"Apparently, Heaven is siding with us..."
- Okiya Subaru
I recently finished overviewing and talking about the very introductory cases of the three main suspects of the Bourbon story arc in Detective Conan and decided that while I'm not going to go over the entire series volume by volume in the same manner I'm doing with Tantei Gakuen Q series right now, I will however talk about cases I found memorable in the manga such as the Furinkazan Murder Case. And what better way to start with than talking about Conan's version of the golden age classic Murder on the Orient Express, Mystery Train.
The Bourbon arc is very long, spanning chapters 622 to 898 that were created within many years in real life time by author Gosho Aoyama, and the first half of it frankly had barely anything to do with the main storyline during the time between the introductions of Okiya Subaru and Masumi Sera. Although there were couple neat cases regarding it soon after Okiya's introduction. Anyway, after Masumi gets introduced the story starts to move again as there are a lot of intriguing cases regarding relevant characters and the main storyline, and this time I've decided to begin with a case from post-Masumi introduction era of this series: the Mystery Train arc which reveals us the identity of our big baddie of the arc, Bourbon. I still remember back when this arc came out weekly just how much it was being hyped, and I've re-read the case quite a few times after it as well. Some people were going absolutely mental. The author Gosho Aoyama even drew promotional artwork as a nod to the original Murder on Orient Express movie promos. Honestly though, this case might just be the most multi-layered that Detective Conan has ever gotten with the amount of different key characters with their own allegiances that are on board.
Gin, Vodka and Vermouth from the villain group Black Organization catch a whiff of Sherry through the intel they gained from Bourbon's research. Sherry's real identity is Miyano Shiho who, to escape the Black Organization like a thousand chapters ago in this series, decided to take her own life with a drug she created from the data left behind by her parents... but things didn't go the way she thought as instead of dying, her body shrunk from the effects of the drug and she managed to escape. She found herself in Dr. Agasa's place after looking for Shinichi whom she realized must've shrunk as well, and eventually she became one of our main characters under the alias of Ai Haibara.
Bourbon is hailed as the greatest intel collector in the ranks of the Black Organization. At this point of the arc we don't yet know how he does it, but it's clear that this type of foe is very formidable and intelligent. Up to this point in the story Bourbon's mission has been to try and locate where Sherry had disappeared to, send the information of her whereabouts to the organization and kidnap or eliminate her. The previous volume ended with Haibara being forced to take on the form of the adult Miyano Shiho / Sherry with an antidote that temporarily can return victims of the de-aging drug APTX-4869 to their previous state, to help herself and the Detective Boys; Genta, Mitsuhiko and Ayumi, to escape a dangerous situation.
However Sherry was caught on tape during the case, and the information about her whereabouts was leaked to the black organization by Bourbon. On her finger, Sherry had a ring. An emblem seal which tells everyone that she will be entering a once-in-a-year tour on a Mystery Train known as The Bell Tree Express which has an unknown destination...
As the Black Organization members learn of Sherry boarding the train, they immediately start to theorize that she's been living in the Gunma mountains in secret, waiting to escape from the Kanto region by using the train. The organization members; Vermouth and Gin in particular, agree that the train is one of the most suitable places to eliminate Sherry in as it's a moving steel fortress with no way out. They can find her and she won't be able to escape... however, Vermouth herself has mixed feelings about this all as during the two mysteries on the night of a full moon case, Conan had defeated her before she escaped, and she acknowledged her defeat and let Haibara stay alive. This time, however, she can't do anything about it and just has to try to kill Sherry regardless of letting her live before as, according to Vermouth, "she's (Haibara) the only one that can't be allowed to exist in this world."
It's most likely not going to be a surprise to anyone that the great detective Mouri Kogoro (in this case Kogoro sports mustache eerily similar to Hercule Poirot) is also boarding the Bell Tree Express. The train is a steam locomotive powered by a powerful new diesel engine. Along with Kogoro, however, there is a huge amount of relevant overarching characters that get on the train, everyone with their own personal reasons.
