edogawa ranpo covers part 6 – curse of the fiend with twenty (five) poplars

while trawling the web for more edogawa ranpo covers (as I am often known to do), I stumbled on a puzzling cache of detective novels shrouded in mystery – was ranpo among the illustrious authors? were the rip-roaring covers eerie… or eerily familiar? and what will I do when confronted with an actual phantom novel?! read on to find out!

this poplar collection, published from 1955 to 1957, was made as a result of the popularity of their previous series, the World Masterpiece Detective Library, which featured the translated works of international authors – following this, the Japan Great Detective Library (日本名探偵文庫) was put together, featuring 25 volumes across an array of authors. I won’t bury the lede – ranpo is certainly among them – though we only get 4 new covers, all of which are titles we’ve seen before. the covers, though, are stunners –

information on the rest of this collection was somewhat sparse, but I gathered a lot from this one amazing resource: the supekuri secondhand bookshop research archives. they went through and correlated all the authors with the actual illustrators for the books, which is incredible – I wonder if that goes for just the covers, or includes the internal illustrations, as below. these aren’t something we often get a peek at, just from online listings – a factor to all the books I talk about – which is a huge part of keeps me on the hunt!

while the rest of these books aren’t edogawa ranpo specifically, they are good covers, and I’m certainly interested in reading more broadly across the as-yet-untranslated mystery genre in japan… so it would be remiss of me not to share them! among the authors featured is one we’ve encountered before – Unno Juza – but with a bunch of new titles! all the other authors are new to me, but seem like established contemporaries to ranpo – with one interesting exception…

as noted in the supekuri guide above, the 8th volume of this series was originally announced as being The Mysterious Diamond (謎のダイヤ), by Uson Morishita, but this never came to fruition, being replaced by The Red Playing Cards (赤いトランプ) by Yoichiro Minami instead, making The Mysterious Diamond… a phantom book!! but let’s take a moment to talk about the ‘phantom’ author himself… along with writing some mystery novels, he was also known for his translations of western mystery novels and stories that brought the genre to the Japanese public – and, most intriguingly, served as editor-in-chief at Shin Seinen, one of the foundational ‘modernist’ literary magazines which established the mystery genre through the 1920s and 30s. as seishi yokomizo once said of him, “it would not be an exaggeration to say that Morishita is the father of detective fiction in Japan”, with many of the most lauded mystery authors of that generation making their start under his tutelage in shin seinen – heck, he was responsible for the introduction of edogawa ranpo himself!!

but, one last mystery: a few of these covers made me do a double-take… some of the fellas depicted looked… awfully familiar. especially that last cover, for The Midnight Mayor – I could have sworn I knew the guy. and then it clicked: isn’t that… James Dean? from the poster for East of Eden??

at least a handful more look to be similarly cribbed portraits – pretty sure I see Tony Curtis on The Fearful Flower Basket, for instance – but it might take me some time to track em down. if you’ve got any leads on who they might be (or the source photo/poster etc), let me know! for now – this one’s an open case…

as always, the ranpo covers will be up on the masterpost… but now that I’m starting to accumulate so many other covers/authors, I’m wondering how best to categorize them outside of their own entries! for now, I’ll keep them as-is, but do my best to link back to each post… let me know if something else makes more sense ;^)