Table of contents:
- The ancient world and just ancient times, when mysterious crimes were already unraveling with might and main
- The emergence of the detective genre of literature
Video: How detective story writers played with readers, and why it's so hard not to love detective stories
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Anyone who calls the Conandoyle stories about Sherlock Holmes the first detectives in history will be mistaken for several thousand years. No, the authors offered readers riddles with the search for the unknown already in antiquity - apparently, the beginning of the detective story can be counted from the moment people learned to read.
The ancient world and just ancient times, when mysterious crimes were already unraveling with might and main
Already in Ancient Egypt, narratives recorded on papyrus appeared that had the features of a detective. In the fairy tale "Truth and Krivda", which dates back to the 13-12th centuries BC, Pravda is slandered by his brother Krivda and accused of stealing, for which he was blinded and expelled from his home. Years later, the son of Pravda restores the true picture of what happened and seeks the punishment of the real criminal.
Murders, theft of treasures and the investigation of these incidents by heroes endowed with special qualities were also described in antiquity - Sophocles created the play "Oedipus the King", in which the main character, investigating the circumstances of the death of King Lai, finds out that he is the killer himself. Daniel”contains the story of Susanna and two lustful elders who accused her of adultery. As a result of interrogating each of the accusers separately, the young man Daniel (the future prophet) catches them on inconsistencies and achieves the girl's acquittal.
Detective stories and stories similar to them have not bypassed the east - take, for example, "The Tale of Three Apples" from "A Thousand and One Nights", in which the vizier is instructed to investigate the murder of a beautiful girl, whose body was found in a chest, for three days.
This literary genre was also not ignored in China, where an honest and noble servant of the law was praised, who challenged evil and injustice - and along the way, of course, sought the truth that would help punish the guilty and bring freedom to the innocent accused. Often, in this case, the detective investigating the crime turned to the help of otherworldly forces and to the spirits of the dead, so that the picture of what happened was as complete as possible, and the decision was fair. One of the heroes of such works was a certain "Judge Dee", an official who once really existed, who was a benevolent, courteous and shrewd fighter against criminals.
In the 20th century, Judge Dee was included in the series of works by Robert van Gulik, a Dutch writer and orientalist, who "became infected" with an interest in this character and his investigations after he translated the story of Judge Dee in 1949. The first piece in the cycle was Murder on Crescent Street.
The emergence of the detective genre of literature
The founder of the detective story as an independent genre is considered to be Edgar Poe, and the first work that has absorbed all the main features of detective literature is Murder on Morgue Street.
But earlier European writers have created works with similar features. The nineteenth century in general became a time of increasing interest of the reading public in fiction and crime literature. To a large extent, this was facilitated by the emergence of detective police units, as well as the fact that the routine, rather boring life of an ordinary European, consisting of days similar to one another, was an excellent background and environment for the emergence of such stories. The hero, who set himself the goal of unraveling someone's insidious plans and exposing the villain, was, of course, very dear to the heart of a 19th century reader. It also played a role that with the spread of periodicals, the awareness of the townspeople about crime and the degree of crime detection - rather small - forced them to turn to those works where, unlike newspapers, the good in the person of the detective won, and the evil - the criminal - received inevitable and just retribution.
Already at the beginning of the century, lovers of this kind of stories were happy to read "Notes" by Eugene Vidocq, once a recidivist and then the head of Parisian national security, Emile Gaboriau with novels about a young police officer Lecoque, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Chesterton, Gaston Leroux - and this is not a complete list of those who stood at the origins of the detective genre and threw puzzles to the reader that were not yet considered detectives.
Edgar Poe, in Murder on the Rue Morgue, already set the real canons of detective literature, which were guided by both Conan Doyle and subsequent recognized masters - which is one classic "locked room mystery". By the time Sherlock Holmes saw the light of day as a character, detectives had already firmly established themselves on the shelves of home libraries and bookstores. Doyle had only to develop the already invented laws of the genre, the main one, perhaps, of which was the presence in the work of a noble, intelligent detective, solving crimes involving a companion who turned out to be not so smart, but possessed an everyday, typical mindset and could lead the hero to the correct idea under investigation.
And the Russian reader, starting from the 18th century, got acquainted on the pages of a book with the life of a Moscow thief, who later became a detective, named Vanka Kain. In 1789, the story of M. D. Chulkov's "Bitter Fate" - about the mystery of the death of the entire family of the main character, the peasant Sysoi; this story is considered the first example of a detective genre in Russian literature.
Perhaps the main difference between a detective story and other literary genres is its "interactivity", the involvement of the reader in the investigation that is taking place on the pages of the book. Perhaps the unabated love for detective books is explained by this, because from the author follows a certain challenge, an offer to solve the mystery, based on all the data that are necessary and sufficient to establish the truth. The book sleuth always succeeds, but the reader may be deceived - and, in this case, take up another detective story, where to try his luck again.
There are exceptions to this rule, as it should be - when the author undertakes to show the reader a murderer or other criminal immediately, from the first pages of the work. Such a "detective story" came out of Dostoevsky - the novel "Crime and Punishment". This is an example of an "inverted" detective story, where the main intrigue is not the personality of the criminal, but the thought process and those actions that lead the detective to unravel the mystery of the crime.
The golden age of the classic detective was marked by the accession to the throne in the thirties and forties of the last century, his "queen" - Agatha Christie. To this day, Poirot and Miss Marple occupy their places at the top of the detective Olympus, without fear of competition with the new heroes of new works. And there are plenty of them - and those who, to solve the crime, turn to social conditions and the status of criminals and victims - like Commissioner Maigret, and those who proclaim hedonism as their main goal - like Nero Wolfe, and those who seem to have fun, throwing the reader away from from one sudden turn of the plot to another - like the heroes of detective stories by Sebastien Japrizo.
And here is another master of the detective genre in literature, for whose ideas Hitchcock himself was chasing: Boileau and Narsejak.
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