Tetsuya Ayukawa (1919-2002) was born in the Sugamo district of Tokyo. The son of a surveyor for the South Manchurian Railway Co., he spent much of his youth in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, returning to war-ravaged Japan only in 1944. He began writing detective mysteries, and introduced the recurring character Inspector Onitsura, for which Ayukawa later became renowned. Celebrated as one of Japan's finest writers of impossible crimes and alibi-deconstruction mysteries, he won the Japanese Detective Writers Club Prize for The Black Swan and in 2001 he was awarded the inaugural Honkaku Mystery Grand Prix for his contribution to the genre. Many of his works have been adapted for radio and screen.