Back in time to the 1940s. At that time, the Western media was full of war news, and everyone seemed to have no other way of life except to advance and retreat with the government and leaders.In this special period, a group of alternative news, which usually seems a bit nondescript, has unexpectedly received high attention from the public, and the controversy it caused even almost changed the fate of the world. The first message came from the United States.President Roosevelt wrote that the famous detective Sherlock Holmes was not a British citizen, but a compatriot of "Uncle Sam".Citing many evidences, the president concluded by saying: "Every citizen of the United States welcomes Sherlock home."

The speed of message transmission is not inferior to that of war intelligence.Three days later, a British man named Churchill publicly expressed his opinion in the newspaper: "President Roosevelt's remarks are irresponsible. The fact that Holmes is British has been confirmed 50 years ago. Any attempt to put the great detective Any act of 'taking it for oneself' will fail!" In the eyes of the cigar-smoking prime minister, the behavior of "dividing" Holmes is almost equivalent to Hitler's air raid on Coventry, which is simply intolerable. The people of the United States and Britain were immediately attracted by the leader's remarks. The issue of Holmes' ownership seemed to have affected the relationship between the anti-fascist alliance and the opening of the second front.

The French, who are extremely eager to show off, also joined in the fun, and the task of speaking on behalf of the people naturally fell on the leader.De Gaulle said: "No matter which side of the Atlantic is the hometown of the great Mr. Holmes, one thing is certain-he will always be the best friend of the French people!" It's okay to do something meaningless. As a result, Sherlock Holmes scholars and fans of the great detective in the three countries started a debate on various occasions. Their only purpose was to compete for the "copyright" of a fictional character.The famous detective writer Raymond Chandler once wrote: "Fortunately, the Germans and the Soviets are playing games in Stalingrad, otherwise, Hitler and Stalin must also join the debate."

Today in the 21st century, I believe that the name of Sherlock Holmes has become a household name. Who is he? a fictional character in a novel; a fictional character in a detective story; A great fictional character in detective stories. Detective novels are really charming, and it can make the three great men "care about every detail".The protagonist of a detective novel is full of magical powers. He can make the people temporarily forget the hatred of the country and the family, and turn to a topic that has no practical meaning. For readers, a good detective novel often reminds them of three names: the name of the author, the name of the work, and the name of the detective.There is no doubt that the most important of the three names is the last one.The first two are just flat symbols, but the existence of the detective can make everything three-dimensional - the author is famous all over the world, and the works are regarded as classics.

Readers must know Sherlock Holmes before remembering Conan Doyle; must know Poirot mustache before remembering Agatha Christie (grandmother); must know Mitarashi first , I remembered Shoji Shimada; I must have known Edogawa Conan before I remembered Gosho Aoyama... Therefore, we might as well start with the most familiar and intuitive detective to explain the context of detective novels. The word "detective" first appeared in the English-speaking world in 1194. At that time, it was written as "sleuth". The original meaning was footprints, traces, and the objects could be humans or other animals.By the 15th century, the word had the meaning of "dog tracking the target", for example, the current "sleuth-hound" was derived from it.In the 19th century, the noun form of the word officially meant "detective" and the verb form meant "to search, investigate."Today, "sleuth" refers to all investigative and event-solving protagonists (that is, detectives) in detective fiction.The term "detective" that we use more now is much younger, appearing in the works of the great British writer (and pioneer of detective fiction) Charles Dickens in the mid-19th century.

Detectives in reality are produced with the rapid development of the western world economy and the establishment of the capitalist system, which is exactly the same as the conditions for the production of detective novels.The first detective to appear in detective novels is the Frenchman Auguste Dupin.He was born in 1841, the creator is the American Edgar Allan Poe.Mr. Dupin concentratedly reflects the characteristics of the protagonist in detective novels—existing entirely for deciphering the truth, non-human, without any emotion at all, weird and magical.We still don't know what Mr. Dupin looks like, because Poe only created a reasoning machine, and there is no description of the appearance of the machine.It can be said that the appearance of Dupin made the detective novel freeze from the day of its birth: this is a kind of "extremist" type novel, which is the purest intellectual game.

In the half century after 1841, the appearance of several detectives enriched the expression techniques of detective novels, and also changed the impression of "ruthless to the end" left by Dupin's predecessors to readers.Detective Kauf, portrayed by Wilkie Collins, made the story more layered; Detective Lecock, written by Emile Gaborio, left many effective detection methods for later detective students.On the whole, though, detectives were far from earth-shattering in the nineteenth century, good but definitely not great. It is the great detective Sherlock Holmes who appeared in 1887 that connects "great" and "detective". His appearance made detective novels accepted by readers all over the world.What followed was that more and more people devoted themselves to the creation of detective novels, and detective novels entered the era of mass production.This era began in the early 20th century and lasted for almost 50 years.This is a beautiful time when "miraculous things happen every day, and detectives go everywhere".We are used to calling this era the "Golden Age".

