Fiend with 20 Faces
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Edogawa Rampo’s The Fiend with Twenty Faces EDOGAWA Rampo |
The Fiend with Twenty Faces, the first in the Boy Detectives series by Japan’s master of mystery Edogawa Rampo, helped create a new genre in Japan and enthralled thousands of young readers.
When 1930s Tokyo is threatened by a master thief who claims he can take on any disguise and stymie any matter of law enforcement, the people of the city have nowhere else to turn but Japan’s greatest detective, Akechi Kogorō. Unfortunately for Tokyo, however, Akechi Kogorō is off on overseas business, so it becomes the job of his 12-year old assistant, Kobayashi Yoshio, to track down the thief and desperately keep him at bay until his mentor returns.
In the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street Irregulars, The Fiend with Twenty Faces is a classic mystery tale by a world-renowned author filled with disguises, tricks, “A-ha!” moments, and spiced with a unique Japanese flair. Will Kobayashi’s intrepid band of little detectives be able to outwit the nefarious fiend, or will Tokyo be forever at the mercy of the face-swapping phantom?
The Japanese text is from the original edition published (and still in print!) by Poplar Publishing (ポプラ社). Rampo himself wrote the first two dozen or so books in the series (and Poplar was nice enough to put them in a boxed set!), and had the remaining two dozen titles or so ghostwritten while retaining much control over the product.
Edogawa Rampo (pseudonym of Hirai Tarō, 1894–1965) is the acknowledged grand master of Japan’s golden age of crime and mystery fiction. He is also a major writer in the tradition of Japanese Modernism, and exerts a massive influence on the popular and literary culture of today’s Japan.
