Case Closed Review

The engine has never changed. A body turns up, four or five suspects hold alibis, Conan works out which one is lying about a time, a temperature or a telephone, then tranquillises Kogoro Mouri and delivers the solution in a borrowed voice. Aoyama has run that loop for more than a thousand chapters, and the surprise is how often the trick is genuinely good. The best cases are engineering problems: a locked room assembled out of a refrigerator, a dying message written in a language the victim did not speak, a murder timed to a train.

What has not moved is everything else. The Black Organization plot advances a few inches per decade, Ai Haibara has been on the edge of a cure since the nineties, and Ran has been on the edge of finding out for roughly as long. Nobody ages, nobody leaves, and the running joke that Conan is a walking corpse magnet stopped being a joke several thousand bodies ago.

The art is functional and close to unchanged since 1994: clear figure work, excellent diagrams of how a trick was rigged, very little beyond that. Read one strong volume and this is among the best puzzle serials ever drawn. Read a hundred and eight and the stasis becomes the subject.