Detective story. Twenty rules for writing detective stories

Cooperation with a publishing house - even in our time, this is quite a good way to make money on your own book. Of course, the chances that the publishing house will pay attention to a little-known newcomer are small, but still above zero.
Here is a selection of publishing houses that are open to cooperation with new people. You should immediately warn that before sending a book somewhere, it is advisable to register your copyright for it. And before signing a contract with a publishing house, consult with a good lawyer. After all, often their contracts will not be in your favor.
I also advise you to pay attention to other collections dedicated to.
Eksmo- they accept both fiction and business literature, they do not work with poetry and children's fairy tales. It takes a long time to make a decision about your book, maybe up to 12 months. If your work is liked, you will be contacted.

Labyrinth- they are looking for authors of children's books, as in other publishing houses, you send them your work and wait for them to contact you. You may have to wait a long time.

Publishing house Peter- are ready to cooperate with authors, accept economic, computer, technical, popular, humanitarian, psychological and pedagogical literature. First, you need to fill out the book prospectus and send it to them by mail. Then, if they are interested in you, they will contact you.

Knorus- publish textbooks, manuals, and all kinds of educational literature. If the book interests them, they promise to publish it as soon as possible. In addition to publishing the book, they promise to contribute to its further dissemination. Veche- accept historical and fiction literature. For your book to be of interest to them, it must be thematically relevant to the series that are published here. They promise to make a decision regarding your book in 1-2 months.

Juright- publish educational literature. We are ready to both publish a new textbook and republish an old one. Moreover, they not only publish the book, they also promote and distribute the published textbook. Astrel-SPb- publish fantasy, contemporary prose, fantasy and crime fiction. You can send them not the entire manuscript, but an introductory excerpt; if they like it, then you can send the entire manuscript and agree on cooperation.

Mann, Ivanov and Ferber- looking for Russian authors for cooperation. They publish children's books, fiction and scientific literature, as well as all kinds of educational books. Williams- publish professional and scientific literature. They promise effective distribution of books in Russian-speaking countries. First you need to fill out an application and send it along with the book.

Knorus- publish textbooks, manuals, and all kinds of educational literature. If the book interests them, they promise to publish it as soon as possible. In addition to publishing the book, they promise to contribute to its further dissemination.

ABC- work with fantasy and science fiction, as well as fiction. They are not interested in technical books, children's books, or poetry. They promise to make a decision on your book within three months.

Alpina Publisher - publish fiction and technical literature, as well as textbooks and reference books. They promise to make a decision on your book within three weeks.

AST-PRESS- publish children's, fiction, historical books. As well as scientific and educational literature. They ask you to send the main idea of ​​the book in a letter and preferably synopsis of the text.

AST- publish textbooks, reference books and encyclopedias. Children's, educational and fiction, popular science literature. They also work with biographies and memoirs. They make a decision on your book within three months; in case of refusal, you are not notified. Just know that if they haven't contacted you in three months, the book isn't right for them.

Visson- publish religious literature. Or rather, they work with many genres, ranging from fantasy to scientific literature. But the book must have a religious slant.

Swallowtail- we are ready to cooperate with new authors, but it can take up to six months to make a decision regarding a book. In order for your application to be considered, it must be completed in accordance with the rules, which you can find on the publisher’s website. Centerpolygraph- I didn’t find detailed information about cooperation on the website. But there is a contact button with which a new author can contact the editors, and I am giving a link to it.

Zakharov- are open to cooperation with new authors, but they are not interested in fiction. Review of a new manuscript can take up to three months.

Polyandria- are open to cooperation with authors; the peculiarities include the fact that they accept both prose and poetry. But the publishing house does not work with books that have already been published, as well as with educational literature.

Self-publishing books is becoming popular. Signing a contract with a publishing house is not so profitable, because, firstly, the publishing houses themselves are not eager to conclude it with all the writers, and secondly, even if you manage to come to an agreement and draw up an agreement, you will lose some of your rights. By publishing a book yourself, you will retain more rights to the final product, be able to sell it at a lower cost, and also conduct an advertising campaign and market research. Motivation can be very different, but by publishing a book yourself, you will make it accessible to everyone. This article will give you recommendations on how you can do this.

Steps

Book writing, editing, design development and copywriting

Writing a book takes a lot of effort and time. You will have to spend 4 to 12 hours a day on this for several months or even years. If you're going to take this seriously, you'll have to allocate most day to develop the plot, directly write and edit the resulting text.

• The most productive and creative period for many authors is early in the morning, when they have just woken up and have not yet recovered from their dreams. Others prefer to write at night, while others do it during the day. Determine the most suitable time for yourself and free it up to work on your book.
• Don't forget to read other works while writing your book. Reading is a source of inspiration for authors. Take the time to sit down with books and get some useful ideas from them.

1. Prepare yourself. Publishing a book requires initiative and drive. Remember that the desire to bring your book to readers will help you overcome all the difficulties that you encounter along the way and cope with irritation. But at the same time, self-publishing can be a very exciting and profitable business.

   Explore your options. Decide whether self-publishing a book is right for you or not. Talk to representatives of several publishing houses and compare costs with possible profits. Make a list of reasons why you want to self-publish your book and estimate the approximate cost, which will include cover design, editing, and formatting. I must say that all this is a very expensive pleasure. Determine whether your desire is worth the cost, and it is certainly worth it, and continue to act.

   • A rough list of necessary expenses (at least for the US) would look something like this:
     • Formatting: $0 (if you do it yourself) - $150 and up, although you don't have to spend a lot of money on this.
     • Cover Design: $0 (if you do it yourself) - $1,000. If you choose the e-book format, photographs will be used as the cover.
     • Editing: $0 (if you do it yourself) - $3,000 for initial proofreading. Many start-up publishers are willing to pay about $500 for the services of a proofreader and editor.

2. Proofread the book. Make sure it is complete, well edited and proofread. You can give your manuscript to a few close friends who can give you feedback and discuss the motivations and actions of the characters, as well as other trivia about the book.

   • If you're part of an online writing community or a frequent visitor to writing forums, you can use them as a source of free (or relatively free) advice. Most often there are fans on the forums who will be happy to help you. It is very pleasant and honorable to receive the approval of such people.
   • The check is most often carried out in several stages until all design errors, as well as grammatical and stylistic flaws, are eliminated. If you rely on someone else's free services, then a complete edit will require at least two or three proofreads. And even after this, you should not think that the text is flawless.

3. Hire an editor. Hire a good editor who can provide constructive advice and improve your writing. Decide whether you need the services of a proofreader or a literary editor. A literary editor, in addition to correcting grammatical and punctuation errors, works on the style of speech, develops characters, can make changes to large chunks of text and introduce individual ideas into it. The work of a proofreader will be limited to correcting grammatical and punctuation errors; he works with a ready-made text and does not bring anything new to the work.

   Come up with a good name. If you haven't already, come up with a title that will interest people and increase reader interest in the work. The title can make people want to buy your book, but it can also discourage them. For example, “Lactic Acid Bacteria Fortified Food Guide” doesn’t sound as appealing as “The Temptation of Gorgonzola and Honey.”

   Hire a designer to create a quality book cover. If you are not an artist, it is better to trust the professionals. It will take very little time, but it will give the book a marketable appearance, and you will want to buy it.

   • This is very important if the book is expected to be on store shelves. Be prepared to pay not only for the cover itself, but also for the title page and back cover of the book, although this will incur additional costs. However, if you have already decided to publish the book yourself, it is worth investing in presenting it in the best possible way.

4. Add a copyright notice. The safest thing to do is to contact the competent authorities that are responsible for registering copyrights to confirm their existence and be able to leave a mention of them in a visible place. Most self-publishing sites allow you to add copyright information. In Russia, it is usually indicated in the lower left corner of the title page in the format “© Naumova I. N., 2012.” This will indicate that the text of the work belongs to you. Visit the official website where you can register a copyright and fill out the necessary documents.

   Get an ISBN number international Standart room books). An ISBN is a thirteen-digit digital code that can be used to identify and trace a book. Many self-publishing sites provide such codes to publishers. If you are going to self-publish the book, you will need to obtain it yourself. You need to do this in order for your book to be included in the database from which bookstores take information about new products in order to sell them.

   • You can purchase an ISBN directly, but note that it costs approximately $125. Wholesale sales are also possible: 10 ISBNs cost $250, 100 – $575, and a thousand ISBNs cost $1000.
   • Each book format requires its own ISBN: .prc (kindle), .epub (Kobo and others), and so on.

5. Find a printing house. Find out prices from different printing houses. Prices vary depending on the quality of paper, inks and binders. The more copies you print, the lower the cost of each one will be. Expect a circulation of 500 to 2,000 copies.

   How to publish a book yourself in electronic format

   1. Explore the benefits of publishing via a website.

      • Low production costs, which include editing fees. Creating an e-book does not require additional investment.
      • Greater popularity means greater profit. E-book publishers like Kindle Direct Publishing allow authors to keep 70% of the profits from a book, which means if it's in high demand and competitively priced, you can make a killing.
      • You retain all your rights. You don't have to hand them over to the publisher, who is often on his own.

   2. Install the program and create an account. You will need this to download the book and manage information about it. Many of them will automatically reformat documents, but if not, you can always hire someone to format the document for you.

      Download the finished book. After you fill out the list of categories on the site, finish publishing, and voila - you are the author of a published work!

      Publishing with Print on Demand

      1. Find out for yourself what Print on Demand (POD) is. You provide an electronic copy of the book to POD, and the vendors print it. Typically they will try to resell it to other sellers, but often they will just sell the book online.

         Learn about the benefits of publishing with POD. These include the following points:

         • You receive a tangible copy of the book that can serve as a commodity on the market.
         • You shift all the problems of printing a book to the seller.
         • You get a source that will distribute your book to top sellers around the world.

      2. Select a POD vendor. There are many sellers for authors who are just treading the thorny path into the world of great literature and want to get a physical copy of the book for relatively little money. These include Lulu,

         Find out what Vanity Press means. This is a derogatory term (it can be translated as “vanity publishing house”) that refers to small publishing houses where authors must pay to have their work published. Leading publishers recoup the money spent on publication by selling copies of the book, while small publishers live off the fees paid by authors. They tend to be less selective and therefore less prestigious.

