Edogawa Ranpo

Born Tarō Hirai in 1894, he spent his student days at Waseda University attempting to translate Arthur Conan Doyle into Japanese. He adopted the pen name Edogawa Ranpo as a phonetic tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, whose work he admired alongside that of Japanese mystery pioneer Ruikō Kuroiwa. His novels introduced the detective Kogoro Akechi, a hero who in later stories led the Boy Detectives Club, a group of young sleuths that became a fixture of the genre. Through those books and his criticism, Ranpo built the scaffolding for Japanese mystery and thriller writing, translating Western tropes into a tradition that hadn't existed before. He died in 1965, having spent four decades turning borrowed forms into something unmistakably his own.