Sonoko Suzuki along with her best friend Ran Mouri have arranged first-class seats on the train as recently Kaito Kid had announced he'd be taking on Sonoko's uncle Jirokichi once again on the train in a month's time when the train gets a special run as a jewel exhibit. In fact, Jirokichi owns the damn train. So, before Kaito Kid arrives on the train to steal gems that will be on the first-class train carriages. Sonoko wanted to plant a love letter for Kid on the first-class ahead of time.
At the same time, our tomboy detective Masumi Sera also makes her appearance on the train, claiming that it's only natural for a detective to ride a Mystery Train.
Along with Kogoro, the detective boys; Mitsuhiko, Genta, Ayumi, Ai and Conan of course also board the ship, with Ai Haibara herself of course playing a key role in this miniarc as other mysterious characters find themselves on the train. For example, Kogoro Mouri's new "detective apprentice" Amuro Tooru, along with the mysterious "Scar Akai" (who has been walking around crime scenes in this arc up til' now), being one of them. What's more, apparently the university graduate mystery fan Okiya Subaru is also on board with a mysterious woman while the black organization's shadow looms over the train.
Aside from the overarching characters, there is also the case cast:
Car 8 case-only participants (First-Class car)
Andou Satoru (Cabin C, Age 41) boards the train with a heavy gold-frame for a picture on his back. However, apparently the drawing itself is nothing more than counterfeit. Rest of the passengers also carry hidden objects with them
Noto Taisaku (Cabin A, Age 52) and Idenami Mari (Cabin E, Age 33), along with Komino Natsue (Cabin D, Age 75) & her helper Sumitomo Hiroka (Cabin D, Age 37) being the rest of the participants on the train. But of course, there's also the train conductor...
Car 7 case-only participants
Murobsahi Etsuto (Cabin B, Age 39) had arranged his usual room in the first-class car 8 but it was changed to car 7 as the room was accidentally double-booked. In fact, the room was first reserved by none other than Mouri Poirou himself. I
There are also other carriages to the train, of course. For example Agasa and our five Detective Boys are in Car 6.
As everyone is all aboard the train, we get an explaination that the destination of the train is very easy to pinpoint - it's Nagoya. However, the name Mystery Train actually comes from the deduction quiz that's held on-board as the train moves non-stop towards the terminal station. The Mystery Train tour is known for creating an incident after choosing a random 'culprit' and a random 'victim'. Rest of the passengers will then become detectives to figure out the culprit's identity before the train reaches its destination.
After a knock on the door Dr. Agasa and Conan open the door to their room to notice a sealed letter that's been left on the floor. The letter congratulates them - the five detective boys - for being chosen to play the role of the 'detective'. In 10 minutes an incident will occur in Cabin B of Car 7. The letter invites the DB's to start their investigation towards the matter but Conan finds it a bit odd that seemingly not every passenger becomes a 'detective' this time.
As the Detective Boys head to Cabin B of Bell Tree Express's Car 7, the moment they open the door, a man shouts at them to not come in as he gets shot by a person wearing a hoodie and face mask, and using a gun with a silencer. As the shooter leaves, the Detective Boys head after the culprit... it's feeling more and more like a game of tag instead of a real mystery. Anyway, the Detective Boys manage to lose the perp after chasing after him - he might've escaped into one of the private rooms of the car. An employee of the Express then tells them that the kids should head back to their room as the deduction quiz will be announced via the speakers in each room in an hour. Conan gets a shiver from potentially having seen a real murder and decides to head back to the room where the man was shot. At the same time Haibara's sixth sense picks up dangerous signals as 'Scar Akai' comes out of one of the rooms in Car 8.
Things get very odd at this time as the door Conan opens up to check up on the corpse actually has Masumi, Sonoko and Ran in it, spending some tea time together. Conan wonders what's up as he should've head to Car 7, but has somehow ended up in Car 8. As the DB leave Car 8 to try to go back to Car 7, Agasa comes out of his room to ask them how they'd do on the deduction quiz. This brings about the first core mystery of this case which is very entertaining: The kids had moved just one carriage from Car 8, yet they ended up in Car 6. While the high-speed train was in motion, Car 7 where the man was shot, went missing!?
