"The table of contents of the second number of 1923—one of the earliest special issues on tantei shosetsu published by Shinseinen—categorizes the stories into six different subgenres, i.e., ‘pure’ mystery (jun-tantei), witty mystery (kichi-tantei), bizarre mystery (kaiki-tantei), adventure mystery (boken-tantei), sentimental mystery (joshu-tantei), and humor mystery (kokkei-tantei)."
"The air of impropriety and ambiguity that surrounds a person who plays at detecting…and the fundamentally split personality that underlies it, is what gives a detective novel its deeper breadth and dark shadows. It is what drives the tale and makes it complicated...Even in the same story, a person can be presented as both a good secret-seeker and/or evildoer depending on the perspectives of others…In short, the detective or tantei acquires a double consciousness, or a double-voicedness, by virtue of the fact that he or she travels constantly between two poles of dichotomies such as good and evil, law and criminality, civilization and anarchy. "