Kogoro Akechi, a brilliant detective patterned on Sherlock Holmes who appears in several stories by Edogawa Rampo and is a fixture in Japanese popular culture. ~~ The film is based on a 1934 novel by Edogawa Rampo, and its theatrical adaptation by Yukio Mishima, who, at the time, was the lover of Akihiro Maruyama, the actor who plays the notorious female criminal "Black Lizard" in drag.