#(Was a pretty big fan of The Spellman Files throughout middle school - even though it probably hasn't aged well

[mirrorfalls]

Hi Mirror,

I thoroughly enjoyed your post about what makes Ran so wonderful, especially in regards to the flexibility of her character and the roles she can fulfill (even if canon isn't always good at doing her justice). I'm going to try my best to add to the quality Ran content in the fandom for your gift - hopefully you like the end result!

What encouraged you to get into Detective Conan in the first place? Are you a mystery/ detective fiction fan?

~Santa

Ah, therein lies a long but not particularly interesting story...

As a grade-schooler I read the usual pack of paperback mysteries - Encyclopedia Brown, Cam Jensen, Jigsaw Jones - and I loved Arthur's occasional mystery-centric episodes (in fact, I think it might've been where I first heard of Sherlock Holmes), but by the time I got into Conan I'd pretty much outgrown all of that.

So what did lead me there? TV listings. Specifically, listings for that magic land known as [adult swim], forever beyond the reaches of my bedtime. Even on the rare nights my parents forgot about that, there was no goddamn way my tiny metabolism could stay up 'til two in the morning. So all I had to go on was the bare-bones summary from [as]' homepage, which confused the hell out of me (did I mention there wasn't even one screenshot, so I hadn't clue number one what this "Case Closed" even looked like?). A teenage detective is poisoned into... a kid? In what universe was this the stuff of Serious Adult Drama?

Fast-forward to... seventh grade or thereabouts, when I discovered the magic of YouTube and also scanlations. Poured myself around ten episodes of the Funimation dub, then hopped over to sub, and from there it was only a short jump to the manga (if you're of my generation, you may remember those Bad Ol' Days when most of the scans after Ch. 70 or so were cobbled from Vietnamese efforts that made your average Hong Kong bootleg look respectable). My brain was still soft and malleable enough to take damn near any new series at face-value, and those early cases had more than enough whiz-bang action to keep me hooked (the debut of the super-sneakers in Vol. 2 remains a quiet favorite). I don't think I ever tried to play along with the case-cracking - never had much of a head for that, and still don't. I was there to see all the personalities bounce off each other; all the piano-wire magic just bored me.

Even more... I-don't-want-to-say-ironically-but-I-don't-know-what-else-to-call-it... Conan was my gateway into Classic Mystery Fiction. I read the entire Holmes canon in Undergrad so I could understand how to write from Shinichi's POV better, chased it down with the likes of Hammett and Chandler, and up through today I've got a small side-hobby of collecting obscure Japanese mysteries purely on the manga's recommendations. One day - one day I might even become a Legit Connoisseur.

'til then - that fic ain't gonna write itself.