The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

Detectives These Days are Crazy

What's It About? 

Behold, a great detective who thrills the world solving impossible cases in no time! His name? Keiichiro Nagumo. …But all of that was over a decade ago. Now he's just your typical middle-aged dude. Nagumo is behind the times to the point that he doesn't even know what a smartphone is. But out of the blue, he is confronted by a high school girl named Mashiro who shows up wanting to be his assistant. Witness the miracles a gender-gap detective duo can make!

Detectives These Days Are Crazy! has a story and art by Masakuni Igarashi, with English translation by Emily Balistrieri. Published by One Peace Books (April 28, 2025).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Detectives These Days Are Crazy! feels like the answer to the question, “What if one of the teen detectives in manga grew up to be a schlub?” It's perhaps not a premise that you can get much out of, but since the book trades largely in absurdities, it works decently well. The detective in question is Keiichiro Nagumo, who was nationally famous as a young man, solving all the most Sherlockian cases with pizzazz and aplomb. Now? Now he's a thirty-five-year-old chain smoker with a bad back and some serious employment issues…

…and, as it turns out, at least two people who really want to be his assistant. One of them is only in one chapter, but the other, Mashiro, forms the other half of the not-quite-dynamic duo. While we don't know why Mashiro feels she owes something to Nagumo, she's not going to let a little thing like “explanations” get in the way of helping her hero, no matter how little he wants that help. Although he almost certainly needs it – the man can't use a smartphone to take a picture and his stereotype of what makes someone a gyaru is hopelessly outdated, plus his only reason to get dressed is so that something covers his dick. (His own words, incidentally.) Oh, and he's afraid of bugs. And groups of young people. How the mighty have fallen.

Each chapter covers a different case, and they're varied in how funny they are. Masakuni Igarashi relies a little too much on hyper-realistic faces as gags, but some of the plot jokes land very well, such as the chapter where Nagumo gets a case to clear out a wasps' nest. He sends Mashiro instead, and, misunderstanding the directions, instead clears out a yakuza office. Then she brings home the one guy she didn't roast with her flamethrower, continuing a trend from the previous chapter of turning Nagumo's office into her own personal den of misfits.

Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is a very mixed bag. When it's funny, it's close to laugh-out-loud funny, but when it isn't, it sizzles out with a wet fizzle. This inconsistency plus the very crowded pages make it a little tricky to recommend; I'd suggest looking at it in a library to decide if it's going to work for you. But even if you just pick it up, the wasp chapter is almost worth the price of admission all on its own.