Does… does this guy just casually have Tutankhamun’s mummy lying around?
And I bet Hiroshi’s parents/caregivers just looooved him being given a dog to look after
As for the clues...
Clearly the daytime mummy is the professor.
Clearly the shed didn’t actually burn down as much as was said, which makes you wonder if the professor even got burned in the first place, especially since they wouldn’t say what doctor wrapped him up.
Something else happened that made him want to be covered up. He wants to hide something to do with his body.
He has been doing something in the cellar at night, as confirmed by the chihuahua, and he’s been locked in from the outside while he’s been doing it.
While he was there, someone else was in his bed dressed up as a mummy. The nighttime mummy’s body shape looks an awful lot like the Goriranosan (what’s in a name, lol) guy.
But beyond this I am stumped I feel like the smoking might be relevant… If it is true that Goriranosan occasionally takes the professor’s place, it must also mean he is a smoker. Did he maybe accidentally cause the shed fire? I feel like there isn’t any foul play and the two men are in cahoots, but to what end? Why would they need knives? Are they doing nightly King-Tut-mummy-dissections?
Enough speculation, time to read the solution and feel like an idiot afterwards !
I have to avoid your case two solution comment until I read that part of the book, but for the case portion, you’ve basically hit on everything I thought!
My best “wrong” guess: Papa recently took up smoking, and accidentally started a fire. Now he has to hide from his son that he’d taken up smoking.
Off-Topc
Although I realize it doesn’t matter how early or late a nomination comes in before voting begins, it still fells a bit wrong to me to nominate something practically days before voting, and have it come out on top…
That said, I’m looking forward to seeing newcomers make progress reading. I find when it’s something I nominated (Rental Oniichan) or planned-to-nominate-but-someone-else-beat-me-to-it (Soredemo), I feel a lot more invested in seeing individuals stick with it, not give up, reach the end, continue with the next volume, join in following ABBC picks, and eventually try out joining the BBC.
One thing I did get right was that it is significant that there wasn’t a real fire in the shed. That’s the excuse the culprits used for swaddling the professor. But I still feel a bit bamboozled
To show just how poorly I was paying attention, when reading the case portion, I completely merged in my mind the two knife-wielders at the end.
My initial thought seeing these two pages, and having probably forgotten anything useful from the case portion, is that the mummy is the bad guy, and the one with the cross-eyed headpiece on is the father (having had been locked up). The latter matches up with the little dog recognizing the scent at the door, assuming we’ve seen two separate bandaged people.
This doesn’t explain the father being in bed bandaged, unless he was trying to fool someone into thinking he’d been burned. And maybe the bad guy was previously trying to scare him by dressing as a mummy, but found the bedroom empty, and…decided to smoke for a bit (when the kid saw him)?
Page 140
Being a confinement case means the bad guy was probably threatening to hurt the kid if the father didn’t cooperate with something.
I think I would have done better if I paid more attention to it being two different knife/dagger wielders at the end of the case portion. I’m going to say the lack of kanji drained my mental processing capabilities. (Yeah, that’s it.) I don’t know if I would have figured it if I carefully went back through the pages, though…
I feel like this case was overall a bit underwhelming considering its length, but it wasn’t a bad one by any means.
I do like that the わんにゃん books tend to (mostly) have more difficult cases than the author’s Detective Milky books that preceded them. (At least, the ones I’ve read thus far.)
I read this along the lines of: my dog’s really dangerous, his teeth are really sharp because I grind them with a file!
Page 18
I think this dog is called 秋太郎 (あきたろう) which is a male given name according to Jisho and is written on his kennel. Presumably a play on the dog’s breed - 秋田 - but using different kanji for the second character.
頭からゆげがでている - I read that as “there is steam coming from his head” and thought I must have misunderstood. But on the next page he does indeed have steam coming from his head, and it’s still there in the picture on page 21!
