edogawa ranpo covers part 4 – the fiend with twenty poplars

after finding the original 26 shonen tanteidan book covers from this poplar edition, I had no idea I might find more – let alone 20! a mystery was certainly afoot… and I planned to solve it. read on – if you dare!!

as it turns out, poplar publishing later started to put out “rewritten” versions of previous edogawa ranpo mystery novels – ie, ones that only featured the doyen detective extraordinaire, akechi kogoro – but this time, incorporating the boy detectives themselves. which is strange, because, as mentioned previously, throughout the rest of his work, ranpo was famous for his erotic grotesquerie. as far as I can tell, it gets even stranger, with some of the novels actually being adapted to include the whole gang (meaning, not even an akechi joint to begin with)… heck, at least three of them were actually adaptations of western mystery novels, meaning… they weren’t even edogawa ranpo books to begin with..!

in a future post I’d like to talk about the rewritten versions that I HAVE read the originals for, among other things – but for now, here are the rest of the covers! as usual, they’re all going onto the main gallery page :^)