      3. Most serious authors will never get involved with small publishers. Unless one of them really wants to publish something, but there will be no other opportunity. Small publishing houses position themselves as traditional publishing houses, or sub-publishing houses, while they charge fairly high fees for their services and do little or no promotion and distribution of books. They are not selective and are guided by the principle “if there is no fish, there is cancer.”

         • In order to achieve best results, make the topic part of the title or heading so that readers can easily find it in subject directories without even knowing the author and title. Even if you make the subtitle "A Novel of Ancient Greece" it will help interested readers and bookstores find your book.
         • Search Google for books with similar or identical titles to the ones you wanted to use for your book. Book titles are not subject to copyright, although the trademark may be unique, such as the Chicken Soup for the Soul and Chicken Soup for Dummies book series. If your initial choice of title is confusing or too common, consider replacing it with something more memorable.
         • Keep in mind that publishing through Scholastic, Dutton, or Penguin can provide you with many helpful resources such as editors and publicists, which will undoubtedly improve the quality of the book and increase sales. Even though it is not so easy to sign a profitable contract with them, do not write them off just because you do not like working with legal entities.

For a long time, the formula according to which a genre was defined as a set of formal characteristics was considered correct. The research of many Soviet scientists has proven the dependence of genres on the system of class relations, the historical and economic stage of development of society, worldview, and social psychology. For example, on the basis of rich historical and literary material, a folklore theory of the origin of genres grew, in which folklore itself is considered as a form of pre-class production of ideas .

Each socio-historical formation gave rise to ideological attitudes, social relations, and aesthetic preferences, which, in turn, created the preconditions for the emergence of certain genre formations in art. Therefore, it seems very promising to consider the genre as a form which is already defined in its architectonics, texture, color more or less specific artistic meaning .

Genre is a system of form components, imbued with a specific and rich artistic meaning. This is not only a design, but also a worldview. Understanding of literary forms can be achieved through their derivation from the content of life and literature. The universal law at work here is that form is the hardening and consolidation of content. Form was once content; literary structures, which we now, having deadened and turned into diagrams, subsume under the categories of genus and species: drama, satire, elegy, novel - at their birth were a living outflow of literary and artistic .

One of the outstanding Soviet film theorists Adrian Ivanovich Piotrovsky gives an interesting formulation of the film genre that has not lost its significance today. He's writing: We will agree to call a film genre a set of compositional, stylistic and plot devices associated with a certain semantic material and emotional attitude, which, however, fits completely into a certain ancestral art system, cinema system .

Thus, one genre is distinguished from another not only by a group of certain structural, thematic, functional, spatio-temporal features, but also by the nature of their historical, social, cultural and aesthetic connections, features of their genesis and evolution.

There are genres in which their features are most clearly manifested, and the structures constitute clear and stable mechanisms - protozoan cells. Detective is one of these genres.

The most common definition of the detective genre is that it is the disclosure of a mystery, the investigation of a crime through analysis. This formula, despite its apparent breadth and universality, seems clearly insufficient. Let us introduce several elements into it that not only clarify the features of the detective story, but also reveal the nature of the interaction of these elements. Detective is a genre in which a detective, using professional experience or a special gift of observation, investigates and thereby analytically reconstructs the circumstances of a crime, identifies the criminal and, in the name of certain ideas, achieves the victory of good over evil.

This formula is only a working model; in the process of reasoning it will have to be clarified more than once. A special section of this book is devoted to the morphology of the detective story, its structure, work internal mechanisms and external relations. But without this formula it is impossible to move further, to move on to considering some important issues. According to its literary design, a detective story is a novel, story or short story. So it's epic? Yes and no. With rare exceptions (American black novel) the detective greatly modifies his epic essence and with epic literature it has specific connections (which will be discussed below), and absolutely nothing unites it with the lyrics. But it has a lot in common with drama.

Drama and detective stories are based on the same aesthetic subject - emotional-volitional reactions of a person, expressed in verbal and physical actions .

They also have a similar compositional structure - beginning, ending, qui pro quo. Both are built on action, activity, plot, dialogue, because the dialogue in a detective story is almost continuous. Sometimes this is a dialogue of the detective with himself (pro - contra), sometimes with a partner (Holmes - Watson), often with the characters of the drama that occurred (question - answer), and the whole story is constructed as a dialogue of the hero-detective (not the author, he is here or impersonal , or identified with the detective) and the reader, who is asked several canonical questions (who killed? how? why?), who is given the right to insert (mentally) his own remarks (guesses), monologues (versions), and listen to the answers. The connection between the reader and the work is of a special kind; it comes close to the specific features of the viewer’s perception of the drama. Many more arguments can be given. One of them: a detective story always contains dramatic conflict, dramatic collisions, she refers to the dramatic material of life (murder, death).

The detective story is based on a mystery, but how often it is the mystery that is the spring of action in a dramatic work (from Aeschylus to Sophocles, and then to Shakespeare, Schiller, Corneille, and from them to the present day). The expositions of many plays are based on the riddle. What is surprising, for example, is the closeness of the design Hamlet detective scheme. The mystery, its investigation, reconstruction of the crime (scene Mousetraps ), retribution for the murderer. The viewer is offered answers to the questions: who killed? How? Why? That is, to questions that a detective story cannot do without. Hamlet , of course, is not a detective story, its plot is of a completely different nature, but their compositional and structural kinship is undeniable.

The phenomenon of crime has always attracted dramatic writers, if only because the crime created an extreme situation that makes it possible not only to clearly detect this or that conflict, but also to discover the character of the characters, their impulses hidden in everyday life, mental states, and so on. Crime in drama often plays the role of a catalyst for action; in fact, it is both the stimulus of the drama and the essence of the drama. But if in the theater the criminal himself, with the whole complex of his actions, can be the subject of research, then in a detective story he is hidden, as a rule, until the end, and therefore does not become the hero of the action. In a drama, a crime often ends the story, it becomes a kind of outcome of what was explored, the final step in the development of character, and a detective story most often begins with a murder, it is this that determines the course of all further events. In a detective story, the plot often coincides with the plot; in a drama, despite its predilection for plot effectiveness, the severity of intrigue, the plot is immeasurably wider, richer than the plot, which can only be a pretext for story space. The detective story is specific, narrower, more reportage, hence the nature of its realism, devoid of psychological nuance, its isolation, deliberate tornness from the diversity of existence. The detective turns to the fact, but shapes it according to his own conditional laws, turning it into a construction of the idea of ​​​​the punishability of evil.

The hero of the detective story - the detective - is clearly mythological, but he is surrounded by realistic characters. The tragic situation of death is immersed in the context of purely bourgeois relations, in a world where self-interest, thirst for power and money, competition and sex, immorality and selfishness reign. Violent death, previously perceived as a sharp violation of the harmony of the world, is viewed in a bourgeois detective story most often only as a threat to private property, as a temporary, accidental penetration into a stable and durable realistic world of mysterious elements that turn out to be everyday and understandable. Death here evokes not shock, but curiosity; it is perceived as a sensation, tickling the nerves, stimulating the lazy imagination.

Detective as a genre does not easily fit into the system grid genera and species. It is associated with epic and drama, it can be comedy and reportage, story, play, novel and finally film. What is its origin?

Capitalism inherited all the genre forms born before it, but gave them a general review, discarding some as unnecessary, radically modifying others, and introducing others into use for the first time. By adapting literature and art to its needs, capitalism has perfectly learned that some genres have a special energy of influence, that the so-called entertainment art- a rich arsenal of ideological weapons with the help of which a system of class self-affirmation and spiritual subordination of the majority to the ruling minority is carried out. One of these genres generated by capitalism was the detective story, which arose from the crossing of many literary forms, combining the characteristics of archaic genres with new structures.

The socio-political climate of the time determines the evolution of genres, affecting not only their semantic content, but also their structures. Over the years, those varieties of detective fiction have crystallized in which two main tendencies are most fully embodied.

The primary goal of one of the areas is to strengthen and protect the official legal order and its institutions such as the police, court, and political power. The detective here, as a rule, represents the state; he serves it faithfully, supporting its authority and strength. The criminal most often comes from the lower classes (always socially dangerous in the minds of the bourgeois), a foreigner, or, in extreme cases, a pathological maniac. An investigation is the work of coordinated, well-regulated government mechanisms aimed at eradicating evil, and therefore the detective is only a part of this mechanism. He is least of all a personality; his talent is replaced by experience and zeal for service.

In its most reactionary, extreme manifestations, such a detective story in literature and especially in cinema uses the most modern forms of shock; it seems to dissect the most perverted crimes, cruelty, cynicism, and sexual promiscuity. The detective scheme becomes only a device, a compositional core on which scenes are strung, chilling.

If we talk about cinema, then a special type of film has grown on this soil - thriller (thriller), the task of which is to evoke in a person a state of passion, fear, amazement. Classic Horror (horror-films), as a rule, they used fantasy material or showed exceptional phenomena - the actions of maniacs and madmen. Now the creators of such films are trying to prove the thesis about the universality of evil, that in every person there is a sadist, a pervert, eager to realize his monstrous instincts. Therefore, the social and political motives of crime are easily discounted, and the eternal instincts, creating a strong barrier for genuine conflicts and themes.

The most typical expression of this trend is the detective writings of the American Mickey Spillane, published in America alone in millions of copies, endlessly filmed. The apparent absence of problems in them masks a truly bourgeois, inhumane tendentiousness. Spillane's character is a private investigator. Mike Hemmer like a fish in water feels in an atmosphere of meanness, violence, brutal murders. This is his element. He shoots his lovers, they shoot him. All this is generously flavored with sex, striptease scenes, pornography, sadism, masochism. Previously, Hemmer chased after a cheating husband or wife, today he has modernized his activities.

