Ellery Queen's Japanese Golden Dozen. Ellery Queen

      INTRODUCTION

      Dear Reader:

      When the Suedit Corporation of Tokyo asked me to select twelve stories for the Japanese Golden Dozen, I asked myself: What do I know about the Japanese detective story? And I had to answer truthfully: almost nothing.

      I dug into my memory. I was aware of the short stories written by Edogawa Rampo (pseudonym of Taro Hirai, often called "father of the Japanese mystery"), and had mentioned his work in Queen's Quorum, the history I wrote in 1951, and updated in 1969, of the detective-crime short story of the United States, England, and Continental Europe. Edogawa Rampo's name has a familiar sound to Western ears; if one says the name aloud, and keeps repeating it, the name becomes a verbal translation of the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe.

      What else did I know of Japanese detective stories?

      Nothing.

      Confronting the challenge the Suedit Corporation had given me, I ransacked my memory. More than thirty years ago Vincent Starrett, the famous bibliophile, had told me of his researches in the Chinese detective story. I consulted long-forgotten notes and refreshed my memory.

      The detective story, as we know it today, was apparently unknown in China until the first translation of the Sherlock Holmes saga, probably in the 1890s. After Holmes (sometimes called Fu-erh-mo-hsi), the deluge. The Chinese writers pitted Sherlock against their beloved ghosts, fox-women, and tiger-men, turning Holmes into a popular hero in their literature for the masses. (How different things are today!)

      But in old China, centuries before Poe and Doyle, storytellers had woven tales of criminal investigation and "detective" solutions. For the most part the "detectives" were just and upright magistrates with a passion for righting wrong, for correcting the errors of society and the injustices of fate. The stories, however, were too deeply rooted in the supernatural to be called detective stories as we understand the term today.

      Did Japanese detective stories resemble or follow the Chinese tradition? Or did Japanese stories resemble or follow the Occidental tradition?

      I asked myself: Have Japanese writers originated detectives of their own in the analytical and deductive school of Poe's Dupin, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and Ellery Queen? Are there tough Japanese private eyes like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer? Have Japanese writers created super-sleuths like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe? A courtroom detective like Erie Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason? A priest detective like G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown? A scientific detective like R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke? Are the official detectives of Japanese fiction like George Simenon's Inspector Maigret or more procedural like John Ball's Virgil Tibbs or the men of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct?

      There was only one way for me to find out: read whatever histories of the Japanese detective story I could locate, and perhaps more relevant, read the stories sent to me by the Suedit Corporation from which I was to prepare the Japanese Golden Dozen.

      From James B. Harris' Preface to Edogawa Rampo's Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination and from Katsuo Jinka's "Mystery Stories in Japan" (in the February 1976 issue of The Armchair Detective), I learned that until 1923 "no Japanese writer had attempted a modern detective story."

      In the beginning the old-style mystery story was known in Japan only through the tales of court trials imported from China. But as long ago as 1660 Japanese writers began to fashion similar tales; the most famous was Saikaku Ihara's Records of Trials Held Beneath a Cherry Tree (1689).

      So far there was merely a duplication of the Chinese