Reviews
(4.25/5)A Good Ol' Mystery Novel
ENTERTAINMENT
Detective Boys had many enjoyable moments from start to finish. It was a battle of wits between 20 Faces and Akechi Kogoro. I do wish that the Detective Boys were able to do more as a team like in the beginning of the book.
It was great to see where Detective Conan's Detective Boys got there namesake and badges from. The gadgets that they had were interesting as well. Like the fountain pen flashlight.
LANGUAGE LEARNING
This was my first time reading an old book so it was difficult to follow in some parts. Luckily this Aoitori version that I bought on Bookwalker has furigana. I didn't look up that many words this time and used context to understand what was going on.
If you'd like to listen to it being read to you, luckily there is a YouTube channel that has read this book. I left comments on the videos for this story with timestamps on when each chapter starts. This version of the book does have more chapters but majority of the chapter names and content are the same.
I did find some interesting phrases/words such as:
- 立（たち）ちすくむ：To be petrified
- 片言（かたこと）：broken language, imperfect speech
- 狐（きつね）につままれる：to be bewitched by a fox, to be confused
- 鳩（はと）が豆鉄砲（まめでっぽう）を食（く）ったよう： like a pigeon who's been shot by a peashooter (in other words like a deer in headlights, or wide-eyed in shock)
A SMALL JAPANESE REVIEW
フリガナがあるので、この本はもっと易しくなりますが、古い本なので、難しかったです。二十面相対明智光秀と少年探偵団の勝負は面白いと思います。この本のタイトルは「少年探偵団」だから、少年探偵団の役割はもっと大事になったかと思ったが、間違えました。それでも、楽しかったです。
The Youtube reading differed from the Aozora text in the introduction (adding several extra sentences) but seemed to be largely consistent after that point.
An old fashioned kid's detective's story. I'm a fan of golden era detective novels and also very comfortable with older texts at this point, so I enjoyed this thoroughly, but a few call outs for people not familiar with the genre:
- This is an old text (published 1937) so some of the grammar and words used will not be in common use anymore. You'll especially notice this when the young boys are speaking.
- Part of the plot involves Indian mysticism ("oh, you don't know the secret magics that the people of India have!" kind of thing).
- Because the intended audience is kids, there are fewer kanji than you might expect.
Overall this is a fun detective book, fully the type of spooky kids writing I expect from 江戸川乱歩's boy detective series. The plot twists are VERY predictable, but the writing style is so fun I always enjoy it anyways. His works for adults are much more difficult, so if you tried one of his normal novels or short stories and found it too hard you might still be fine with this.
Private detective Akechi Kogoro is teaming up with a gang of curious boys to first solve the mystery of a black demon before going against a phantom thief.
With this being a children’s book from 1937 I’m not sure if it will rank as high on other people’s lists but for me personally it was a lot of fun analyzing how this series definded the “detective vs. phantom thief” trope on the Japanese side. Be advised though that not everything holds up to modern standards and especially the chapters where the main suspects are wizards from India show a lot of xenophobia.