Spillane's novels are directly related to the works Ian Flemming, A Mike Hemmer- brother of Bond, a super-spy in the service of Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, the invulnerable agent 007. The famous cinematic Bond movie(nine films based on novels Ian Flemming) lies outside the scope of our research, because it is not a detective story, but a complex genre formation, which includes elements of an adventure, gangster, detective, science fiction film, western and even comic. Much has been written about this series, and the attention it attracted is not due to its artistic value, but to the aggressiveness of the means of expression and the reactionary essence of the content.

The detective thriller often resorts to political camouflage, masking its reactionary essence with topicality and popular journalism, its predilection for violence - racial, political, simply criminal. It is no coincidence that the word has become so fashionable in America violence- violence. It comes from advertisements, posters, titles of books, films, newspaper, magazine articles, scientific research. The problem violence politicians, scientists, journalists are engaged, it has become a national problem.

The alarming increase in crime in the United States is a fact established by numerous statistical calculations. That's not what we're talking about now. The thing is feedback. Every sensational crime in life almost automatically becomes a fact art. A book is immediately thrown onto the market, an action film appears on the screens, reproducing in detail and dispassionately all the nuances of the event. Often such a work becomes instructions for a new crime. One American journalist calculated that the average American sixty years old has seen about one hundred thousand murders on the TV screen in his life. This cannot pass without a trace.

American psychologist and psychiatrist Frederic Wartham writes: From time to time I analyze films, so I can conclude that the curve of showing on screens all the details of acts of violence and cruelty is constantly growing. Sometimes it even seems that the cinematographer’s imagination has never appeared as sophisticated as it does in showing murders and cruelty. Family dramas, Westerns and many other genres today abound with scenes full of savagery and sadism. And one of his compatriots, a publicist, clearly formulates: Commercial exploitation of such phenomena as cruelty, sadism, violence is the best way to destroy the foundations of a nation’s civilization.

All these characteristics and observations naturally apply to other capitalist countries. In line with these thoughts, by the way, lies the fact of the expansion of certain genres that were hitherto considered the national affiliation of America. Mass production of Westerns, gangster films and other types of American violence-films in Italy, France, Germany, Japan is primarily due to the fact that these genres are the most effective means of mass film shock.

A continuous stream of films are being released that actively demoralize consumers and provoke an increase in crime. First of all, these include works that present crime as an act of heroism, courage, and risk. The heroes of these films are shown with sympathy; they appear in the romantic aura of their criminal skill. Even in detective stories, where moralizing was considered traditional and canonical, the criteria for treating the hero have sharply shifted. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that the craft of detective... has turned into a simple source of income, a type of business. It was here that the outwardly inconspicuous border of qualitative difference lay. prompted one critic to remark that the detectives had become nothing more than gangsters turned inside out. They can compete with them in the amount of blood they shed .

This type of detective is openly bourgeois in nature, his reactionism is demonstrative and consistent. At first glance, it may seem that the detective game is opposed to the tendentious bourgeois detective story. From works of this type, social and political motives are carefully erased, the action is abstracted, the killer, investigator, suspects are considered as signs, necessary elements of the proposed game. The rebus-charade-chess-game principle determines the inviolability of the rules, canons, techniques, and nomenclature of characters. The more skillfully this game is played, the more cunning the investigative puzzle and the more exotic the decorum in which it is played, the higher the merits of the thing, its purity. Intense action, an entertaining plot - the most important thing here, connections with life are weakened and reduced to a minimum. But one should not be deceived by this apparent asociality of the detective game. In essence, this is an absolutely bourgeois conformist trend. One of its most talented representatives, writer Dorothy Sayers, argued that the rise of detective fiction is evidence of the health of society: The appearance of an entire literature glorifying the detective who defeats the criminal is a fairly good indicator that the people, generally speaking, are satisfied with the work of justice. One cannot but agree with A. A. Gozenpud, who, commenting on this statement by Sayers, writes: Christie and Sayers and many others not only do not encroach on the sacred institutions of the capitalist world, but protect them.

In the depths of bourgeois society, another direction was formed - socially critical, anti-bourgeois. For its representatives, the detective genre is not a hindrance, but a way of social analysis, the study of capitalist society, its conflict situations. IN best examples In this direction we will find a fairly accurate (though not complete) picture of modern capitalism. That is why the specificity of the scene, the clarity of social characteristics, the motivations for crimes, and the social attitude of the detective conducting the investigation are so important in them. It is no coincidence that the main character here is, as a rule, a private detective who opposes the police and conducts an investigation not only at his own peril and risk, but also according to his own moral laws. This tradition is especially stable in the American, and more recently in the Italian detective story; it also has its followers in England (their pedigree goes from Sherlock Holmes). Such a detective can be a brilliant amateur, like Holmes, but he can also be a professional who runs a private office, like many heroes of the American social detective story, which will be discussed in detail in the book. A private detective or an amateur detective is a third force, an arbiter, supposedly independent of bourgeois justice. He sometimes comes into direct conflict with the law. He has access to that illusory freedom of choice that the policeman is deprived of. Pursuit free your hands to his hero leads to the fact that many authors of detective stories transfer the functions of the investigator to persons completely free from police duties - writers, journalists, curious old women and inquisitive children, insightful priests and revenge-seeking relatives of the murdered. Of course, such a technique in itself does not ensure the anti-bourgeois nature of the work, its critical orientation. The heroine who sees through everyone and everything Agatha Christie Mrs. Marple does not even think of correcting reality; she is quite happy with it. Detective for her is a form of self-affirmation, realization God's gift, no more. Father Brown- the constant hero of Chesterton's short stories - a fighter most likely against abstract, rather than concrete, social evil. But for private detectives in American works Raymond Chandler And Deshiela Hammet the fight against a criminal is a fight against corruption, gangsterism, against police officers who are in the pay of bandits, against sharks of capitalism for whom profit justifies any means of achieving it. There are cases when a detective, continuing to serve in the police, becomes, as it were, in opposition to it. So outsider, in fact, is famous Commissioner Maigret Georges Simenon. Maigret is not a fighter, political positions His ideas are vague, but he has a developed social sense and strong democratic convictions. His sympathies are on the side of the poor, the oppressed, he knows the value of need, so he always rushes to the aid of those who have been crushed by fate, and mercilessly exposes the treachery, malice, and crime of the rich and well-fed.

An anti-bourgeois detective story, revealing the political, social, class causes of crime, invades the sphere of bourgeois morality and morality, examines murder in the specific circumstances of place and time. That is why he turns to realism, to almost documentary accuracy of reproduction, to social psychology, exploring not mythologically abstract fights between good and evil, but conflicts and contradictions taken from life itself, generated by the conditions of capitalism. Of course, one should not exaggerate the combat capabilities of the genre, but it is also unwise to ignore or downplay them.

The history of the Western detective story is the history of the development of two opposing trends. On the one hand, he fiercely defended the inviolability of the capitalist legal order. On the other hand, he acted as an enemy of society. Many works of this kind were openly, demonstratively anti-bourgeois. And today in America, England, Italy and other countries of classical capitalism, revealing works appear, exposing the rottenness, inhumanity of justice, social relations, the decline of morality and ethics.

One of the pillars of American detective literature Raymond Chandler wrote: The realist author writes in his novels about a world in which murderers and gangsters rule the nation and cities; in which hotels, luxury homes and restaurants are owned by people who got their money through dishonest, dark means; in which movie stars can be the right hand of a famous killer, about a world in which a judge sends a man to hard labor just because brass knuckles are found in his pocket; in which the mayor of your city encouraged a murderer, using him as a tool to make big money; where a person cannot walk down a dark street without fear. Law and order are things that we talk about a lot, but which have not so easily entered into our everyday life. You may witness a terrible crime, but you would prefer to keep quiet about it, because there are people with long knives who can bribe the police and make your tongue shorter.

This is not a very organized world, but we live in it. Smart, talented writers can bring a lot to the light of day and create vivid models of what surrounds us. It’s not funny at all when a person is killed, but sometimes it’s ridiculous to kill him for nothing, his life is worthless, and therefore what we call civilization is worthless .

Chandler considered such a realist author Deshiela Hammet , which primarily reflected the sharply negative attitude of its heroes towards reality. Hammett proved with his talent and the sharpness of his judgments that a detective novel is a very important thing.

In the same article The Simple Art of Killing Chandler, praising the novel A. A. Milna The Mystery of the Red House , considers its main advantage to be problematic. He's writing: If Milne had not known what his novel was against, he would not have written it at all. He is against many things in life. And the reader understands and perceives this.

To be successful, modern detective fiction and film must not only skillfully use elements of sensation (as is usually believed), but grow out of the main moral problematics of one’s society.

So, a detective story contains the opportunity to be moral and immoral, humane and misanthropic, devoid of serious content and, on the contrary, carrying the most progressive content.

At the dawn of its history, the detective story had high literary authority; Hoffman, Poe, Balzac, Dickens, Collins, and Conan Doyle stood at its cradle. But the years passed, and the detective story, which was a literary phenomenon, turns into an industry that accustoms consumers to the idea that cruelty and violence are natural state person.

True, there were periods when this genre was rehabilitated. There were essentially two such periods. The first is the rise of the American black detective(both in literature and on screen), the second is our days. Today, prestigious works of the genre are increasingly appearing, attracting with their sharp social content, high skill, and convincing criticism of bourgeois society (this will be discussed in other chapters of the book).

Good detectives are still a rare thing. It is not they that are in use, but a sea of ​​overflowing replicated vulgarity, wretched goods for the poor in spirit.

Bourgeois principles of private property, competition, loose moral principles, social conditioning of the growth of crime, nakedness of conflicts - this and much more led to the fact that over time the detective story became the most typical and widespread genre of bourgeois mass culture.

With the help of mass media - radio, newspapers, cinema, television, advertising - modern man in the capitalist world receives spiritual food, he is entertained, educated, forming him into a passive consumer, incapable of action or critical thought.

A paradoxical situation arises - in an era of unprecedented technological progress and the rise of scientific thought, everything possible is being done to reduce a person to the most primitive level, to make him an intellectual poor man, an emotional impotent, a mental freak. With the help of all means of modern civilization, the degradation of the human personality, its lack of spirituality and immorality are programmed.