The first half of the golden age belonged to short works, and detectives at this time were more accustomed to "flash by".So is Chesterton's Father Brown, so is Jack Futrell's "The Thinking Machine," so is Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndike, so is Baroness Ossitz's Old Man in the Corner.By the 1920s, detectives were getting more and more wings, and they were no longer satisfied with just appearing in short stories, and began to yearn for a broader stage.The prosperity of full-length detective novels came naturally.Familiar detectives in the western detective world basically appeared in this era.Examples include Poirot in 1920, Ellery Queen in 1929, and Gideon Fell and Merrillville in the 1930s.We can assert that such an era will not recur.Even today when spiritual life has become so diverse, looking at the classics left by the golden age, we will still be amazed at the purity and delicacy of the works.It was a vestige of the Victorian era and Coolidge prosperity, destined never to be repeated.

Good things are always fleeting. The Great Depression in 1929 pierced the mask of prosperity of the capitalist society, and the ensuing world war destroyed not only the economy, but almost all the beautiful illusions of human beings.All of a sudden, citizens in Western society no longer have the mood to enjoy themselves, and rebuilding their homes and hearts on the ruins is the top priority.Therefore, the era of gorgeous and unreal classical detective novels was mercilessly buried in the gunfire. At this time, a group of American saboteurs came one after another.They retreated from the battlefield, covered in bruises, but had no time to lick their wounds.They are heroes in times of war, who go through life and death for justice and love.However, these heroes found that the world has changed, dirty things are everywhere, and human beings are calculating and betraying each other for self-interest.The heroes try to change the world through their own efforts, but in the end they run into walls everywhere, their heads are broken, and they are either doomed or join forces. The fate of heroes is so cruel.

We call the stories of these strange heroes "hard-boiled detective novels".The impact of such works on classical detective novels is called "Black Revolution".The advocates of the revolution are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and others, and the heroes they created, such as Philip Marlowe, have become synonymous with tough men. The black revolution subverted classical detective novels so thoroughly that almost all detective works in the western world today are born out of hard-line works, including suspense novels, crime novels, adventure novels, spy novels and so on.The noir movies and "007 series" that flourished in Hollywood also gradually matured under the influence of the black revolution.

