Since the 1990s manga has been well populated by skillful teen detectives. Brilliant young investigators appear in Detective Conan, Puppet Master Sakon, The Case Files of Young Kindaichi, Detective Agency Q, The Detective is Already Dead, Pretty Boy Detective Club, CLAMP School Detectives, Detective Opera Milky Holmes, and many more manga titles. The one thing all of these stories have in common is their focus on teen detectives at the height of their youth and the prime of their sleuthing lives. So creator Masakuni Igarashi’s manga series Detectives These Days Are Crazy! (Mattaku Saikin no Tantei to Kitara) sets itself apart from the pack by focusing its setting on the years after the protagonist’s prime. Detectives These Days Are Crazy! depicts an over-the-hill teen sleuth who’s stuck in the past, clinging to former glory while struggling to make ends meet in the modern era. But while the scenario sounds dire, the manga is anything but. Instead, Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is a crazy, absurdist, slapstick romp that parodies the standards of teen detective stories as well as Japanese pop culture. One Peace Books will launch the official English translation of the long-running gag manga on April 28.
Detectives These Days Are Crazy! revolves around former celebrity detective Keiichiro Nagumo. As a teenager, Nagumo’s brilliant insight and athleticism allowed him to easily solve opaque cases and difficult mysteries. But twenty years later, his body is a collection of aches and pains, his most brilliant insightfulness has diminished, modern technology has left him behind, and he struggles to make ends meet as a down-on-his-luck gumshoe with no clients. The abrupt arrival of a high school girl determined to support him for her own hidden reasons turns Nagumo’s life upside down in the most unconventional, unexpected, and unpredictable ways. Nagumo is a self-pitying and clumsy sad sack who’s come to accept and even embrace his loser lifestyle. Mashiro is a crazy hybrid of Hitagi Senjogahara (from NISIOISIN’s Monogatari series) and Kenshiro (from Fist of the North Star). This offbeat odd-couple balance out each other and end up making an unconventional yet effective team that resolves mysteries and odd-jobs of any order.
Despite ostensibly being a mystery manga, Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is far more slapstick comedy than thriller. The tone of the manga’s humor draws from the shounen styles of City Hunter and, to a slightly lesser degree, Gintama or Hinamatsuri, with just a little bit of Makoto Kobayashi’s What’s Michael stirred into the mix. As the story develops, Nagumo slightly evolves from being clumsy pratfall into functioning as a straight man for Mashiro’s exaggerated antics. The comedy also escalates rapidly from reasonably grounded to absurd, although the humor never goes so far over-the-top as to be totally left-field. The humor also makes some deep-cut in-joke references that will sail past all but the most hardcore aficionados, including references to Furuhata Ninzaburo, Joe Odagiri, Green Leaves’ “Yatta!,” and Fujiya’s Peko-chan. The manga also drops in Japanese cultural slang including “gyaru,” “JK,” and “gokudo,” that readers are expected to understand or interpret from context.
Masakuni Igarashi’s illustration style is crisp, detailed, and highly cinematic. The manga extensively utilizes screen tones, sound effects, and dynamic camera angles to give the visual aesthetic a very dense, busy appearance. At a glance, the magna may even look intimidating, but, in fact, the manga’s layout is very fluid and surprisingly easy to read. Considering the popularity of the story and the visual depth of the illustration, it’s little surprise that the manga is getting a 2025 anime television series adaptation.
The 168-page first volume of Detectives These Days Are Crazy! manga from One Peace Books contains the series’ first five chapters, 4-koma omake for each chapter, a short bonus chapter, an author’s afterword, and three bonus illustrations. One Japanese reference within the story is translated in a footnote. Other references within the story are left up to the reader to intuit. The English translation contains one very minor typo, a single instance of a single letter omitted from a character’s name. The translation also contains six instances of swearing in the dialogue. The book contains no sex or nudity, although it does include some mildly risqué jokes. Violence is hyperbolic and cartoonish, like Looney Toons. Japanese text and visual sound effects are retained except in one instance in which visual translation was necessary for communicating the story.
Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is a very fun slapstick parody of manga’s teen detective trope. Despite how entertaining the story is, though, Detectives These Days Are Crazy! doesn’t come across as a good entry-level manga for manga novices. Detectives These Days Are Crazy! heavily references commonplace manga tropes and parodies the fundamental characteristics of manga itself. So readers who are used to manga’s storytelling format will likely get the jokes and effortlessly follow the manga’s rapidly changing visual styles and tones that are all part of the book’s humor. Readers that are totally unused to manga will likely find Detectives These Days Are Crazy! rather disorienting and confusingly wacky. With its deadpan humor akin to Hinamatsuri, and falling in-between the absurdism scale of City Hunter to Excel Saga, Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is a fun ride for veteran manga readers and especially fans of manga teen detectives like Edogawa Conan and Hajime Kindaichi.