Mystery Train [Tunnel] progresses on from the previous chapter's mystery of where the seventh Car of The Bell Tree Express could've gone missing. The Detective Boys are informed that to get information about what goes down in each of the different cars, it'd be wise to ask the conductors as there is one positioned in each. Each conductor will sit in the rearmost part of a car, looking over who goes in and who out. However, the conductors will move when one rings a bell that calls for them to come to the room from which the bell was rang. In this chapter we get explanations towards the missing car mystery along with fleshing out the train itself a bit. There is some tension regarding Masumi being curious about Haibara, and Scar Akai spying on them all.As Kogoro and the case cast notice that the fields outside are burning, the Detective Boys and the girl trio or Masumi, Sonoko and Ran learn that the real deduction battle is truly yet to even be held, and after learning this they head to Car 8. At the same time bunch of different mysteries start to take place: a conductor visits a room whose resident didn't call for him, another room contains a person talking on the phone about the ruckus outside his room, the third room's guest asks the conductor to do something about a weird noise in her room.
In Car 8, the previously apparently fake-shot man is found in a room with a chain lock on. After breaking the chain, Masumi and Conan see that the man is actually dead, with a gunshot right through his temple being what most likely took his life.
Mystery Train [First Class] goes over the mystery of the murder. A locked-room murder with a man who assumedly did a suicide with a gun that had a silencer attached onto it is quickly exposed as a real murder, but the answer to how this was pulled off and by whom is still up in air. In this case we don't really get to see Conan's thoughts or anything as there's something mysterious going up with him as well as he gets a text message from someone which shocks him and makes him shout at the Detective Boys for not going back to their room. Haibara notices that there's something off about Conan, and she's also been feeling a powerful ominous aura on the train that's more than something one or two organization members can cause her to feel with her sixth sense... which only gets more powerful as Scar Akai passes her, at the same time as Ran and Sonoko realize that Amuro Tooru has also gotten on the Bell Tree Express apparently due to a successful bid on the net, and furthermore at the same time as Okiya Subaru is also shown on the train, looking at Amuro and co. ... and Subaru is in the same room with a mysterious woman who seemingly likes to text about something a lot. Regarding the case cast we also learn that they all knew each other beforehand, and they'd always arranged the same rooms for themselves on every Mystery Train tour.
While the Black Organization agreed to let Bourbon and Vermouth either kidnap or kill Sherry, in this chapter we get to learn that Gin and Vodka are also trying to take her down. Everyone wants a piece of that pie and to make Nagoya the Final Destination for Sherry.
Mystery Train [Junction] has Kogoro bring up a very good point: as everyone on the Bell Tree Express is a hardcore mystery fan, the victim, Murobashi, could've easily made it seem like a murder even if it actually was a suicide, but of course that's not the case here... in this case, it seems that there is some kind of reason why the culprit wanted the victim move back to Car 8, as Kogoro had reserved the car he usually spent time in during Mystery Train tours. Kogoro's actions made it so that the victim was moved in Car 7. The fake deduction quiz that Conan and co. took part in was used to lure the culprit back in Car 8 for some mysterious reason, and there is also a problem of one of the train attendatns' uniforms having gone missing as well.
Of the whole train, only Car 8 was created by a huge fan of Christie's Orient Express who was also Jirokichi's acquaintance. The Bell Tree Express was finished five years prior and most of the family of the car's creator died in a large fire, a month before the Mystery Train first started moving. The only living legacy of that deceased family left is the elderly lady in Room D of the carriage.
The fire that took the magnate's family occurred during his birthday party. His whole family along with twelve other party attendees lost their lives that day. It's very possible that every case character that boards the train right now are survivors of that massive fire...
This chapter is mostly about gathering information from the people who were staying in the same car as the victim. The information is actually a bit technical with multiple aspects to it, so making notes of what went on and where would be a good start. Luckily Gosho made it easier to memorize things by just naming the rooms with single letters. Kogoro on the other hand gives us a quick false solution to this case regarding Car 8's conductor supposedly letting everyone in the victim's room through a secret mechanism, and to fire bullets into the victim's body one shot per person... and reading that got a chuckle out of me. Conan and Masumi even point out about Kogoro just ripping off Orient Express's scenario.
