London calling.
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Gosho Aoyama
Translation/Adaptation: Tetsuichiro Miyaki
What They Say
When Conan gets an invitation to London, he’s thrilled. What could be better than visiting the home of his hero, Sherlock Holmes? But there’s only one way he can get there: by becoming Jimmy Kudo again! Temporarily returned to his true age, Jimmy sets out on the trail of a devilish serial killer plotting an attack at the Wimbledon tournament. With London in turmoil, can Jimmy find a chance to confess his feelings to Rachel, or will love mean zero in tennis as well as in life?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I really wasn’t expecting a lesson on VHS vs. Betamax in this volume of Case Closed, but that’s exactly what we get in the first case. A trip to school to hand out fliers results in Detective Chiba visiting his old elementary school. A trip to the AV archives leads him and the kids to track down a message from a childhood crush… who just happens to still be crushing on her grade-school sweetheart. Improbable? Totally. Cute? Absolutely. And it’s always nice to see a case which doesn’t focus on death, especially when the rest of the volume does.
It’s funny that this book came out in English right around when Spiderman: Far From Home did. The plot of both follow similar arcs for the protagonist, except for Conan this wasn’t a school trip, and Rachel is far more naive than MJ.
After a very strange moment where a wealthy English woman in Japan offers to invite the famous detective Moore and family to England out of the blue, the group does just that. It is probably the flimsiest excuse to place the characters where they needed to be for the story. From there they have a run-in with the sibling of a famous tennis player and things escalate to stopping a terrorist attack.
I don’t know why the murderer decides to leave a trail of clues as to where the next attack will take place. He’s doing this all out of revenge and has already stacked up a sizable body count. The poem he left behind, and it’s insane rambling seems so obtuse that it feels like an awful lot of set-up on his end for no reason. He seems disappointed the cops can’t break his code, but if he really wanted to be stopped it is a little late for that.
There is one element of this case that I feel the author failed to be informed of rather than taking the usual creative license. If the police were aware of a potential crime at a public event then they likely would have had screeners, metal detectors, or bomb dogs at the event. The fact the suspect still manages to plant a potentially dangerous object with a person and get it inside remains perhaps the hardest part of this to believe.
That doesn’t mean the case is without the usual ‘suspend your disbelief’ problems that the series often creates. The fact that the tennis player is able to so perfectly plant her shots to spell out a help code is utter nonsense. Nobody is that good, and her opponent would have needed to be in on her plan for it to be executed. Plus there is the hiding of letters on the planted clues, which is a huge stretch. Almost all of the clues, in this case, are huge stretches. Even the reason they go to England in the first place is an enormous stretch.
Then there is the silly runaround that Conan gives Rachel. He had to use the temporary revert serum to even get to England, and once there, wastes his return vial just to give Rachel the slip. Why not just slip into a store and then into a bathroom? She’s not going to follow you there. How he can be so smart yet so stupid is beyond me.
The tension continues to ramp up through this volume until the closing page, where Conan identifies the location of the culprit but we’re left wondering how he’ll stop him. And for that, we need to wait until the next volume. The detective profile for this volume is for Dr. House, which gives an idea of when this book was originally published.
In Summary
All for love, love for all. The quick, cute case which opens this volume is an aperitif for the volume length case which follows. Conan finds himself in the homeland of his namesake, racing against the clock in a foreign land to prevent a massive terrorist strike at Wimbledon. Not only does he have to contend with a murderer, but he also has to navigate an upset Rachel as well. Multi-chapter epic cases in Case Closed are always a treat, as is a change in scenery. I don’t know how Conan plans on stopping the murderer in time to prevent a tragedy this time.
Content Grade: B +
Art Grade: A –
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B +
Age Rating: Teen +
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: July 9, 2019
MSRP: $9.99 US / $12.99 CN / £6.99 UK