Mass culture has waged and continues to wage a not unsuccessful struggle with genuine art, which always awakens the person in a person, teaches him to think independently, gives him genuine experience, that is, in its ultimate goal it finds itself in a hostile position towards the official bourgeois ideology. This is why serious art often becomes isolated and persecuted.

A stereotype, a familiar scheme, a common morality, a common model of a hero - all this is designed to be easily recognized by the consumer, quickly absorbed, and related to himself. Thus, the process of cognition is replaced by a process of recognition, genuine experience is replaced by its surrogate - affect, instead of social activity, escapism - departure from reality - is offered.

Bourgeois mass culture is a special type of spiritual industry. In the works she creates, aesthetic categories are weakened to the limit; their place is most often taken by vulgar market, bourgeois ideas about beauty, common stereotypes and signs. Real social and psychological problems are replaced by bourgeois mythology. Mass culture seems reifies the main slogans of the bourgeoisie. Changing or modifying these slogans inevitably entails change of course in the field of artistic production. Mass culture is a way of self-affirmation of the bourgeois system, a means of promoting ideas, political attitudes, psychological attitudes, patterns of behavior, fashions, and so on.

The production of mass culture is reliably subsidized, because it is a source of constant and considerable income, it is a profitable business. Every year in the United States, $82 million worth of detective comics are sold, and about two hundred and fifty new titles of adventure books about spies and murderers are published every month. In theater and cinema, as a rule, themes of sex, violence, and horror dominate. Radio and television screens teach a person eavesdrop And spy sensational stories, presenting them so soothingly that, for example, after a report on the bloody atrocities of the fascist junta in Chile, a person goes to sleep as calmly as after just reading a detective story. The reaction to reality becomes dulled, it is perceived as something illusory ( far from me), and after this the moral criterion falls, the mind and conscience become lazier.

It is widely believed that mass culture was born when the means of mass communication appeared - newspapers, radio, cinema, television. This is not entirely accurate; its origins should be sought in a special type of entertainment performances, in market painting and sculpture, in the appearance of popular fiction, which was designed for general reader. Mass communications created favorable conditions for the development of this special culture. Unprecedented audiences of readers, viewers, listeners appeared, to satisfy whose demands it was necessary not only quality, but also quantitative changes in system manufacturing works of art. Art was transferred to continuous, mechanized production, producing millions of copies of books, films, songs, performances, all types of entertainment, all types of mass didactics. Hasn't art ceased to be art under such conditions? After all, quantitative factors could not but affect its quality.

There are different opinions on this matter. Some sharply divide the sphere of art and the sphere of mass culture. The presence of artistic elements in a work, even individual cases of the emergence of genuine creations of art in the depths of mass culture, do not change the general thesis that mass culture is a subculture, non-art, because it has different functions, a different approach to the phenomena of reality, it is devoid of an aesthetic system, outside of which art does not exist.

Others propose to reconsider and expand the concept of art, introducing within its boundaries not only new types (cinema, television film, television play), but also such areas as advertising, souvenir production, everyday aesthetics, design, and also to find a place in the art system and mass culture . In this case, there is danger to such an extent expand the concept of art that it will lose not only its characteristics, but also its meaning in general. There is still a rational grain here.

So, for some, mass culture is non-art, for others special kind his,

The author of this work is inclined to the first statement. Proponents of the second theory are right in one thing - new facts and factors have appeared in the modern life of art that require not only new aesthetic terminology, but also, possibly, a new definition of the concept of art.

How does the definition of mass culture as non-art agree with the statement that there is a type of detective story, which we talk about as a phenomenon of art and recognize its right not only to entertain, but also to reproduce life analytically and figuratively?

Let's try to build a logical diagram: if mass culture is non-art, then the detective story, its typical representative, is also non-art! If the main functions of bourgeois mass culture are protective, then how can a detective be anti-bourgeois, stand in opposition to his social system?

It would seem that there is an obvious contradiction. In essence, this contradiction is fictitious, formal. Why don’t these questions arise about, for example, the genre of the novel, which can be the most base pulp reading and the highest product of the human spirit? Who would think to think about the question: can a novel in one case be reactionary-protective, in another - militantly anti-bourgeois? The analogy here is further strengthened by the fact that both the detective story and the novel arose on the same historical and social basis. Another thing is that the specifics of the detective story (repetition of plot schemes, entertaining intrigue, apsychologism of the characters, standard means of expression) make it easily replicated, and its extreme accessibility becomes a strength that is often used not for the good. This does not mean that the genre is completely absorbed by mass culture, as some bourgeois theorists and apologists claim. They consider popular culture to be the most modern form culture, the art of the age of mass communications and mass audiences.

Detective- popular genre. This is common knowledge. But it does not follow from this that it mechanically, due to the quantitative factor, always becomes a product of mass culture. Between detective stories Conan Doyle And Edgar Wallace, Friedrich Dürrenmatt And Mickey Spillane There is a fundamental difference, although in terms of circulation they may be at the same level. New American paintings Bullitt , French liaison , for example, everyone hits cash records, but there is a serious difference between them and the mass productions of the detective genre.

The popularity of the detective story leads theorists to another common mistake. Works of the genre are divided into good and bad depending on the skill of their execution. Well done They classify a detective story as an art, while a hastily churned-out story or film falls under the nomenclature of mass culture. Using specific examples, we will see that this is far from the case. Spiritual cinema products can be created at a high level of technical skill, with modern widescreen, color and stereo chic. The script, director and cameraman's dexterity of compositional and dramatic structures, the participation of fashionable movie stars, and skillful advertising confuse the inexperienced consumer, who takes all this external brilliance for art. The form here cleverly replaces the content or disguises its poverty. How can I not remember the words? Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky who said: To play vulgarity with talent means to shield it, to promote it.

All these conclusions are far from categorical; they were born from observation of just one genre. The author understands how arbitrary all demarcation lines are in the areas chosen for research, how the boundaries of established ideas are blurred under the pressure of new facts, how great the role of migration of themes, forms, techniques is and how significant the phenomenon feedback, arising from specific historical, political, socio-psychological circumstances.

The proposed working model was decisive in the analysis method. It explains, in some cases, the abandonment of traditional criteria in evaluating works, and a special approach to the object of study.

The methods of artistic criticism may turn out to be completely unsuitable where we are talking about functions of a completely different kind - about entertainment, mass didactics. Here the work should be assessed precisely from these positions: how, by what mechanisms it provides entertainment and how, by what mechanisms it achieves its didactic-ideological goals. The value of a work appears in this case as not an aesthetic category, but as a category whose goals are determined by its socio-psychological functions.

Morphology genre

To understand how the mechanism of a detective story works, it is necessary to study its basic structures, understand their interaction and content. Using the example of this genre, one can be convinced that there are no neutral forms, that each genre structure reflects not only connections with reality in general, but with specific reality. It is historical and dependent on ideas, psychological climate, and social conditions of the time.

The study of the morphology of a detective story provides rich material for analyzing the connections between formal structures and ideological and artistic content. The seemingly neutral form turns out to be thoroughly imbued with meaning, and each element of the structure ultimately reveals patterns that reflect general processes and relationships. Here, as if in focus, questions of form and content, art and ideology converge. Bourgeois detective literature is a very characteristic phenomenon, aesthetically and historically much more established than film detective fiction, and the nature of the connections between them is of particular interest, because both their kinship and their differences arise from the most typical moral, psychological and aesthetic tasks of literature and cinema.

The analogy that determines the patterns of viewer-reader perception of certain genres and their methods of influence in the system of bourgeois mass culture also seems valuable.

Certain structural mechanisms have emerged in the literature. This took a very long time and a huge amount of literary experience. At first, cinema mechanically transferred already invented techniques and schemes to the screen, adapting them to new conditions of existence (visibility, lack of sound in silent films, the specific perception of cinema, etc.), and later came its own screen discoveries. But literature was and still remains the basis for the evolution of this film genre. This is one of the main reasons why the author turns to literary material in this chapter. There are other reasons. One of them is our lack of serious scientific developments of the theory of the detective genre, not only in cinema, but also in literature, as evidenced by the endless debate around the definition of the genre, its specificity, and its morphology. If this were not so, the author would simply refer the reader to the most authoritative sources and immediately move on to the point- to the film detective. Another reason is the absence of such well-known film examples and samples as literature has in abundance. It is difficult to find a modern person who has not read Conan Doyle, and well-known examples of film detective stories are much more difficult to establish. In addition, to check this or that position of the author, the reader of the book only needs to turn to detective literature, and he still can’t take a film work off the shelf and play it at home.

Turning to literature is by no means a sidetrack. This is the logic of this problem. This technique gives us the opportunity to understand both general patterns and differences, explore the evolution of detective mechanisms when translating literature onto the screen, and determine the significant difference in the perception of the story described and shown.

The detective story attracts the researcher with such genre properties as stability compositional schemes, stability of stereotypes, repetition of basic structures. This certainty of signs makes it possible to consider a detective story as simplest cell.

Let us consider the typical elements of the genre structure that most fully express the characteristics of a detective story.

1. Three questions

In the detective genre, a certain standard for plotting has developed. At the very beginning, a crime is committed. The first victim appears. (In a few deviations from this option, the compositional functions of the victim are performed by the loss of something important and valuable, sabotage, forgery, disappearance of someone, and so on.)

From this epicenter of future events, three rays of questions diverge: who? How? Why? These questions form the composition. In a standard detective scheme, the question Who?- the main and most dynamic one, because the search for an answer to it takes up the greatest space and time of action, determines the action itself with its deceptive moves, the process of investigation, the system of suspicions and evidence, the play of hints, details, and the logical structure of the Great Detective’s train of thought. (This is how the main character of a detective story is usually called. This term was introduced into critical use by the British at the end of the 19th century).

