"Kageotoko" (Shadow Man) by Edogawa Ranpo. Stories of a man who profits from shady ventures such as blackmailing rich deviants and consulting for murderers. This book has a mix of most of the good parts from Ranpo's other writings, including interesting disguises, optical illusions, and really clever ways to kill people.
The optical illusion bit was very much like "Panoramatou Kitan", but actually "Kageotoko" was published ~28 years after "Panoramatou Kitan". It was pure coincidence that I would read these two books back to back, but having done it, I would recommend the same sequence to other readers. Those panorama scenes in this book were done at a smaller scale, more like a circus show than an amusement park tour, but they don't have as much of the dark and uneasy undertones of "Panoramatou Kitan". It was more pleasurable to read overall.
The real highlight of this book was the really clever murder schemes, and there were a few of them, including death by quicksand and a twisted locked room mystery. It's like reading detective novels from the criminal's perspective, but this criminal happens to be a detective novel writer who constantly aims to create new puzzles for readers. Not only were the setups difficult to solve, they were done in such a way to best present the murder scene to the intended audience. While the "novel writer" here refers to the shadow man and the "intended audience" refers to the various clients who paid for the hit, these sentences parses equally well if the writer had been Ranpo himself with us readers as the intended audience.
This book is one of Ranpo's best works and is definitely worth reading.
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