Posted on June 13, 2025
edogawa ranpo covers part 4 and a half – a poplar interlude
while hunting for the edogawa ranpo covers from my last post (the ones rewritten to include the boy detectives) I found a funny little oddity: an edition of the rewrites that also included… something mysterious!? read on… if you’ve got the nerve!!!
this edition, called the meitantei series (名探偵シリーズ), used some of the original ranpo rewrites that incorporate the boy detectives, along with the same shigeru yanase covers – where it gets interesting is that just about half of the books are actually entirely different juvenile mystery/adventure stories, but by equally famous authors. as far as I can tell, these were all books that poplar had kicking around in their back catalogue that they just reprinted under the same ‘edition’ (in some cases with a slightly new title), interspersing them with the ranpo titles – perhaps somewhat misleadingly.
it’s funny seeing the other authors amongst the ranpo, given that they also have shigeru yanase covers – if I were a kid back then and saw a book in the same line, with the same illustrator, and also including an intrepid boy detective on the cover, I definitely would have assumed it was from the same author! I think I probably would have felt bamboozled at the time, but then again – it’s the spirit of that kid that has me here happily hunting down these covers and writing these posts :^)
without further ado, I present to you, the non-ranpo meitantei series covers:
Seishi Yokomizo
Seishi Yokomizo, known mostly in the west for his Kindaichi books (which have been getting published at a glacially slow pace in english by pushkin press), also appears to have produced a whole range of juvenile mystery lit featuring the adult detectives from his most famous works.
仮面城の秘密 –
The Secret of The Masked Castle
in the case of this first one, I’m not sure I’d call it a rewrite (other than a rewritten title – [the secret of] the masked castle is definitely more mysterious), but it certainly has a young boy detective (in this case, named Fumihiko) on a rip-roaring adventure working together with Kindaichi & co. to solve the mystery at hand. I saw some readers saying it’s stylistically similar to the ranpo boy detectives series, so I guess it makes sense it would be included in this collection – I just hope that someday I’ll be able to read it amongst the Kindaichi canon, as it deserves (haha!)
幽靈鉄仮面 –
The Iron-Masked Phantom
now, this second book… warrants an exploration all on its own. in brief, this one stars the boy detective Susumu Mikoshiba, who is the Kobayashi-equivalent featured in Yokomizo’s juvenile mystery books, which are an offshoot of his other famous detective, Yuri Rintaro. I won’t go into too much detail here, but the watson to Yuri Rintaro’s holmes is usually a character named Shunsuke Mitsugi, but at some point – as far as I can tell – Mitsugi actually usurped Yuri Rintaro’s place in the stories. at that point, Susumu Mikoshiba stepped up to take his place in the books as boy detective, and it’s presumably the latter pair we see cowering on the second cover. there’s a lot of other interesting twists and turns to this one in particular, but I’ll save it for the future – keep yr eyes peeled!!
Akimitsu Takagi
消えた魔人 –
The Disappearing Demon
There’s only one book in this series by Akimitsu Takagi, which is a shame! it appears to be a juvenile mystery novel (re-named from 吸血魔 – The Vampire as far as I can see) that incorporates Takagi’s most famous detective, Kyosuke Kamizu. not much of Takagi’s stuff has been published in english (more of the prosecutor Saburo Kirishima series, but even then, only two books!) but I’ve liked what I’ve read from his main two series. much like ranpo, it’s also funny to think of a juvenile rebrand given the thematic origins (think less eroguro nonsense and more postwar grittiness)
Unno Juza
the founding father of japanese sci-fi, whose prolific body of work crosses enough genre boundaries that it’s pretty hard to summarize, has the second largest representation in this collection (after ranpo himself), and for good reason – now here’s an author who warrants his own case file…! as such, I’ll keep it brief here, in the event that I cover him again in future.
少年探偵長 –
The Boy Detective Chief
this appears to be the most “boy detective” of the set, given that it’s got a titular boy detective and all – interestingly, I learned from this blog that Unno passed away while writing this book, and it was finished by Seishi Yokomizo (click thru to also see a very charming manga adaptation from 1955). wikipedia has a really nice section about their relationship and how close they were – like unno helping yokomizo to buy a house when he lost his home during the war!
美しき鬼 –
The Beautiful Demon
a rewrite of Unno’s 1937 novel 蝿男 – The Fly Man, which is part of the larger Homura Soroku detective canon, Unno was also in the process of writing this when he passed away, and its serialization was ghostwritten by Kazuo Shimada, another japanese mystery author who remains dishearteningly under-acknowledged in the west. I enjoyed this lil writeup of the book!
in an extra exciting twist (for me, at least) I was able to find some of the inner illustrations for the last two books from unno – I would also love to know more about whoever did these type of illustrations too, so let me know if you know!!
suffice to say, I am intrigued by the ‘forcible inclusion of boy detectives into existing franchises’ trend from this era – I feel like I can assume it comes from the popularity of the original shonen tanteidan (who were successful in their own right before the rewrites), but I don’t want to make any assumptions without having real ‘evidence’, as it were. as lew archer once said, “I need more time to pin them down”!!
