but I still wish that the books were divided up differently. This volume has two chapters finishing up the case from the last book; a four-part complete story; another three-chapter quandary; and then two chapters beginning a new puzzle. To find out what happens there, with a teacher setting a game for her students, I guess I’ll need to get the next book in March. Once […]

Like an episode of a good television serial, the latest edition of Case Closed by Gosho Aoyama may not be outstanding or unique, but it is entertaining in a fashion consistent with the series overall. (The most recent entry in the series I’ve reviewed was volume 11.) First comes the conclusion to the last case from the previous book. I do wish that they would divvy up the chapters better, or more prominently label the books — I would have […]

Volume 11 is a great place to sample the Case Closed series by Gosho Aoyama, since this volume contains three complete cases and the solution to a fourth, with no cliffhangers. The first chapter shows boy detective Conan concluding a case from the last book. Like many of his stories, it’s Encyclopedia Brown-like — if you can find the single wrong item or recall the obscure knowledge that forms a clue, you’re well on your way to solving the case […]

I’m a little lost. At the end of volume two, the kids Conan was forced to go to school with were threatening to investigate his deserted home. (I say “forced” because even though he has the mind of an almost-adult, he looks like a six-year-old.) I took this to be a hint toward the next storyline; apparently, it was just a joke, since volume three opens with Conan, Rachel, and her dad on a cruise ship, returning from an island […]

Jimmy Kudo, high school junior, idolizes Sherlock Holmes and solves mysteries for the police department in Case Closed, a long-running manga action comedy by Gosho Aoyama. After trailing bad guys to a mysterious meeting, he’s knocked out and poisoned. Although the villains meant to kill him, they instead turn him physically into a six-year-old boy. He winds up working with an incompetent private investigator, the father of the girl he has a crush on, while a mad scientist tries to […]