Posted on July 2, 2025
Detectives These Days Are (driving me) Crazy
I’ve been watching less and less anime as it airs these days – perhaps because I prefer watching things once they’re complete, or maybe it’s because of hype fatigue… whatever the core reason, taste-testing my first show of the summer 2025 season certainly did not fill me with confidence that my viewing habits would change any time soon. if you’ve been round these parts for any amount of time, what piqued my interest about this show should be immediately obvious – a past-his-prime, ex-teen detective, aging out of precociousness while taking on a high school girl as his assistant? sounds like themes I’m interested in as a baseline, certainly, so I was bound to check it out. which, with hindsight, I rather wish I hadn’t! what left me feeling so sour about Detectives These Days Are Crazy? read on to find out!
Read MorePosted on June 30, 2025
old project, new resolve
recently, while digging through the convoluted, gnarled (and frankly, precarious) organizational system I call my computer to find an image to explain some tangent or other, I stumbled on the scattered remains of a project that I started several years ago which never came to fruition. later, while brushing the dust off and checking out what was there, I felt quite fond of the work I had done – so I’ve decided to try my hand at it again! I can’t say when I’ll have anything to show for it – restarting something where you left off before often leaves you with a lot of effort wasted just trying to understand your own shorthand – but I’m hoping to have the beginnings of this new (old) long-form project out sometime soon!!
I’m excited to be working on it again, but I know how foolish posts like this are. so, you can either picture me behind the scenes as quietly diligent, or – in the event that the project comes to nothing again – boisterously overconfident (as below) ;^)
Posted on June 26, 2025
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!
Read MorePosted on June 23, 2025
edogawa ranpo covers part 5 – the edge of kodansha-hunting
as I’ve been looking for various versions of the edogawa ranpo boy detective series, there’s one edition that stood out from the rest – read on to learn more about this hair-raising kodansha selection, their unreal cover illustrations, illusive authorship and perhaps… a connection to kamen rider?!
Read MorePosted 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!!!
Read MorePosted on June 11, 2025
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!!
Read MorePosted on June 10, 2025
edogawa ranpo covers part 3 – the case of the missing poplars!
back in my first post on these shonen tanteidan book covers, I didn’t really have much info on them – but then I got stuck into digging up more info while I’ve been recuperating from a cold (cough). and so, here I present – the remaining covers that I was missing from that first batch of Poplar Publishing editions. which should be the end of it… OR IS IT??? read more to find out!!
Read MorePosted on June 9, 2025
edogawa ranpo book covers part 2 – kobunsha!
while I was hunting for the covers from my previous post, I also found a treasure trove of covers from the same series, but a different publisher – in this case, kobunsha! I also found… some fun facts??! read more to find out!! :^O
Read MorePosted on June 3, 2025
edogawa ranpo’s shonen tanteidan/boy detective club book covers
透明怪人 – Invisible Fiend (1951)
怪奇四十面相 –
The Fiend with Forty Faces (1952)
サーカスの怪人 –
Fiend of the Circus (1957)
a whole lotta fiends round these parts…
during the pandemic, I took it upon myself to start reading as many japanese mystery novels as I could get my hands on – I won’t go into any of the details on authors or genre distinctions here (for now!!! another time!) but something I’ve become fascinated with is edogawa ranpo‘s era of juvenile literature. for a guy mainly known (particularly in the west) for his ero guro nonsense genre books, I am obsessed with the chunk of time where he churned out 26+ of these shonen tanteidan (boy detective club) mystery thrillers for middle grade readers. what gives!! why is no one talking about this!!! but more importantly – the covers I’ve found so far are amazing. read more to check em out!!
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