“Like Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” many of Rampo’s stories incorporate cryptograms and logic puzzles for the reader to solve.  But his early work can’t be labeled uniformly derivative.  Rampo separates himself by his fixation on the erotic, on the pleasures of the body, an obsession set uncomfortably against the anxious backdrop of a pre-war society struggling with identity in the face of Westernization.” At Tin House, A.N. Devers tells us of the work of Edogawa Rampo. “Even at their most intimate, […]