Once upon a time, there was an avid fan of detective fiction
named Patrick. Patrick did not yet have a blog named At the Scene of the Crime. Back in this Dark Age, in order to talk
with like-minded mystery fans and find out about book recommendations, Patrick
frequented several Internet forums, where he learned to refer to himself in the
third person. On one of these forums, he was introduced to a manga series
called Case Closed.
Okay, I’m dropping the third-person narration now. When I
first started to read Case Closed, it
was love at first sight, and I read absolutely everything that had been
translated into English to that point within a month. This was my first serious
exposure to manga, and I remember that learning to read the images right-to-left
was a bit of an adjustment. Yet at the end of the day, I loved adored the visuals
of Case Closed. I loved the
characters. And I thought many of the mysteries were imaginative, intriguing,
and some of them are among the most ingenious mysteries I’ve ever encountered.
(Seriously, the locked room in volume 19 is something I still remember.)
The only entry in the series which I reviewed on this blog was Volume
38.
And then… stuff happened. At first, my library didn’t purchase
Volume 39 upon publication, and I was forced to wait. And then other books
popped up on my radar. I started reading even more contemporary mysteries. And Case Closed was set aside… but not
forgotten. (I couldn’t have forgotten if I wanted to, what with reviews
popping up regularly on Beneath the
Stains of Time.)
Then a few weeks ago, I discovered to my delight that this
series is available, in its translated entirety, for the Kindle. The advantage
to this is that I can purchase a volume in this series for as little as $5.
Thus, I can support an author and a series that I genuinely admire. And now
that I’ve a little spare time, that’s exactly what I did, purchasing and
reading Case Closed: Volume 39.
