Thanks that’s exactly what I’m after.
The first two issues of Fables presented a very nice murder mystery, with lots of clues visually presented for the reader to study.
From there on, Fables is a fantasy series (and a very good one!) But that opening mystery was wickedly clever.
As far as currently published manga/comics go, Viz is translating Master Keaton into English. The main character is an archaeology professor with a military background who moonlights as an insurance investigator specializing in antiquities.
Chesterton’s “Father Brown” mysteries tend to be pretty clever. You also might want to try to check out “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine”, which publishes short mystery stories.
I was tempted to mention them, but I didn’t know whether they were the kind of thing the OP was looking for, since they don’t involve much traditional detective work.
Chesterton’s mystery stories, including but not limited to the Father Brown stories, tend to involve mysterious circumstances that look bizarre, paradoxical, or impossible, until the explanation comes which makes the reader go “aaaahhh.” The “detective” (e.g. Father Brown) comes up with that explanation, not through any systematic investigation, but through an ability to look at things from a different angle (or “think outside the box”), along with cleverness, intuition, and insight into human nature. They’re good stories if you like that sort of thing; Chesterton has a flair for paradoxes and twists, in both his fiction and his nonfiction.
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” is a Chesterton collection of little mysteries, which, however, are all tied together into a larger theme, which only becomes clear with the final story. At first, they seem very much like Sherlock Holmes stories, but, as Thudlow Boink notes, they begin to take on a bizarre tone.
(Sigh… They’re quite good, but I do feel the need to warn the reader of Chesterton’s anti-Semitism. It was the 1920s, and many, many good people succumbed to the deadly trap of thinking “The Jews” had inordinate control over the world’s high-level political policies. I suggest being aware of it…and reading and enjoying the stories anyway.)
These two paragraphs of “Visual wit” in the Wiki article on Chesterton are well worth a read: G. K. Chesterton - Wikipedia