First appearance
Henry James Black. (Kairakutei Burakku). 岩出銀行 : 血染の手形 [Iwade Ginko : Chishio no Tegata]. (aka Gento : Tantei Shosetsu); the complete issue of Azuma Nishiki no. 3. Tokyo, Sanyusha July 4, 1892 (Meiji 25). 185x123mm publisher's colour printed wrapper; illustrated title & 97pp, three double page illustrations. Ink inscription on the plain back cover, smudges and signs of use; certainly read but still rather good. Au$3500
Perhaps the most remarkable detective novel ever. Where to start? This is a London set murder mystery solved by an amateur detective using fingerprints - or a handprint - and a magic lantern that was told as a serial story to a Japanese audience by a gay Australian who became a professional Japanese story teller, taken down in shorthand and turned into a book. I probably don't need to add much to that but I will.
Better known as Gento - its title when published as a book, this is the second known book to use fingerprints to solve a crime. The hero of fingerprint detecting is of course Mark Twain who solved a story within the story with a thumb print in his Life on the Mississippi in 1883 and followed it up with Pudd'nhead Wilson in 1893-4 - a year after Galton's Fingerprints was published. Now to Henry Black: Black was born in Adelaide and arrived in Japan in 1865 at the age of almost seven - his father, up until now a singer, had bought into the Japan Herald. Henry seems to have grown into something of a no-hoper in the eyes of some of his family at least and rather than settle to respectable work became first a proponent of progressive reform, like his father, then a professional rakugoka - story teller - and even a kabuki actor playing women. His reaction to his siblings' disapproval was to change his name to Kairakutei Burakku (Pleasure Black), marry a Japanese woman and become a Japanese citizen. Ian McArthur, Black's biographer, quotes from a police report made at this time that he was living in "virtually a husband and wife relationship" with a young Japanese man but otherwise there was nothing untoward to worry about.
At the height of his fame - 1891 and 92 - maybe six or seven of these stenographic novels were published and other stories appeared in newspapers. It's a bit hard to unravel as a couple appeared more than once with different titles. Even the concise and acerbic Edogawa Rampo gets muddled and misled trying to work out a bibliography at the end of his 1951 essay translated as Fingerprint Novels of the Meiji Era. He cites another essayist who wrote on Black and said he had five* of his books, Edogawa has only three but Gento is one of them - hence his essay.
Edogawa tells this appeared in June 1892 but elsewhere it is listed as July and CiNii's single entry is also dated July. The book edition, from the same publisher, is dated December. So this, then, is the first appearance of the novel. The title here translates more or less as Iwade Bank : the bloody handprint while the book is Magic Lantern : a detective story. Apart from the title page and some extra advertisements the contents are identical to the December book and were probably printed from the same stereoptypes. The title shows an overdressed chubby story teller who may well be Black in full drag.
This handful of detective stories or thrillers was bracketed by two translations or adaptations of novels: Mrs Braddon's Flower and Weed in 1886 and Dickens' Oliver Twist in 1895. Of the thrillers from these two boom years, two are known to be adapted from stories by Mrs Braddon and one from a story by Fortune du Boisgobey. The others - most particularly this, the jewel in the crown - have no known antecedent.
I would like to suggest that scholars chase connections with Henry Faulds - the disgruntled pioneer of fingerprint studies - who lived in Japan through the 1870s and 80s and published his first paper in Nature in 1880 - the paper that Galton said had no part in his discoveries. The bright spark in Black's story spent time in China and Japan where he learnt about prints as a form of identification - exactly as Faulds did in Japan.
*He lost his copy of Gento during the war.
