The Black Lizard
“Give a crooked man enough rope, and he’ll provide enough evidence to hang himself” – Akechi Kogoro
If you were to wonder which author influenced the development of literary genres like thriller, crime and mystery, an expected name would be Taro Hirai, known by his literary pseudonym Edogawa Ranpo. And the novella “The Black Lizard” is perhaps his most famous work.
Ranpo created a whole series of short stories, novellas, but also novels for young people (“Boy Detectives Club”) where the central figure is Akechi Kogoro, a brilliant (but very eccentric) private detective who takes on the most complicated cases throughout Tokyo. He’s extremely intelligent and cunning, a judo expert and unsurpassed master of disguise, who has a whole network of helpers and street boys who help him in his searches.
And his newest case is quite unusual, because the famous thief “The Black Lizard” plans to kidnap the daughter of merchant Iwase Shobei, Sanae, in order to get the valuable precious stone (“Star of Egypt”) that’s in the Shobei family’s possession.
What’s interesting is “The Black Lizard” sent letters to Iwase two weeks earlier saying his daughter would be kidnapped, which is why Iwase hired the famous detective Kogoro to constantly be with them, to eventually prevent potential kidnapping.
We soon discover “The Black Lizard” is the seductive (and no less cunning) Madam Midorikawa, obsessed with beautiful things, who has her blindly devoted helpers, who’s so confident she’s willing to meet her rival face to face.
However, her kidnapping plan, thanks to the famous detective, wasn’t realized.
But this isn’t the end, but the beginning of a cat and mouse game, and the prize is Sanae and the precious stone.
Ranpo with the work “The Black Lizard,” and other works in the series about detective Kogoro, drew inspiration from the works of Edgar Allan Poe (by the way, the pseudonym Edogawa Ranpo arose from the Japanization of precisely this famous writer’s name), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Akechi Kogoro irresistibly reminds one of Sherlock Holmes) and Maurice Leblanc’s series about the famous thief Arsène Lupin, creating an interesting amalgam of a detective-thief gothic noir novel set in Japan.
The writing style is also interesting and unusual for today’s writing style, because the narrator (i.e., author) constantly addresses the reader and explains what’s happening, so you have the impression as if together with the narrator you’re standing invisible and watching live what’s happening, while the narrator explains situations to you with some additional information. And not infrequently the narrator will tell some seemingly unconnected events, which will later turn out to very much matter…
The entire novella is, as I mentioned, a cat and mouse game, i.e., constant outwitting. Detective Kogoro, although at moments seems sometimes overly confident in his skills, somehow always manages to get out of a situation with “yu-gi-oh” moments, when he manages to pull an ace from his pants (not literally, of course) and turn the situation in his favor, and not infrequently seems in Aizen style to be a few steps ahead of the opponent in constructing certain events to unfold.
Although the novel has 29 chapters and just under 200 pages, it reads incredibly quickly and easily, you have the feeling you can read it in one afternoon.
All in all, “The Black Lizard” is a fun and intelligently written novella, and it would be a shame not to read it and have it in your library. For lovers of crime mysteries and detective novels, and especially if you’re a lover of Japan, this is a must read.
And you, dear reader, have you previously had the opportunity to hear about detective Akechi Kogoro?
Book price: Vulkan | Delfi | Makart
