少年探偵団-対決! 怪人二十面相 10歳までに読みたい日本名作

I can very much echo squarefairy's review here. While this was at times a little predictable (possibly because it is a children's book, after all) it was still exciting and well-written. It was a fun read and plenty of times I felt like reading just a little bit more to see where it goes.

I'm a bit torn about the grading of the book. While the first story is definitely around L21 and was a smooth read (with just plenty of vocab I had to look up), the second story felt more like a L24-25, especially in the beginning, and had many places where I had to resort to DeepL to get the meaning of a sentence.

All in all, definitely recommended!

This is an abridged adaptation of Ranpo Edogawa's juvenile novels 怪人二十面相 (The Fiend with Twenty Faces) and 少年探偵団 (The Boys Detective Club). I have not yet read the original works (which are free on Aozora Bunko) but suspect this adaptation, like others in the series, pares the stories down to just the main plot points to keep it short and simple enough for young children to grasp.

The concessions made for young readers make this book pretty readable for foreign language learners: the gigantic font, the furigana, the modernized vocabulary, the frequent footnotes to explain old-fashioned terms, and illustrations and diagrams of key plot points. Sentences are occasionally a bit long, but with patience can be pulled apart and made sense of.

Despite the heavy abridgement, I enjoyed the stories a great deal — it has exciting scenes, likable characters, and a memorable villain. I'd recommend this to anyone at upper N4 level with an interest in detective stories.