Thus, who killed?- the mainspring of the detective. Two other questions - How did the murder happen? Why?- in fact, are derivatives of the first. It's like The groundwater detective story, coming to the surface only at the very end, in the denouement. In the book this happens in the last pages, in the film - in the final monologues. Great detective or in dialogues with an assistant, friend or enemy of the main character, personifying the slow-witted reader. As a rule, in a process of guesswork hidden from the reader Great Detective questions How And Why have an instrumental meaning, because with their help he identifies the criminal. It is curious that the predominance How above Why(and vice versa) determines to some extent the nature of the narrative. For the famous Englishwoman, detective queen Agatha Christie, the most interesting mechanics of crime and investigation ( How?), and her favorite hero Hercule Poirot works tirelessly to study the circumstances of the murder, collect evidence that recreates the picture of the crime, and so on. Hero Georges Simenon Commissioner Maigret, getting used to the psychology of his characters, getting into character each of them, tries first of all to understand Why a murder occurred, what motives led to it. The search for a motive is the most important thing for him.

In one of the first detective stories of world literature - a short story Murder in the Rue Morgue Edgar Allan Poe amateur detective Auguste Dupin, faced with a mysterious crime, the victims of which were the mother and daughter of L’Espanay, begins by studying the circumstances. How could a murder happen in a room locked from the inside? How to explain the lack of motivation for the monstrous murder? How did the criminal disappear? Having found the answer to the last question (a mechanically slamming window), Dupin also finds the answer to all the others.

In another story Edgar Poe, Stolen letter , Dupin acts according to the same scheme - he seeks to determine: how can a letter be hidden? But in the first case, he looks for material traces, in the second, he penetrates into the secrets of the enemy’s psychology, imagining what an intelligent, cunning, unconventionally thinking person might do in such a situation. So he comes to the conclusion that the minister chose an ingenious and simple way to hide the letter without hiding it at all.

Edgar Poe proposed not only a new way of storytelling, but also its main variations.

The problem that interests us is the mechanism of action of three questions; in the nature of the answer to them, Edgar Allan Poe's hero anticipated both the deduction of Sherlock Holmes and the intuition of Father Brown and proposed several now classic modifications. IN Murder in the Rue Morgue question How serves as a guiding thread and it is he who leads to the solution Who?. IN Stolen letter Already in the first pages we find out who the criminal is, and together with Dupin we learn how he managed not to even steal, but only hide the letter. It is curious that in both cases Why plays almost no role. In the first case - a special case of unmotivated murder, in the second - in task conditions an explanation is immediately given: the letter is a means of blackmail. IN The Secret of Marie Roger a different scheme and a different mechanism for the interaction of the three issues were used.

Of the examples given, only Simenon came to the fore with the question Why? And this is not at all accidental. The nature of the question determines not only the method of investigation, but also the nature of the entire narrative. Who? And How? - engines of intrigue, they perform purely plot functions and satisfy the most primitive feelings - curiosity, attraction to mystery. Why? - analytical question. You can answer it unequivocally: the murder occurred because of self-interest, revenge, hatred, and so on. But you can look for the root causes of the crime, look for explanations not only for the fact, but also for the phenomenon. Question Why? opens doors to deeper spheres of human life, he is interested in psychology, sociology, and politics. So, for example, in the already mentioned Swedish novel locked room answer to question Why was an old pensioner killed? pulled, like a thread, a tangle of interconnected social phenomena and revealed not only the specific reason for this murder, but also much more. This analytical nature is also characteristic of some detective films of recent years, especially Italian ones, in which the focus is not on the investigation of the crime itself, but on the study of the cause-and-effect relationships that determined it. Unfortunately, there are not many such works; stories with a dominant question about That?.

We will have to return to all these problems more than once using specific material from cinema and literature. Here it is important to note the presence of three questions that shape the mystery and the course of its disclosure, as one of the signs of the genre we are considering.

2. Composition structures

Famous English author detectives Richard Austin Freeman, who tried not only to formulate the laws of the genre, but also to give it some literary weight, in his work (The Art of the detective story, 1924) names four main compositional stages: 1) statement of the problem (crime); 2) investigation (solo detective); 3) solution (answer to question Who?; 4) proof, analysis of facts (answers to How? And Why?).

Victor Shklovsky back in 1925 he made an experiment in the structural analysis of a detective story or, as he called it, crime novel. Comparing many of Conan Doyle's short stories, he noticed the repetition of the same elements, motifs, techniques, and their monotony. From these observations he derived a general scheme:

1) a static scene of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, in which both of them indulge in memories of previous cases, of solved crimes. This is, in essence, an overture that sets the reader up, immersing him in a state of expectation of something;

2) the appearance of a client reporting the presence of a secret (murder, kidnapping);

3) the business part of the story - investigation, Sherlock Holmes collects evidence, hints leading to a false solution;

4) Watson misinterprets the evidence. He has a double function here - to lead the reader on the wrong trail and prepare elevation Great detective, penetrating the holy of holies - the mystery;

5) crime scene investigation. Criminal. Evidence is in place (pseudo-crime, pseudo-evidence);

6) official detective (antagonist Great Detective) gives a false answer;

7) an interval filled with the thoughts of Watson, who does not understand what is going on. At that time Sherlock Holmes, hiding the intense work of thought, smokes or plays the violin (a kind of shamanism), after which he connects facts into groups without giving a final conclusion;

The denouement is mostly unexpected;

9) Sherlock Holmes gives an analytical analysis of the facts.

Soviet scientist Yu. Shcheglov researched the set plot functions short stories Conan Doyle O Sherlock Holmes, their interpretation, syntactic laws for combining elements.

He formulates the main theme of the short stories as situation S - D, (from the English words Security - safety and Danger - danger), in which the homeliness of civilized life, comfort (the attributes of this are Holmes's apartment on Baker Street, strong walls, fireplace, pipe, etc.) are contrasted with the terrible world outside this citadel of security, the world in which Holmes's terror-stricken client resides. Situation S - D appeals to the psychology of the average reader, as it makes him feel a kind of pleasant nostalgia in relation to his home and meets his desires to escape from danger, observe them from a shelter, as if through a window, entrust the care of his fate to a strong personality, protector and friend - Holmes.

The development of the plot leads to an increase in D (danger), the impact of which is enhanced by instilling fear, emphasizing the strength and composure of the criminal and the helpless loneliness of the client. Yu. Shcheglov, however, is aware that situation S - D- description of only one semantic plan.

Shcheglov formalizes the concepts S - D without delving into their meaning. This seemingly purely compositional formula reflects that specific content, which has become a form. It is difficult to find a genre in which bourgeois morality, preaching the danger of leaving the drawn magic circle, would be embodied with such eloquent evidence. My home is my castle- the slogan of the feudal lords - the bourgeoisie adapted, slightly changing, expanding the concept house. This is not only my home, but also all my property, my company, my class, and so on. And the early passion of the bourgeoisie for adventure, adventurous escapades degenerated into a cozy, nerve-tickling game of danger. D lies in wait for you if you leave the house, but this D is conditional, a toy, you will still return to your usual S, enjoying the illusion of adventure. And the sharper, scarier, more spectacular it is, the higher the pleasure. Doesn't happen here non-finita- lack of a final ending. A detective always (with rare exceptions) has happy ending. Happy end- a happy ending is an invention of mass culture, very typical and socially conditioned. In a detective story, this is a complete return to safety (S), through victory over danger (D). The detective administers justice, evil is punished, everything has returned to normal. Compositional structure turns out to be full of intentional content, it is a mechanism that performs various types of work, including ideological ones.

The compositional standard indicates that the detective is drawn to the same laws of construction. This conservatism of form is also largely explained by the conservatism of perception, the consumer’s tendency to habitual and familiar stereotypes that facilitate understanding. We are talking here, of course, about a specific consumer who seeks, first of all, entertainment, relaxation, and relaxation in literature and art.

3. Intrigue, plot, plot

Our genre is characterized by special relationships between such concepts as intrigue, plot, plot.

Detective intrigue comes down to the simplest scheme: crime, investigation, solution to the mystery. This diagram constructs a chain of events that form a dramatic action. The variability here is minimal. The plot looks different. Choice vital material, the specific character of the detective, the location of the action, the method of investigation, the determination of the motives for the crime create a multiplicity of plot constructions within the boundaries of one genre. The possibilities for variation here increase dramatically. The relative importance of the author’s personality also increases. His moral, social and aesthetic positions, no matter how hidden they may seem, will reveal themselves in the nature of the plot design of the material. If intrigue itself is non-ideological, then plot is not only a formal concept, but is necessarily associated with the author’s position, with the system that determines this position.

A husband kills his unfaithful wife - a scheme for building an intrigue.

The Moor, trusting an insidious envious man, kills his wife and, unable to withstand the mental strain, takes his own life. In this plot scheme there is already Shakespeare, who needed this particular story to express something much more - a plot about the collapse of trust, about tragic collision a pure, magnificent person with meanness, cruelty, hypocrisy, and finally, about a world in which evil is stronger than good.

The personality of the author, embodied in the plot concept, determines the true ideological and artistic scale of the thing. But these scales also depend on the chosen genre. That's why Shakespeare writes tragedy Othello , and Dostoevsky builds the plot of the novel on criminal intrigue and detective plot Crime and Punishment .

The detective story is characterized by the closest blending of all three of these concepts - intrigue, plot, plot. Hence the narrowing of its plot possibilities, and consequently the limited life content. In many detective stories, the plot coincides with the plot and is reduced to the logical-formal construction of a dramatized criminal charade. But even in this case, which is extremely important to understand, the form is not independent of the ideological content, it is subordinate to it, for it arose as a protective idea of ​​the bourgeois world order, morality, and social relations.

4. Reconstruction. Two-fable

French scientist Regis Messac, comparing an adventure story with a detective story, I noticed a curious difference between them. Both can tell the same story, but the way they tell it will be different. In an adventure story, the story follows the course of events, adhering to their natural chronology. From the beginning it goes to resolution - denouement. The reader seems to be included in the normal passage of time, the story unfolds before him from beginning to end, he follows the actions of the heroes in plot-time sequence.

