Headline : Dear readers, jumping and crying out in surprise

Read more from the original article on here at www.budapesttimes.hu.

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And the answer is that one doesn’t need to delve too far into ”Gold Mask” to realise that it is closer to the latter, like reading a yarn out of something called ”Big Adventure Book for Boys”. It seems odd that literary bods invariably view Rampo as the greatest of all Japanese suspense and mystery authors when he writes in such undemanding, almost juvenile, style, at least on this evidence.

When we hunt for further details about Edogawa Rampo, which was a pseudonym for Taro Hirai (1894-1965), they generally offer that the pen name is a Japanese transliteration of Edgar Allen Poe, whom Rampo obviously admired. The strange thing is that while it can’t be denied they both went in for tales of mystery and the macabre, here again we find Rampo/Hirai writing in a far simpler style than Poe’s sometimes difficult-to-tackle sentences.

The Japanese writer was prolific and can’t be judged fully on just three titles. He is also said to have been much influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes; G.K. Chesterton, best remembered for the priest-detective Father Brown; and science fiction novelist H.G. Wells, all British. British, American, Japanese – somehow it all fits together.

”Gold Mask” had its birth as a serial in a Japanese monthly magazine called King from September 1930 to October 1931. Rampo himself offered an explanatory commentary that is reprinted in this 2024 edition from publisher Penguin Random House. ”I wrote it one month at a time,” he clarified on July 2, 1931, ”driven by deadlines [for King], so it is not as if I prepared any clear plot in advance. As a result, its quality varied month-to-month depending on my mood, and upon reading it through as a whole there is definitely an impression that something is lacking.” King was a major magazine with the highest circulation in Japan, and thus certainly aimed at grown-ups.

Read more from the original article on here at www.budapesttimes.hu.

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