Detective Utsumi is the culprit?
NTV’s drama “Good Things, Bad Things” (Saturdays at 9 p.m.), which is gaining popularity for its consideration, is entering its final stages. So far, three 34-year-old men and a woman have been killed. They were classmates of the main characters, Masaru Takagi (Shotaro Mamiya) and Sonoko Saruhashi (Yuko Shinki), in the 6th grade at Takasato Elementary School. Their former teacher Noriyo Otani (Mariko Akama) was also murdered. The main culprit, we read, is none other than that person. Fuyuhiko Takabori, broadcast columnist and journalist] [Photo] “This person looks suspicious” “He looks bad…” Who is the “real culprit”? A heated battle of speculation ***
I would like to deduce the main culprit based on the numerous clues given by the drama so far and “Knox’s Ten Commandments”. The Ten Commandments were proposed by Ronald Knox, a famous British mystery writer, in 1928. They are the basic rules of mystery. First, Kei Utsumi (Subaru Kimura), a detective in the Investigation Section 1, is clean. Even before the serial murders, he had been going to the retro snack bar “Imakuni,” where Takagi, a painter, was a regular customer. When asked about his occupation, he replied, “I’m a lowly civil servant. That made him suspicious, but it is common practice for police officers to conceal their identities after work hours. This is to prevent suspicious people from approaching them. The main office of the Metropolitan Police Department is called the “head office” outside of working hours. Each police station is called a “branch office. The reason for this is the same. In the fifth episode, Utsumi asked his boss Miyazono (Masahiro Toda) to let him investigate this case as a serial murder. If Utsumi had been complicit in the crime, it would have been suicide. At this point, pharmacist Toshio Takeda (Katamari Mizukawa), hostess Emi Nakajima (Reina Matsui), and tavern owner Kanta Sakurai (Asuka Kudo) were dead. Since Takeda and Nakajima had already been treated as accidental deaths, the police upper echelons were reluctant to act on them as serial murders. Knox’s Ten Commandments stipulate in their seventh, “The detective himself must not be the murderer. If that were allowed, anything would be possible, and the mystery would cease to be a mystery. In the case of this drama, Takagi and Saruhashi, a reporter for “Weekly Apollo,” also play detectives. If either of them were to turn out to be the murderer, many viewers would be disappointed. This drama and Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” (1939) share a similarity in that people die just as in the song. In Agatha’s work, ten people died in a series of murders. The murderer was a former judge who was supposed to have been killed in the process. He faked his own death. In this drama, too, Sakurai, who died after being set on fire, was suspected. The truth is that he is still alive, isn’t he? There are some suspicious points about Sakurai. But there is no doubt that he is dead. In the first episode, Sakurai’s tavern catches fire. Sakurai was admitted to the hospital in an unconscious state. No visitors were allowed. Takagi, who visited him out of concern, was also unable to see him. Takahiro Koyama (Shintaro Morimoto), who runs an app and game development company in the U.S., also came, but the same.