Things take a more serious turn as Haibara gets a message which reads: "Are you ready? -Vermouth". After this, she decides to get up and leave - forever. In her pockets Haibara has the antidotes meant to help one temporarily turn back into an adult from the effects of the APTX-4869 drug. As Haibara she also listens to the recording her mother left behind for her. This portion of the chapter where we learn that the drug was thought to be a miracle called the silver bullet, is very well created by the author Gosho Aoyama and gave me chills. At the end of the chapter Subaru Okiya just waltzes into the room where Haibara is hiding in and orders her to come over to "our area", but Haibara decides that she can't be killed while looking like a child and makes her escape.
At the same time Kogoro, Conan and Masumi ask all of the suspects relating to a fire from five years ago that have boarded the Bell Tree Express to run a lap around the corridor. The reason for this was because they might've seen the culprit run away back in the first chapter of this case. There might be some similarities to pinpoint about their running styles-
The rest of this chapter have to do with different overarching characters running around in the corridor and spying on each other. You can tell that there's a lot going down in the backgrounds. It's actually pretty impressive to look at. It ends with Masumi going face to face with Scar Akai and the revelation that Masumi is the sister of Shuichi Akai.
Mystery Train [Interception] gets us closer to the truth of the murder case. Scar Akai takes Masumi out with an electric tranquilizer while Conan has gathered everyone to listen to the explanation of what's going down with the murder case. Ran is looking for Haibara. The explanation for the locked room murder is simple in its own right but honestly, I like it as it takes use of the visual medium which a story told in this comic book format is. The trick doesn't feel cheap at all here. The answer to who the culprit is and how it was all pulled off is quite impressive in its technicality. I honestly still don't completely understand all of it but the core aspects are clear in what the culprit wanted to pull off and why during the trick and why that person simply has to be the culprit.The chapter ends with Scar Akai throwing a suitcase out of the train's window as our main character's mother Yukiko Kudo faces off with this mysterious person.
Mystery Train [Releasing Smoke] There's this fight between lions on the train as Yukiko goes face to face with Vermouth in a battle of wits which she seemingly loses, but before that we get this very intriguing exchange about our good guys having found a weak spot in Vermouth's defenses, and Yukiko even brings up Itakura Suguru, the CG Creator who perished a very long time ago during the Vermouth story arc. Basically, Vermouth had ordered a software from this special visual effects creator Suguru, and gotten very angry at him regarding the software once. I never even realized how Vermouth's and Yukiko's acting work is so closely connected to Suguru, which is a direct connection to why and how Vermouth found the man... Anyway, the battle of wits between Yukiko (Conan and co.) and Vermouth (BO and co.) is a great addition to the climax of this arc as it has to do with predicting how Haibara will react to her surroundings. Both sides are basically reading ahead of each other, and the goal for the good guys is to save Haibara. Oh, I never even realized that this case foreshadowed a certain object used in a trick during the Raiha Pass incident...!
Regarding the murder case, while the previous chapter basically told us the murderer and the method, this chapter continues to reinforce those facts by making it absolutely clear why the murderer is who he is and how everything that seemed as if they were coincidences could have been pulled off perfectly. The motivation of the culprit isn't surprising but it does have a nice connection to the train itself.
As the case comes to a close, Car 8 starts to fill with smoke from pre-positioned gas tanks (that were shown in the beginning of this case) which the Black Organization members, Bourbon and Vermouth, had arranged in every corner of the car. The plan is to literally smoke Sherry out by faking fire on the train, and then take hold of her. It's pretty effective as even the murderer is running for their life from the fear of fire (which was ironically the motive for the murder as well). Though that action from the culprit and rest of the case cast is actually pointed out in this case - the fire that took so many lives which they survived from five years prior had made all of them into pyrophobics, and Vermouth used that against them with the plan of creating fake smoke and alarming the passengers through a proxy - through the true identity of Code Name: Bourbon.
