Edogawa Rampo: The Black Lizard and Beast in The Shadows

 

These two Japanese mystery-adventure novels from the 1920s share a lot in common with their European counterparts of the same era. Wildly improbable plots not even meant to be probable are linked with a lot of coincidences and reversals and nearly cartoonish action. The detective of The Black Lizard is nearly a superhero, while the narrative of Beast In The Shadows could nearly be called postmodern, with unreliable narratives nested inside unreliable narratives. Edogawa Rampo was the pen name of Hiro Tarō (18940-1965) and is an anagram and cross-language pun for Edgar Allan Poe. These books weren’t meant as great literature and they aren’t, but they were early and essential books in establishing a Japanese tradition of the detective novel, one that continues like most national traditions in the detective novel to be continually expanding, lucrative, and entertaining.