However, the scope of the black wave is limited to Europe and the United States. The geographical barrier and the huge cultural difference make readers in the Eastern world less "cold" with hard-line novels and their derivatives. We prefer classical detective works .Therefore, the development of detective literature in the East is very different from that in the West, which is mainly reflected in the development of reasoning culture in Japan. Here we need to explain a group of nouns-detective and reasoning, because we will come into contact with these two words repeatedly in this book.Originally, only the word "detective" was used in history to refer to the style created by Allan Poe.This word has been used in Europe and America to this day, although the outer edge has been expanded a lot. At the end of the 19th century, the detective novel came to Japan, and the novel form was quickly adopted by Japanese readers-although it developed very slowly during the first half century.In the 1920s, there was a qualitative change in detective novels in Japan, and detective novels that really belonged to the Japanese came into being.Japanese creators and researchers created the word "reasoning" for self-motivation and to distinguish it from Western detective novels, which is used to refer to detective novels created by Japanese.The word "reasoning" was first proposed by Jun Mizutani, a famous Japanese critic and editor.However, the idea of ​​mystery novels was not recognized by many people in the early days.This is mainly because there is not much difference between Japanese works in this period and European and American detective novels, and there is no need to deliberately distinguish them. In the 1950s, with the establishment of social mystery novels, Japanese reasoning culture gradually acquired its own characteristics, and the term "mystery novels" was accepted by more and more readers.After 30 years of hard work, by the end of the 20th century, Japan had become the undisputed center of the world's reasoning culture. Many readers even called European and American detective novels "reasoning novels", which tended to "forget the ancestors after many classics". In this book, we refer to Western works as "detectives" and Japanese works as "reasoning". In the case of general references, we refer to them collectively as "detectives" based on the principle of "first come, first served".Here is a special explanation to explain the confusion of readers. As mentioned above, detective novels were introduced to Japan in the middle and late 19th century, but developed extremely slowly in the first half century, basically staying at the level of poor imitation and rough translation.In this general environment, naturally there will be no great detectives remembered by readers. In 1923, Edogawa Ranpo, the founder of Japanese reasoning literature, created the short story "Two Cents", which brought reasoning novels into a new stage.This year was also positioned by researchers as "the first year of Japanese reasoning".Subsequently, Edogawa launched the first detective in the history of Japanese reasoning - Meiji Kogoro, a good man who lives at home.Later, there were many detectives named "XX Kogoro" in mystery novels (including the Mori Kogoro in "Detective Conan"), all thanks to Ranpo Patriarch.From 1923 to World War II, a large number of detectives emerged in Japanese reasoning literature.Most of their activities were concentrated in a literary magazine called "New Youth", so the first peak of Japanese reasoning literature was called "New Youth Era". After World War II, mystery novels developed from short stories to full-length novels, and the proponent of them was Henggou Zhengshi, a master of his generation. In 1945, the official history of Henggou was published, and a detective with scorched teeth and messy hair came into the eyes of readers all over the world.He is Kosuke Kindaichi, the grandfather of the protagonist of the manga "Kindaichi Case Book"!Under the guidance of this senior, Binguang Takagi, Takao Tsuchiya, Tetsuya Ayukawa and others began to create.It turns out that Japanese detectives are in no way inferior to their Western counterparts.The position during this period was mainly in a magazine called "Gems", so it was called "The Age of Gems". Reconstruction after the war went so smoothly that perhaps even the most optimistic citizens of Japan did not expect that their country would soon become the second largest economic power in the world.However, with the rapid economic rise, the many disadvantages of Japanese society have undoubtedly been exposed.Corruption of officials, collusion between government and businessmen, polarization between rich and poor... The resentment of the Japanese people seems unstoppable.Against this background, readers have raised the most fundamental question to those outstanding detectives—do the "strange cases" you have solved really exist?Don't lie anymore, we want to see the true portrayal of this decadent society, and we don't want to read those empty secret room murders or alibi anymore! As a result, Benge detectives who had been brilliant for nearly 40 years were collectively laid off.Japanese reasoning literature is facing a choice between life and death. In 1957, a mystery novel called "Murder" made the eyes of all Japanese people shine.No detectives!This is a mystery novel without a magical detective!The whole book tells a story of political and business collusion from beginning to end, and the darkest side of Japanese society is completely exposed to the sun.The author is like an old man who sees through the coldness of the world, repeating the stories around him in the most approachable tone.This old man is Seicho Matsumoto, one of the most accomplished creators of Japanese mystery novels.He won the Akutagawa Award, the highest award in the field of pure literature in Japan, and introduced mystery novels into the field of pure literature.It can be said that Seicho Matsumoto has contributed to the achievements of Japanese reasoning literature today.Critics call Matsumoto Seicho's reasoning novels that reflect the status quo of Japanese society "Socialism" or "realistic reasoning".This genre was completely created by Japanese writers. It was during this period that the term "reasoning" gradually gained popularity, and Japanese reasoning also conquered the world during this period.Socialist reasoning has been brilliant for 30 years. Morimura Seiichi, Natsuki Shizuko and others are representatives of socialist writers following Matsumoto's predecessors, and classic works such as , , and so on were also born during this period. However, in the 80s of the 20th century, the new generation of Japan has mastered the right to speak.This generation has never experienced the cruelty of war and the hardships of reconstruction, and is quite numb to some social phenomena.They do not have a heavy sense of mission and social responsibility, but believe in extreme hedonism.No matter how much public opinion despises the so-called "beat generation", the fact that socialist reasoning has become obsolete cannot be changed. In 1980, Shoji Shimada published.This book conquered the "new and new human beings" by relying on unprecedented gorgeous mysteries, and readers called it "the perfect fusion of fantasies and dreams".This work inspired newcomers such as Ayatsuji Kototo, Arisukawa Yusu, my grandson Takemaru, and Maya Yutaka (they were all college students at the time) to start creating.They held high the banner of "Rejuvenating Benge" and created a large number of "Classical Mystery Novels" belonging to the new era.These works are called "New Benge Reasoning", marking the entry of Japanese reasoning into a new era. In the 21st century, the new century, reasoning novels should usher in a new era.Japanese creators have inherited the fresh writing style of social reasoning, profound thoughts and gorgeous settings of new basic reasoning, and organically combined the two to create a brand new mystery novel.The stylized traces of this type of novel are very vague, and it is difficult to apply a certain definition, and "good-looking" has become the only criterion for evaluation.These works are filled with the creator's unimaginable world view, the universe has been emptied, and the geniuses reconstruct the space-time dimension completely according to their own ideas.Keigo Higashino, Kotaro Isaka, Miyuki Miyabe, Hidesuke Michio and others are among the best. The above is the combing of the context of this book, and it is also a brief history of Eastern and Western detective novels.Maybe some of the names of people or books mentioned above will make you feel confused, but it doesn’t matter, the following reading will let you understand that these nouns are unavoidable monuments in the field of detective novels. This is not a boring academic work, but a light-hearted and popular reading. If it can make you feel a little bit of profit in today's increasingly prosperous detective novels, the author will undoubtedly be flattered. The curtain opened, and the famous detective appeared.In the name of a detective, at your service.