Kodô Nomura(1882-1963)

He was born in Shiwa city. In the Morioka Jinjo junior High School he knew future novelists Takuboku Ishikawa and Kyosuke Kindaichi, but he had to leave school after his father's death. In 1912 he joined a newspaper as a journalist and at the same time serialized his first novels in the same newspaper under the pen name of "Kodo Nomura" in 1914. He also wrote a music section with a second pen name. In 1931 he created his most famous serialization, "The Casebook of Detective Heiji Zenigata", which ran until 1958. During these 27 years Edo Period detective Zenigata solved 383 cases. The fast popularity of the character led to the first film adaptation in the first year of publication, 1931. The last one was in 1967, in a total of 30 movies and a long TV series (1966-84), where he solved 888 cases. The most famous Zenigata in film was Kazuo Hasegawa, who played him in 18 movies between 1949 and 1961. Nomura wrote other novels, including another detective novel, "The Casebook of Daisuke Ikeda", but none of them were so popular as Zenigata.