DETECTIVE NOVELS

   The Japanese detective novel (tantei shosetsu or suiri shosetsu) was born in the 1890s and flourished during the 1920s. The movement’s key author, Edogawa Rampo, was an admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Maurice Leblanc and founded the Detective Story Club in Japan in the 1940s. Matsumoto Seicho’s story of social and political corruption, Kao (1957; tr. Face, 1980), injected realism to detective literature. Since the 1980s, detective fiction has evolved to include elements of intellectual reasoning and introspection. Detective fiction also recently expanded to include manga (visual novels), most notably the weekly children’s publication Meitantei Konan (Case Closed), established in 1994.

   See also MINAKAMI TSUTOMU; OKAMOTO KIDO; SAKAGUCHI ANGO; YAMAMOTO SHUGORO.