Not at all like that in a detective story. French sociologist and philosopher Roger Caillois writes in his famous book Possibilities of the novel : ...a detective story resembles a film that is shown from end to beginning. She reverses the flow of time and changes chronology. Its starting point is the point to which the adventure story arrives at the end: a murder that concludes an unknown drama that will be gradually reconstructed rather than told first. Thus, in a detective story, the narrative follows discovery. It starts from an event that is final, closing, and, transforming it into an occasion, returns to the causes that caused the tragedy. Gradually he finds various twists and turns that an adventure story would tell in the order in which they occurred. Therefore, it is very easy to transform a detective story into an adventure story and vice versa - just turn them over... The exclusive role of a detective story in literature lies precisely in reversing chronology and replacing the order of events with the order of discovery.

This is extremely important for establishing the specifics of the genre. More often and more easily, a detective story is confused with a spy and criminal story, because they are all devoted not only to similar topics, but are also related in their purpose: through the emotional involvement of the reader - to the apologetics of courage, risk, dexterity, resourcefulness, and so on. But about the adventures of the scout, oh exploits gangster or dedication The police are told by the author in such a way that the reader follows the actions, observing the temporal sequence: nothing is hidden from him, the element of mystery is weakened here, but in this case it is not the mystery that influences, but the unusualness, the improbability of the actions, the strength, dexterity, and cunning of the heroes. On the screen, a duel between a scout and an enemy or a fight between a policeman and a criminal takes place before the eyes of the viewer, and he is likened to a spectator of a wrestling match - not a single blow escapes him, and he sees how victory is achieved. Here the event follows from the event and their consistent development creates intrigue.

In a detective story, the entire investigative process, which usually occupies the main place in the narrative, is a reconstruction of the events that preceded it. to the initial corpse. This reconstruction reflects the life practice of the investigation. In my mind Great Detective it begins immediately, but we are given only the elements of this restoration work, and only at the end the whole picture of what preceded appears before us.

It is no coincidence that many detective authors begin their work from the end - by inventing a criminal story that will be investigated; they, first of all, develop the exact construction of the crime, the exact basis of what preceded the appearance of the corpse, a topographic map of the criminal’s actions. Only after this is the main part of the narrative, dedicated to the search for the unknown killer, built, and, finally, fully presented to us at the end - in final effect- reconstruction of events.

And one more important note. In both adventure and detective stories, the main character can be a spy, and even more so a policeman. This is just a sign of professional affiliation. He will become a detective hero only if the goal of his actions is to reveal the secret, investigate, and reconstruct the events preceding the crime.

Studying large quantity compositional schemes leads to the conclusion about the two-story construction of the detective story. What Messac and Caillois call in reverse way of telling, in fact, is the presence in one narrative of two fable stories, each of which has its own composition, its own content and even its own set of heroes (with the exception of the killer, who is present in both stories). The spatiotemporal proportions of these stories can vary greatly. So, in a long novel Emilia Gaboriau Mister Lecoq the immediate drama of the murder and the investigation take up much less space than the story leading up to it. It happens most often the other way around. The most common scheme is in which the plot of the investigation occupies the main place, and the plot of the crime can be placed on one or two pages. They penetrate each other, and elements of the crime plot continuously accumulate in the plot of the investigation.

IN Murder in the Rue Morgue The plot of the investigation is developed in the most detailed and interesting way, which includes the author’s theoretical thoughts, our acquaintance with Dupin, a newspaper report about the murder, the course of Dupin’s investigative thoughts, his actions; interrogation of witnesses, dialogues Great Detective with the author, meeting with the monkey's owner, epilogue. The plot of the crime is the sailor's story about what happened. It takes up only two pages out of twenty-eight, but its elements (description of the scene of action, the appearance of the victims, evidence, traces, etc.) were also contained in the plot of the investigation. The participants in the first story are two women, a monkey, and a sailor. The second is the author, Dupin, the innocent suspect Le Bon, numerous witnesses, an anonymous crowd, the police. And only the sailor acts in both. This classic example clearly shows how the plot of the investigation gradually restores (creates) the plot of the crime, which contains all the answers.

5. Suspense (suspense). Voltage

The structural and compositional features of a detective story are a special mechanism of influence. Closely related to all these questions is the problem of suspense, without which the genre we are considering is unthinkable. One of the main tasks of a detective story is to create tension in the perceiver, which should be followed by a release. liberation. Tension can be of the nature of emotional arousal, but it can also have a purely intellectual nature, similar to what a person experiences when solving a mathematical problem, a complex puzzle, or playing chess. It depends on the choice of elements of influence, on the nature and method of the story. Often both functions are combined - mental stress is fueled by a system of emotional stimuli that cause fear, curiosity, compassion, and nervous shock. However, this does not mean that the two systems cannot appear in an almost purified form. It is enough again to turn to the comparison of the structures of the stories Agatha Christie And Georges Simenon. In the first case, we are dealing with a rebus detective, with its almost mathematical coldness of plot construction, precise schemes, and bareness of plot action. Simenon's stories, on the contrary, are characterized by the emotional involvement of the reader, caused by the psychological and social authenticity of the limited living space in which the human dramas described by Simenon are played out.

Agatha Christie deals with signs that are extremely abstracted from their primary source - life material. Her heroes are just designations: X is the killer, VD is the Great Detective, A, B, C... are the components of a mathematical equation. The victim can rightfully be designated by the sign 0 - zero, because it has a plot-compositional meaning and is needed only as a starting point for further proof of the formula.

Simenon's characters persistently convince the reader of their real-life origins, and even if they are not such, they actively try to imitate it, resulting in a fairly high level of verisimilitude. It is characteristic that in Simenon’s stories the victim is far from being a zero value; she is one of the central characters in the drama and not only is a lot of attention devoted to her, but sometimes she becomes the center of collision events.

We turned to two almost polar examples; between them lies an ocean of mass production. This element has acquired particular significance in cinema. It has become one of the main springs of detective action, the most active technique involvement viewer. It is here, in this area of ​​standards and stereotypes, that we observe continuous changes in character suspense. If about forty years ago it was possible to scare the viewer by showing a close-up of a raised knife or a pistol shooting into the audience, then after the world experienced the tragedy of the Second World War, these methods of intimidation turned out to be simply ridiculous. It took the invention of a new arsenal of fear. Surrealism and Freudianism were used, and the screen was filled with red aniline. But this also became boring. Competing in creativity, directors - suppliers of mass culture goods invented new genre formations - those already mentioned above appeared horror-films(horror films), bloody violence-films(violent films), pornographic sex-films. The waste from these innovations is fully used old genres - Western, gangster and spy films, detective. The most difficult thing for the writer and director is the design of the tension system, because the viewer demands that the dose of the literary and film drug be increased, otherwise it ceases to work.

It would be a grave mistake to consider suspense as only a negative category. It all depends on the content of the technique, on the purposes of its use. Not only is a detective unthinkable without voltage, but also many other genres - from ancient tragedy to modern western.

Suspense- one of the elements of entertainment; through emotional tension, the intensity of the impression and the spontaneity of reactions are also achieved.

The spontaneity and intensity of the detective's perception is obvious. Sergei Eisenstein, who was intensely pondering the mystery of the mechanisms of influence, turned to the detective as the most pure genre, in which the operation of these mechanisms is extremely clearly visible. Asking yourself the question: what's good about a detective?- he answered: Because it is the most effective genre of literature. You can't tear yourself away from him. It is constructed using such means and techniques that maximally rivet a person into reading. The detective story is the most powerful means, the most purified, honed structure in a number of other literatures. This is the genre where the means of influence are exposed to the limit.

In the same lecture, given to VGIK students in September 1928, Eisenstein talks about mechanics of absolute means of influence, related, on the one hand, to mythology, epic, and on the other, being the most naked form of the main slogan of bourgeois society about property, which dictates the selection of funds.

6. Mystery, mystery

So characteristic of detectives, they are composed not only of questioning(who? how? why?), but also from the special system of action of these riddle questions. Hints, riddles, evidence, understatement in the behavior of the heroes, the mysterious hiddenness of thoughts from us Great Detective, the total possibility of suspecting all participants - all these are logs that the author throws into the fire of our imagination.

Mystery is designed to cause a special kind of irritation in a person. Its nature is dual - it is a natural reaction to the fact of violent human death, but it is also an artificial irritation achieved by mechanical stimuli. One of them is the technique of inhibition (when the reader’s attention is directed along the wrong trail). In Conan Doyle's short stories, this function belongs to Watson, who always misunderstands the meaning of evidence, puts forward false motivations and, as Shklovsky puts it, plays the role of the boy serving the ball for the game. His reasoning is not devoid of logic, they are always plausible, but the reader, following him, finds himself in a dead end. This is the process of inhibition, without which a detective cannot do.

Let's turn again to Murder in the Rue Morgue Edgar Poe, let's see how the mystery and atmosphere of the mysterious are built in this short story.

After the author's discussion about the inaccessible analytical abilities of our mind, about the playful beginning of analysis, its connection with the imagination, after a kind of theoretical overture that creates Yu. Shcheglova situation S - D(safety - danger), in which S is especially clearly revealed by the calm, leisurely and armchair comfort of the author's reasoning, the main character - Dupin - is introduced into action. Already in the depiction of this hero, the theme of danger begins to sound. We learn that the narrator and Dupin settle in a house of bizarre architecture in a quiet corner of the Saint-Germain suburb, abandoned by its owners due to some superstitious legends.

The stability of S begins to be disrupted, because the house where ghosts roam loses its domestic strength. But S can be created artificially: We resorted to counterfeiting: at the first light of morning, we slammed the heavy shutters of the old house and lit two or three lamps, which, smoking with incense, shed a dim, ghostly light. In its pale radiance we indulged in dreams, read, wrote, talked, until the ringing of the clock announced to us the arrival of true darkness. And then hand in hand we went out into the street...

And here, behind the walls of the house, the kingdom of D began. A newspaper article announced unheard of crime, at the sight of which the crowd retreated, gripped by horror and amazement. A razor with a bloody blade, a mutilated body in a chimney, in the courtyard under the window the corpse of an old woman with a cut off head. The testimonies of witnesses agree that everyone heard voices behind the locked door, but they disagree on whether one of them belonged to a man or a woman, a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Italian, a German or a Russian.