While rest of the passengers leave from Car 8 to Cars 1-5, Sherry will do the complete opposite in order to make the Black Organization not be alarmed of her connection with the Detective Boys. She wants the organization thing that she's been all alone all this time. At the end of the chapter Sherry is seen running towards the room where the victim of the murder case is but she's stopped by a shadowy figure looming behind her saying: "As expected of Hell Angel's daughter... you look very much alike. Pleased to meet you.... Bourbon... That's my codename."
Mystery Train [Final Destination] wraps up this pretty intense story. I'm literally sweating in the middle of the night from re-reading this case again. While it's not on the list of my favourite all-time Conan cases or anything, it's still very impressive in its own right for being a solid collection of everything.
The battle of wits between Conan's and Black Organization's sides is intense and we get to learn quite a bit about Bourbon's character and motivations in this one. As Bourbon asks Sherry to head over to the storage carriage beyond Car 8 of Bell Tree Express, we get an announcement that there's one hour left until the train arrives its destination. Sonoko's uncle Jirokichi along with the Aichi-prefecture's top police force officials are all on the train station waiting to catch the culprit who murdered someone on Jirokichi's train. However, this is when we get the revelation that Gin and Vodka of the Black Organization have filled the train with explosives that will go off the moment the train arrives. But as they're all big shots, they're bound to think the explosives were meant to be an attempt on their lives instead of someone else's. This scene is pretty funny as Gin tells Vodka how he doesn't even care if Vermouth or Bourbon get caught up in the explosion, and apparently Vermouth herself had also taken more C4 explosives for a plan of her own...
On the train again, Bourbon is forcing Sherry to go into the storage hold room. As she does that, Bourbon will destroy the link between the two cars with an explosive. The train will keep going, but the storage hold where Sherry is in will stop and will thus be an easy way for the organization members to pick her up. Bourbon intends to knock her out and take her to the organization alive, but Sherry points out that the storage room is filled to brim of explosives prepared there by Vermouth to take her life at any cost. Bourbon then tells Sherry to step back from the storage hold, but she decides not to do that and instead holes herself in the carriage full of explosives. Bourbon then notices a weird shadow behind him, and thinks it's Vermouth yet points a pistol at the shadow. However, when a hand grenade rolls over his feet he quickly backs away. Ultimately it all ends up in a situation in which an explosion from the grenade forces the storage hold to break off the train, and the hold itself then turns to ashes from a massive explosion from the C4 prepared in it by Vermouth.
The Mystery Train case ends with Bourbon escaping the scene while thinking about the mysterious silhouette he saw. After The Bell Tree Express reaches its final destination, Vermouth confirms with Gin that the hold in which Sherry was, indeed must've taken her life, however... immediately afterwards the detective boys - Haibara included - make their appearance to reveal the reader and Vermouth one of the most insane twists that this series has to offer in general. The final page of this case contains a lot of foreshadowing towards the future: Bourbon will be investigating all the details of Akai's death during Raiha Pass incident and will begin his investigations from square one so we're far from over yet with this arc (final chapter of Mystery Train takes place in Filer 824 while Bourbon arc itself ends in File 898), while Masumi ponders through what went down in the train. The last panel shows the university graduate student Subaru Okiya opening his eyes to reveal his true identity.
Last rites
While it's also not on my top list of Black Organization showdown cases, the battle of wits against BO; Vermouth - Bourbon - Gin & Vodka, was really entertaining in this one as there are numerous different groups trying to outwit each other. Everyone reads ahead and the next person goes even further beyond... it's something that could've very easily become a complete mess in the hands of another, less experienced author.
I've noticed that the author Gosho Aoyama puts a great deal of effort into making each of the main storyline -heavy cases have different settings to them, which is pretty neat. This one being Aoyama's version of the legendary Murder on Orient Express as well as the first climax of the Bourbon story arc is very clever and makes the experience more memorable. Anyway, I don't think I've ever seen a case in a series like this with this type of juggling over overarching story-relevant characters along with case-only characters. It's like weighs on a scale balancing each other out.
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