Thoughts on the case 1 before reading the solution
I really don’t see how we are supposed to work it out from what we’ve read! The aggressive guy is too obvious to be the robber. He has a stain on his t-shirt but this is ketchup, not dirty water from falling in a puddle.
I assume the polite well dressed guy is the robber but I don’t see how Spitz has worked it out. The only clue I can see is that Spitz sees the guy’s dog peeing in the yard - perhaps this is related to what the robber doesn’t understand about dogs - but I can’t put it all together.
My only other thought was that they took the bulldog along as all 3 houses had a big dog in the house. The first two did look aggressive when they arrived, Akitarō is barking at them when they first arrive (although then switches to doing cute tricks) and the Doberman (Oyster) looked really mean. But Jane is just old and feeble - unless she is play acting too…
EDIT - having read the solution I missed all the clues too! Hints (no spoilers): One clue I could have worked out if I looked harder at the pictures but you have to look really carefully. The other big clue I wouldn’t have got as I obviously don’t know much about dogs either!
I completely missed this thread! I’ve just started to work through all the books I haven’t finished including book 2, so probably not a bad thing. I need to get back into reading but I know I’m terrible when travelling and I probably have another stint coming up.
This is a really good point and I did the same thing. Once you consider that the thief might be hiding in one of the houses the other parts of the story then make sense. In the first house the scene with the dog playing dead confirms that this is indeed the true owner of the house as he knows the dog well. Similarly there is quite strong camaraderie between the owner of the second house and his dog too, although I think he’s there mainly to throw you off the scent - 1) by behaving mean like a criminal 2) by having a stain on his t-shirt.
Also I wonder if anyone else thought the owner of the doberman looked just like his dog?
Firstly, this feels like it’s straight out of Scooby Doo! My initial thoughts are that the bad guy is Mr Smith from the amusement park, and he would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those pesky kids dogs…
I can’t put it all together so just some thoughts:
The mummy is not as injured as he’s made out to be, and the fire doesn’t look like the sort of fire that would cause serious injury. So the mummy is either in cahoots with the plan, or it’s the Professor and he’s being intimidated in some way.
Professor wears very thick glasses but the mummy never has glasses on. So it might not be the professor, or if it is the professor he can’t see very well without his glasses (and might explain the mummy stumbling around).
Gorillano and Professor are quite different body shapes, but that doesn’t seem to help in guessing who’s under the mask/bandages.
The dog’s in the story are generally jumping up at the person they are looking for from the scent - so that would be daytime mummy and night time mask guy.
I’ve no idea why they are running around with knives at night.
Best guess - Clara’s the bad guy and everyone else is hypnotised…
By the way, did anyone else think Clara looks like she’s wearing a noh mask in this picture?!
EDIT - one more thought - will Spitz finally declare his affections for Hanae before the end of the book…
Well, I was nowhere near right! It was in the end a relatively straightforward solution. I think the most tricky bit was that they brought him out of confinement when Spitz visited. Without getting that part it’s very confusing what’s going on with the mummy. Also Clara standing behind him with a knife changing his behaviour in that scene makes it more tricky.
Spitz and Hanae didn’t get together but she complimented him at least and left him with a smile on his face!
If you want a hint for case 2
Trust the dog’s nose!
Bonus page on page 150
Drop was so small as a child he was mistaken for a house mouse and sold at a festival. I love the image of him being in a cage spinning a hamster wheel when Spitz finds him!
Thoughts on the book
I really enjoyed reading this. This is the fifth one of these books I’ve read and I found I was familiar with a lot of the language. It was much more of a reading experience than a decoding experience (to reference a recent post by Christopher).
I feel like the smoking might be relevant… If it is true that Goriranosan occasionally takes the professor’s place, it must also mean he is a smoker. Did he maybe accidentally cause the shed fire? I feel like there isn’t any foul play and the two men are in cahoots, but to what end? Why would they need knives? Are they doing nightly King-Tut-mummy-dissections?