Rue Morgue is quiet, deserted, and this sadistic murder mystery fits into its landscape especially frighteningly.

Thus, the crime is not only extremely mysterious, but it is also decorated accordingly. The dialogues increase the feeling of fear, Dupin and the author talk about the feeling of inexpressible horror that emanates from this incident, O monstrous, crossing all boundaries, which is observed here in everything and so on.

The solution to the mystery is also capable of inspiring horror. The killer is a huge orangutan who escaped from his sailor master.

Having led the reader through all the circles of the terrible and mysterious, the author returns him again to a calm state. The monkey was sent to the zoo, the innocent man was released, the author and the detective returned to their intellectual conversations. The reader made a journey into the realm of the mysterious, experienced an acute sense of fear, his nerves experienced tension, but everything returned to normal again, and the reader seemed to re-evaluate his safety, isolation from the terrible world lying beyond the threshold of his home.

So, a necessary condition for the detective genre is the presence of a mystery, the interrogative nature of the given problems, and a specially developed system of stimulating tension in the perceiver.

But then, where are the boundaries between the Gothic novel, so popular in the 18th century, and many mystery novels? Charles Dickens, Eugene Xu, Victor Hugo and a detective? We must immediately recognize the continuity and relatedness of these genres. Without dark gothic novels full of monstrous crimes, horrors, bloody secrets with their props of dungeons, old castles, miracles, romantic hero-villains, devilish cunning, treacherous deceivers, sharply contrasted with pink and blue victims hellish forces, many classic works of 19th-century literature, particularly Dickens's mystery novels, would not exist. For Dickens, mystery became a way of understanding reality, a path leading to the truth.

Creation Wilkie Collins And Arthur Conan Doyle its roots are in the tradition of the Dickensian novel and in the deeper archaeological layer of the English horror novel. By the way, the revival of the traditions of the Gothic novel in detective stories is especially attractive for cinema that loves the exotic atmosphere, decor, locations, situations, and heroes.

And yet there are differences between these genres and the detective story.

7. The Great Detective

French scientist, already mentioned Roger Caillois, who wrote one of the most interesting works on this topic - an essay Detective story , argues that this genre arose due to new life circumstances that began to dominate at the beginning of the 19th century. Fouche, by creating the political police, thereby replaced force and speed with cunning and secrecy. Until this time, a representative of the authorities was identified by his uniform. The policeman rushed in pursuit of the criminal and tried to grab him. The secret agent replaced the chase with investigation, speed with intelligence, violence with secrecy. This secret agent changed his appearance, he disappeared into the crowd, but could at any moment take off his mask and appear before the persecuted as retribution, a messenger of power. Mystery romanticized his completely prosaic functions; his ability to disguise himself amazed and frightened him. Even the great Balzac used his burning interest in secret agents, in particular to the famous Vidocq, and he passed on many of the latter’s features to his hero, Vautrin. He saw in them a kind of mysticism, allowing him to guess the most intricate secrets; he believed in the gift inner voice at famous detectives, an almost divine intuition with which they penetrated into the depths of the hidden.

It is no coincidence that they are apocryphal Diaries Vidocq had unprecedented reader success, which prompted Eugene Xu (Secrets of Paris ), Alexandra Dumas (Parisian Mohicans ) And Ponson du Terail (Rockambole ) make extensive use of their material.

From here it was already one step to Monsieur Lecoq in the novels Emilia Gaboriau- the first professional detective, policeman, conducting an investigation according to all the laws not of life, but of the genre. Mister Lecoq, unlike the hero Edgar Poe Auguste Dupin, Not descendant of a noble and even illustrious family, out of whim and from an excess of intelligence, engaged in solving puzzling criminal problems, but a professional police officer, a master of his craft.

It must be said that even after this the amateur detective like Dupin will not disappear. In the novels of the English writer Dorothy Sayers we will meet the lord Peter Wimsey, y Agatha Christie- with Mrs. Marple, at Chesterton - with Father Brown, doctors, journalists, lawyers, pretty women, children and the authors of detective novels themselves will do the detective work.

True, over time, the professional detective not only stopped serving in the police, he left with civil service and opened a private office, but also became in opposition to official justice, turned into an antagonist of the state policeman. And if he remained in the states of the Surt or Scotland Yard, he occupied a position there special position, like Commissioner Maigret or Inspector Morgan. In the first experiments of the detective genre in cinema, a new hero appeared, different from heroes of other genres not only in his compositional function, but also in his life content. Two trends were identified in the way of characterizing this hero, a set of rules and schemes was developed, within the framework of which options are created to this day Great detective. A standard has also been developed Great Detective- Superman, like James Bond. This type of hero was wittily described by the writer Boris Vasiliev: It’s difficult for me now to remember the names of each of them - they were beautiful men, but their main advantage was immortality. They invariably emerged from any troubles healthy and unharmed, and the viewer was supposed to worry exactly for the length of the film: after seeing the word end, he went to drink tea without any excitement.

He is multifaceted and amazingly international, this miracle hero. For me, he personifies a whole direction not only of television or film production, but in general completely special art, the main task of which is to reduce the spectator’s, as well as the reader’s, experiences to zero. The emotional valerian packed into the plot is swallowed by the consumer with special pleasure: the plot ends, and all the worries it causes end. Naturally, nothing happened to the hero, you can go to bed peacefully.

Type Great Detective largely determines the type of storytelling. In modern political detective film Great Detective, for example, is not only a detective, but also a person of certain views. His profession helps him defend, implement them, and most often administer justice at his own risk.

8. Catalog of techniques and characters

Perhaps no literary genre has such a precisely and detailed set of laws defining rules of the game, establishing the limits of what is permissible, and so on.

And the more the detective story turned into a puzzle game, the more often and more persistently rules-constraints, rules-guidelines, and so on were proposed.

The iconic nature of the mystery novella fit into a stable system in which not only situations and methods of deduction, but also characters became signs. For example, the victim of a crime has undergone a serious revolution. It turned into a neutral prop, the corpse simply became the primary condition for starting the game. This is especially pronounced in the English version of the detective story. Some authors have tried compromise killed, as if removing the moral problem: justifying the author’s indifference to corpse.

In addition, many writers consciously fought against sadistic cruelty, dark and bloody pictures, which were offered to the reader by detective-adventurous series about Nate Pinkerton, Nick Carter, the progenitors of modern Superman James Bond or an immoral hero of novels Mickey Spillane - Mike Hemmer.

Later we will dwell on the evolution of the social content of the detective story, the nature of realism, the didactic and psychological functions of the genre and consider these issues using the material of detective cinema. But all this problematic will be unclear and insufficiently convincing if you do not first study elementary particles what its internal structures are. Naturally, these include signs that have not only a formal, but also a semantic meaning.

Theoretical reflections on the specifics and laws of the genre forced Conan Doyle to look for their formulas. In a more expanded form rules of the game offered Austin Freeman in the already mentioned article The art of detective storytelling . He establishes four compositional stages - problem statement, consequence, solution, evidence - and characterizes each of them. Chesterton addresses the same questions two years later in the preface to the novel. Walter Masterman Letter to the wrong addressee (The wrong letter). He lists what a detective story writer should not do (depict secret societies, having their representatives all over the world; the work of diplomats and politicians; not put into effect at the end twin brother from New Zealand; do not hide the criminal until the very end, bringing him onto the stage only in the last chapter; avoid characters not connected with intrigue and so on).

They had an even more nomenclature character 20 rules for writing detective stories S. Van Dyna(under this pseudonym was hiding a popular American author of detective novels, literary critic and essayist Willard Wright). The most interesting of these rules: 1) the reader must have equal chances with the detective in solving the riddle; 2) love should play the most insignificant role. The goal is to put a criminal behind bars, not to bring a couple of lovers to the altar; 3) a detective or other representative of an official investigation cannot be a criminal; 4) the criminal can only be detected by logical-deductive means, but not by chance; 5) there must be a corpse in a detective story. A crime less than murder has no right to occupy the reader's attention. Three hundred pages is too much for this; 6) investigative methods must have a real basis; the detective has no right to resort to the help of spirits, spiritualism, or reading thoughts at a distance; 7) there must be one detective - Great detective; the criminal must be a person who would not normally be suspected. Therefore, it is not recommended to discover the villain among the servants; 9) do not allow fantasy a la Jules Verne; 10) all literary beauties and digressions not related to the investigation should be omitted; 11) international diplomacy, as well as political struggle, belong to other prose genres, and so on.

Members of the English The Detection Club (Detective Club) pledged to adhere to the strict rules they had developed and even wrote a novel together Drifting Admiral . Members of the American Club also developed their own paragraphs Mystery Writers of America (Mystery Writers Club of America).

Options for detective rules suggested Ronald Knox, John Dixon Carr, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers and many others. All of them are not theorists, but practitioners - the authors of numerous stories and novels. Chandler and Dorothy Sayers they tried not only to expand and enrich the range of prescriptions, but also to increase the authority of the genre. If Van Dyne's code was very reminiscent of a self-instruction manual for playing croquet and boiled down to what is possible and what is not, then in Chandler, for example, we are talking about a realistic situation and atmosphere, life-likeness, and psychological authenticity of images. He advises focusing on the intelligent reader and the cultural context of the time.

Dorothy Sayers made an attempt to bring the detective story closer to a psychological novel, to saturate it with social issues. She sharply opposed the canonization of rules, against turning a detective story into something similar to a sports game. For her, it was important to describe the environment and characterize events.

The desire for refinement of form and virtuosity in the use of rules led to the fact that many works began to resemble an algebraic problem. Hence the desire for limitation in the unity of place, action and time, the fundamental hermeticity of events, purification from social content, and so on.

American black detective tried to break down the barriers separating the detective story from genres close to it. He not only proposed serious and modern, socially acute content, but also encroached on such immutable laws as the established catalog of characters, according to which To the great detective a conventional dialogist is given (Dupin is the author, Sherlock Holmes is Watson, Father Brown is Flambeau, and so on). This partner Great Detective performs three functions - it imitates the reader (or rather, his limitations), creates inhibition, and allows the main character to pronounce out loud the necessary maxims that help us follow the progress of his thoughts.

