Jiro Kimura is involved in almost everything related to mysteries as an English-into-Japanese translator, fiction writer, columnist/essayist, book reviewer, current managing editor of The Maltese Falcon Flyer (the official newsletter of The Maltese Falcon Society, Japan), and the webmaster of one of the most important mystery-fiction sites on the Internet. He has translated Edward D. Hoch, Donald E. Westlake, and Joe Gores among others.  He presently lives  in Japan. The address for his marvelous website, The Gumshoe Site, is: <http://www.nsknet.or.jp/~jkimura/>. The Edgar Allan Poe Awards were given in New York on Wednesday evening and you will be able to find full results soon on Jiro’s site. It’s a resource for all who are interested in mysteries.  —Janet Hutchings

I have been dubbed “one of the longest-running mystery bloggers, who started his blog before the word ‘blog’ was coined.” Yes, I am talking about The Gumshoe Site. I, as its webmaster, call it the best mystery website on my short block. I will tell you the shortest version of how easy it is to launch a mystery website but how hard it is to keep it up to date.

In the 1980s, I was an editorial advisor for EQ, the Japanese edition (1978-1999) of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, while writing a monthly mystery column and translating mystery short stories for Hayakawa’s Mystery Magazine, EQ’s rival magazine. I was contentedly using an old-fashioned word processor for writing these columns and translating mystery fiction, without any interest in computer technology.

In the 1990s, there was some kind of a new fad called the Internet. At my wife’s urging, I decided to sign up a local Internet provider and join a local Internet club as a newbie to learn this mysterious monster baby. As a result, I got very curious about a few mystery-oriented websites on the Net, such as The Mysterious HomePage (now defunct) and ClueLass HomePage (now closed). I was fascinated with their work and bought a book about how to open a website. Those days, you connected your computers to slow-speed phone lines, and if you had surfed from website to website for a long time everyday, your monthly phone bills would be surprisingly high.

Anyway, in January 1996, I finally opened my own ad-free website named The Gumshoe Site, which consisted of a few webpages about its webmaster (that’s me), mystery news, award nominees and winners, mystery links, obituaries and other subjects I got interested in. These days, you can easily create webpages with some applications but in those days you had to write up webpages in “html” language manually. But even a computer-illiterate like me could launch a website. I decided to write my site’s webpages mostly in English, since the Internet is international and I thought my English-written webpages would attract visitors from all over the world. I also subscribed to several mailing lists such as DorothyL (specializing in the whole mystery genre, and still running) and sent them a post of the launching of The Gumshoe Site.

At first, I tried to update my site every month. And in November of the same year, I wrote a book titled The Mystery of the Internet English (not about the mystery of Internet English, as the title suggests, but about how to browse and use English-language mystery websites and sometimes shop at them. This publisher’s title was meant to grab attention from would-be Japanese readers). I also started a regular column about mystery websites for Hayakawa’s Mystery Magazine. I attended several mystery gatherings in the United States, took many photos of writers and uploaded them (photos, not writers) onto my site. I received a number of e-mails from mystery writers I had not met. By then the webmastering had become kind of a fun hobby.

As my professional life changed, my schedule changed. Every time my residential address changes, my priorities change. In the 2010s, I updated my site less frequently—maybe bimonthly. Now I am about to start updating the site quarterly. Since I have been managing the site for more than a quarter century, I can find justifiable excuses to be “lazy.”

As many people say, to launch a website is fairly easy, but to keep updating it is pretty hard. Almost everybody’s life has ups and downs, and so does any website’s life. In the future, I might make over The Gumshoe Site or take a hiatus or fold it for good. I myself don’t know what my future will bring. Nobody knows.

Well, that’s life, isn’t it?