Chapter 56 "Spider Man" Problem Solving

This article involves the mystery of the work, it is recommended that readers read the work first, and then read this article. It is the seventh volume of "The Works of Edogawa Ranpo", which contains the fifth novel of Ranpo.This article was serialized in the monthly magazine "Kodan Club" issued by Kodansha from August 1929 to June 1930. In October 1930, Kodansha published a separate edition. The original text is about two 110,000 characters is a commemorative work in which Ranpo established the style of full-length thrilling novels.At that time, there was no such thing as "thriller novels", but collectively referred to as "popular detective novels".There are not many works that can be classified into this special genre, and only some of the reasoning novels by three writers, Ranpo, Koga Saburo, and Oshita Udoer, can be honored, so they are also called "popular detective novels".Let me add one more thing here, there is no category of "popular reasoning short stories" for short detective stories, and reasoning short stories with non-mystery-solving themes are all classified as "transformed detective novels".

Now, Kodansha can be regarded as the largest publishing house in Japan, regardless of its capital or the number of publications, and it is a veritable aircraft carrier of the publishing industry.Kodansha is an abbreviation, and its official name is Dainippon Eloquent Society Kodansha, which was renamed after the war.But before World War II, it was Hakubunkan, which published magazines such as "New Youth", and Shunyodo, which published literary books, that dominated the Japanese publishing industry. At that time, Kodansha's mainstream publications were popular magazines, such as the popular comprehensive magazine "King", which claimed to have millions of readers, the popular fiction magazines "Fun Club" and "Talk Club", and the magazines for children and girls "Youth Club", "Girls' Club" and "Kids Club", etc., were called the kingdom of magazines before the war, but they were looked down upon by many cultural people, and many writers were unwilling to write for Kodansha's magazines.

According to Ranpo's recollection, shortly after his debut, the editor of "Talk Club" approached him and offered him a particularly generous remuneration, asking him to write a mystery novel.Because of the above reasons, Ranpo hesitated for five or six years before reluctantly agreeing to write a reasoning novel for the magazine - "The Secret Story of the Birth of the Spider Man". Strictly speaking, it is not Ranpo's first popular detective novel, the first novel "Strolling in the Dark" (黑に狂く), and the third novel "One Inch Master" (One Inch Master), can also be classified as popular according to the content. category of detective fiction.However, when creating Ranpo, he built a structure of a mystery novel, and added a riddle plot at the end of the work, which can be said to be a failure.

On the contrary, this random step completely served the hobbies of the general public. It caused a sensation when it was serialized in the magazine, and won the first place in the readers' vote for good-looking novels sponsored by the editorial department of "Talk Club". At the beginning of the story, a strange gentleman Inagaki Heizo rented an office, bought all the desks, chairs and decorative arts in one day, and advertised in the newspaper to recruit young female shop assistants. There is an intuitive feeling.The next day, an 18-year-old girl—Satomi Yoshie was hired from a group of girls who applied for the job.That night he raped and killed the girl, dismembered her body, and made a human body sculpture with plaster to complete the crime.

Next, Luanbu changed his style of writing and began to describe a well-known criminologist——Dr. Pan Liu, who is also a detective. He deduced the criminal information between the lines through three small advertisements in newspapers, and then he He took his assistant Nozaki Saburo to investigate the crime scene where he reasoned, and found that a murder happened there.The story unfolds from an angle that readers cannot predict. It is a story of a battle of wits between a famous detective and a murderer, but the famous detective in the first half is Inagaki, and in the second half he becomes Kogoro Akechi.

Counting from its serialization in the magazine in August 1929 to 1939 when the Japanese government banned the publication of mystery novels, Ranpo published a total of 20 popular detective novels. This high-yield creation It was amazing at the time, more than half of his works of the same genre were published in Kodansha's popular magazines.The main axes of these works are stories about the battle of wits and courage between famous detectives and villains, which also reflects Ranpo's interest in hunting novelties.