Death: 28th July 1965
Location: Tama Reien (多磨霊園), Fuchu, Tokyo Metropolis, Japan Plot: 26-1-17-6
Cause of death: Cerebral Haemorrhage
Photo taken by: Honeydance
Buy books by Edogawa Rampo
Japanese author and critic who played a major role in the development of Japanese mystery fiction. Many of his novels involve the detective hero Kogorō Akechi, who in later books, for juvenile readers, was the leader of the Boy Detective's Gang (少年探偵団).
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Rampo was an admirer of western mystery writers, and especially of Edgar Allan Poe (his pen name is a rendering of Poe's name). He was also influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whom he attempted to translate into Japanese.
In 1923 he made his literary debut by publishing the mystery story The Two-Sen Copper Coin (二銭銅貨). Over the course of the next several years, Edogawa went on to write a number of other stories that focus on crimes and the processes involved in solving them. Among these stories are a number of stories that are now considered classics of early 20th-century Japanese popular literature: Case of the Murder on D-Slope (D坂の殺人事件), which is about a woman who is killed in the course of a sadomasochistic extramarital affair, The Stalker in the Attic (屋根裏の散歩者), which is about a man who kills a neighbour in a Tokyo boarding house by dropping poison through a hole in the attic floor into his mouth, and The Human Chair (人間椅子), which is about a man who hides himself in a chair to feel the bodies on top of him.
In 1939 Edogawa was ordered by government censors to drop his story The Caterpillar (芋虫), which he had published without incident a few years before, from a collection of his short stories. The Caterpillar is about a veteran who was turned into a quadriplegic and so disfigured by war that he was little more than a human "caterpillar", unable to talk, move, or live by himself. Censors banned the story, apparently believing that the story would detract from the war effort.
Over the course of World War II Edogawa was active in his local patriotic, neighbourhood organisation, and he wrote a number of stories about young detectives and sleuths, but he wrote most of these under different pseudonyms as if to disassociate them with his legacy.
In the post-war period, Edogawa dedicated a great deal of energy to promoting mystery fiction, both in terms of the understanding of its history and encouraging the production of new mystery fiction, and in 1947, he founded the Detective Author’s Club (探偵作家クラブ), which changed its name in 1963 to the Mystery Writers of Japan (日本推理作家協会).
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