Scene of the crime writer

Ranpo Edogawa is the pen name (a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe) of Taro Hirai (1894–1965). He was born on October 21 in Mie Prefecture and moved to Tokyo to study economics at Waseda University.

He made his literary debut in 1923 with the publication of a mystery short story.

Edogawa would go on to become a tireless promoter of the mystery genre and is largely responsible for its current popularity in books, manga, movies, and television in Japan.

In commemoration of Ranpo Edogawa's 130th birthday, the Detective Conan anime series (also titled Case Closed) will use his real home as the setting for a two-part episode.

Gosho Aoyama's Detective Conan manga debuted in 1994. The anime followed two years later. Both are still ongoing, with the anime at over 1140 episodes.

The pilot episode has high school detective Shinichi Kudo getting transformed into a child half his age while investigating a black ops organization. He adopts the alias Conan Edogawa and moves in with private detective Kogoro Mori and proceeds to solve most of the cases Mori takes on.

Conan Edogawa is a dual homage to Arthur Conan Doyle and Ranpo Edogawa. Kogoro Mori shares his first name with Ranpo Edogawa's Kogoro Akechi, a name with the same metaphorical resonance in Japan as Sherlock Holmes.

The series has gone on so long by now that the premise is pretty much beside the point (unless Gosho Aoyama decides to wrap up the series). Regardless, Detective Conan reaffirms my admiration for the cozy mystery format, that ties up the loose ends at the conclusion of every episode.

Writing genre fiction that tells a good story and leaves the reader wanting more is much harder than it looks and deserves as much respect as anything carrying the literary fiction label.

Thanks in no small part to Detective Conan, Ranpo Edogawa is best remembered today for his Kogoro Akechi and Boy Detectives Club mystery novels, published between 1936 and 1962.

First serialized in the young adult pulps, these early versions of the light novel are fast and fun reads, with recurring characters and an emphasis on action and clever but not overcomplicated plots. I have so far translated four of the novels and am working on The Underground Magician.

The Boy Detectives Club

The Phantom Doctor
Big Gold Bullion
The Bronze Devil
The Space Alien

At last count, Crunchyroll has nearly 400 episodes of the Detective Conan anime. The manga are available at Amazon (English) and BookWalker (Japanese). "The Ranpo Residence Murder Case" debuted on November 16 and 23, 2024.

The Ranpo Edogawa estate that appears in the anime is managed by Rikkyo University at the Edogawa Ranpo Memorial Center for Popular Culture Studies.

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Ranpo Edogawa
Murder, they wrote
Boy Detectives Club
Detective Conan (part I part II)