Even in murder mysteries, Occam’s Razor sometimes applies.  And so it was with the first big case in Undead Girl Murder Farce, which would up in what always seemed like the most likely place.  Too likely for me – which was the only reason I was betting against Raoul being the killer.  But sometimes that can be a sort of misdirection in itself – using the audience’s preconceptions about the “rules” – against them.  Now when the next mystery comes up, we have to think about UGMF’s own tendencies – how they conform to the expected, and how they don’t.

The success of a series like this depends on two broad factors – the mysteries themselves, and the accoutrements of their presentation.  A sort of “bread and circuses” if you will, and I think Undead Girl Murder Farce set a strong marker in both respects.  It had already established the song-and-dance – the main trio are a vastly entertaining troupe, and their take on the genre has been a blast to watch.  I’m satisfied with the bread part too – the explanation for how all this went down made sense, both in terms of how it went down and how Aya figured it out (and both are equally important).  It wasn’t an especially satisfying ending for the Godard family, but I don’t think it was incumbent on the series to make it so.

To wit, time was the key here.  Aya catalogued seven problems that needed solving, but it really came down to the fact that the murder could not have been committed during the window when it supposedly was.  A lot of things were not as they seemed – the time of the murder, the murder weapon itself – but it was pretty obvious that the killer was inside the house.  The hunter Hugo was indeed working with someone on the inside, and indeed was basically a dupe – more examples of UGMF going with the least unlikely explanation against what some might consider genre tradition.

This was pretty much deductive reasoning in the Doyle sense (and his spectre is all over this story) – eliminate the impossible, and whatever is left over must be the truth.  The killer had to be an insider.  It had to be someone with physical abilities beyond the human.  It had to be someone with no alibi between 12:30-1:00 A.M..  One by one the suspects were eliminated, with Raoul and Giselle (who was my personal pick) the last ones standing.  But the “human” part let her off the hook, and that leaves the youngest son.  And the others among Aya’s problems are solved by the fact that he committed the deed not with the silver stake, but with holy water frozen into the shape of it.  The old “ice as the murder weapon” gambit – a classic if ever there was one.

In the denouement, we get a little (well, a lot) more of Tsugaru’s backstory.  It’s he who’s left with the unpleasant task of dealing with Raoul, who may be a vampire but was certainly no match for the onigoroshi in strength.  What stands out most here is the contrast between his demeanor and his behavior.  Tsugaru plays the clown expertly, but he’s a cold bastard who’s more than used to the act of killing.  Is this how Godard would have wanted things settled, had it been left to him?  One senses that he wouldn’t have had the steel to kill his own son, but Tsugaru – with Aya’s blessing – took the decision out of his hands.  And he didn’t seem to object, in the end.  It is, as Annie says, a tragedy and not a farce (though the narrative acts very much like it’s the latter).

Now the story moves on with the pursuit of Moriarty – and with the mention of “Professor” I think we can pretty much assume that – who was at Godard’s mansion only three days earlier.  Heck, we even get the phantom thief Arsène Lupin being name-dropped here. cementing the Holmes connection – though that has a fascinating story all its own.  Lupin’s creator, Maurice Leblanc, wrote a Sherlock Holmes crossover story in 1906.  Given that he never got Arthur Conan Doyle’s permission the latter was understandably upset – and Leblanc changed the characters’ names to “Herlock Sholmès” and “Wilson” (and wrote four more short stories with them).  I’m fascinated to see where this goes next.