According to the rules in a detective story, all other characters must be suspects; the least suspicion falls on the real criminal. An assistant can stand out from this environment Great Detective, who will move from the category of suspect to the category of partners. However, as we will see, normativity, even in such a sedentary and closed structure as a detective story, does not justify itself in practice.

9. Ambivalence

Another feature of the detective should be isolated in order to understand his special place in literary series. It's about about ambivalence, compositional and semantic duality, the purpose of which is the double specificity of perception. We have already talked about the two-story construction of a detective story, which is characteristic of this genre. In this case, it is important for us to note that one of the plots - the plot of the crime - is built according to the laws of dramatic narration, in the center of which the event is murder. It has its own actors, its action is determined by the usual cause-and-effect relationship. This is a crime novel. The plot of the investigation is constructed as a rebus, a task, a puzzle, a mathematical equation and is clearly of a playful nature. Everything related to crime has a bright emotional coloring; this material appeals to our psyche and senses. The waves of mystery emitted by the narrative influence a person through a system of emotional signals, which are a message about a murder (surrounded, as a rule, by extraordinary circumstances), a mysterious and exotic decorum, an atmosphere of involvement of all characters in the murder, understatement, the mystical incomprehensibility of what is happening, fear of danger and etc.

Usually the killer is at the center of the crime, the detective is at the center of the investigation, Great Detective. This distribution creates its own dilemmas. A murderer is an immoral principle, and he is perceived primarily emotionally. The detective is an analyst, a perfect mechanism of intuition and deduction. He is a representative of morality and law, our perception of him is predominantly logical in nature. Interest in the killer is sensational and impulsive. Interest in To the Great Detective, even admiration for him, is explained by a conscious reaction to the miraculous (for the functions Great Detective are emphatically supernatural, they look like a magician performing in a circus).

But since both plots penetrate each other, the detective story is at the same time a story and a task, a fairy tale and research, didactics and entertainment. This ambivalence of the detective explains that the most undeveloped people can read him, but he can also be admired by Norbert Wiener. Everyone finds something they like in a detective story and, with its help, satisfies their mental and intellectual needs. For some, murder and everything connected with it is just an abstraction, an inevitable element of the equation; for others, it is the most important drug, a thrill; for others, the process of co-creation is captivating. The first ones indifferently skim through pages that are not directly related to analysis or research; the latter, without straining to guess and completely trusting the Great Detective, savor not how Maigret solves the riddle, but how Simenon describes the characters, their relationships, life conditions, psychology. Some experience the pleasure of mathematics, the excitement of a gambler, the inspiration of an analyst. Others experience fear, acute emotional stress, they empathize with the heroes and so on. From the perspective of the former - literary perfection, psychology, character development, details of description, are not only not obligatory qualities of the genre, but also harmful to it. For others, purity from psychology, the complexity of intrigue, and plot complications serve as a hindrance.

The ambivalence of the detective story explains the popularity of the genre, the traditional attitude towards it as self-indulgence, and the eternal debate about what it should be, what functions it should perform (didactic or entertaining) and whether it contains more harm or benefit. Hence the traditional confusion of views, points of view, and demands. And let's not rush to agree with Roger Caillois, who claims that the evolution of the detective has led to the fact that at present he has nothing in common with literature, that his true nature is playful, that he takes only a frame from life, in psychology he sees only a method of investigation or a fulcrum for analysis, engages in passions and experiences insofar as this is required by the force that sets in motion the mechanism that he has built. Caillois claims that the detective is an abstraction, he does not seek to excite, shock or flatter the soul, reflecting its anxiety, suffering and hopes, he is sterile and cold, ideally cerebral. Doesn't awaken any feelings, makes you dreamy, and so on. All this is both true and false at the same time. In the apparent simplicity of the phenomenon, we will still see many complexities.

10. Detective and fairy tale

There is no serious work yet devoted to the kinship between the fairy tale and the detective story, but this is where many interesting opportunities for understanding the genre under study lie. Some papers provide interesting insights into morphological complexity fairy tale and detective, about the relationship between the real and the unreal, about the mythical character of heroes and rich monotony its functions. The validity of these guesses can be easily verified through a comparative analysis of the two genres.

The genesis and history of a fairy tale and a detective story are different, just as their time of origin is different. The fairy tale was born from a myth, the roots of its origin are in ancient rituals, in a practice that has long lost its everyday content. The history of the fairy tale, its evolution, is closely connected with the historical evolution of humanity, with the social context of its existence. Detective originating in mid-19th century, was generated by specific real circumstances of life, it - a derivative of the capitalist system - reflects bourgeois relations, typical configurations of good and evil in a certain social formation. Life of a large capitalist city, formation of new social groups, the creation of a security apparatus of bourgeois power and property - these are the coordinates and soil for the emergence of the detective story. But, having emerged from reality, the detective story became a myth, as if going the opposite way in the development of a fairy tale. Despite such different histories and genesis, both genres have many similarities. The main one is mental function. The pedagogical, moralizing essence of the fairy tale is undeniable. With its help, parents try to help the young listener create a moral and social model of the world, teach the first lessons of the need to fight good against evil, protect the weak, and the nobility of heroic deeds. This constitutes the highest level of a fairy tale. This is followed by a layer of family and everyday ideas (grandmother - granddaughter, stepmother - stepdaughter, brother - sister, husband - wife, and so on), the mythical basis of which is interspersed with everyday details already familiar to the child (a gift, going on a visit, a walk, etc. Further). All this didactics is aimed at building a system of moral ideas and values ​​in the child’s mind, giving him a diagram of the world and society, life and death. A fairy tale, therefore, is the primary lesson of life taught by an adult to a child.

But this does not exhaust its purpose. It is also a kind of mental therapy that parents resort to in order to harden and accustom the child’s body to overcome itself within itself (suppressing fear, horror), to the ability to follow the train of thought (which in turn is a preparatory exercise, training in logical thinking) . Thus, an adult, telling a fairy tale to a child, seems to be performing two rites - initiation and testing.

But why do children love fairy tales so much? And why in the evening before going to bed do they so want to hear again about Baba Yaga, Kashchei the Immortal, the wolf-eater, the living dead, about all these passions that make them freeze in horror? And if we remember the child’s heightened impressionability, his tendency to identify, identify himself with the characters, his extraordinary ability to imagine a story in bright and vivid visual pictures, then you can understand what kind of shock he experiences in the process of perception. It can be assumed that for a child, immersion in the scary is an acquaintance with a new dimension, a transition from the micro to the macro world, and a happy outcome is an enriched return to normal. There is a process of moral, psychophysiological and intellectual education. But any violation of the dosage can lead to organic disorders. It is known that the consequence of frequent intimidation is loss of mental balance, various types of moral deformations, or dulling of the reaction, its complete loss.

A. S. Makarenko considered the game one of the most important ways of education. Much has been written about the didactic role of play both here and abroad. There is no doubt that play can be a very effective means of education; it all depends on its goals and objectives. All this is directly related to both fairy tales and detective stories, the playful nature of which constitutes their genre nature. Consequently, the point is what tasks are set before them, what kind of didactics, ideological and moral content fills them, whether they serve moral or immoral purposes.

So, a fairy tale and a game perform multifunctional work, useful and necessary. In 1968, at the 6th International Congress of Philosophers in Uppsala, the French scientist Etienne Souriau delivered a report entitled Art as work. We will not touch on all aspects and provisions of this report. Let's focus on just one. Souriot sharply protested against the widespread tendency in the bourgeois world to consider art and culture only as entertainment, a form of leisure. He considers this a delusion not only aesthetic, but also scientific, sociological, psychological, and economic. Considering art as a social phenomenon, Surio names its various functions. One of them is the satisfaction of mental needs, which are as deep and important as the needs of physical life.

We need this statement to confirm the idea of ​​the similarity of the impact and perception of a fairy tale and a detective story, which not only produce similar work, but also accomplish it by largely the same means.

Famous Soviet scientist V. Ya. Propp devoted two fundamental works to the study of fairy tales - Morphology of a fairy tale (1928) and Historical roots of fairy tales (1946). Both of them contain many provisions that turn out to be perfectly applicable to the detective story. Let's look at some of them.

V. Ya. Propp gives the following definition: Morphologically, any development from sabotage or shortage through intermediate functions to a wedding or other functions used as a denouement can be called a fairy tale. The final functions are sometimes rewarding, mining or even eliminating trouble, saving from pursuit, and so on. We call this development a move. Each new sabotage, each new shortage creates a new move.

A little lower we read: Knowing how moves are distributed, we can decompose any fairy tale into its component parts - these are the functions of the characters. Next we have connecting elements, then motivations. A special place is occupied by the forms of appearance of the characters (the arrival of the snake, the meeting with Yaga). Finally, we have attributive elements or accessories such as Yaga’s hut or her clay leg. These five categories of elements determine not only the construction of the fairy tale, but the entire fairy tale as a whole..

The construction scheme of a fairy tale proposed by Propp is accurately superimposed on the construction scheme of a detective story. For this you need sabotage And shortage replace with terms murder or kidnapping, don’t put it in isolation wedding, and the triumph of justice through eliminating the problem. And in a detective story, every new sabotage - crime gives birth to a new move that changes the course of the action - investigation. The five elements-categories named by Propp - the functions of the characters - also coincide (in the detective story they are designated even more clearly than in the fairy tale - Great Detective, his assistant or entourage, a group of suspects, a killer - they all have functions predetermined by the genre; here variability is reduced to a minimum), connecting elements (their role in a detective story is played by situations arising during the investigation, which in turn give rise to new situations), motivation (clarification of the circumstances of the crime, family and other connections, relationships between characters; this element in a detective story is significant strengthened in comparison with the fairy tale), the forms of appearance of the characters (the eccentricity of the circumstances of the appearance Great Detective, his client, new heroes), attributes and accessories (their role is huge and diverse - this includes Holmes’ violin, orchids Nero Wolfe, and things-evidence, things-decorum and objects - instruments of investigation, these are exotic places of action, such as ancient palaces, museums, city slums and the like).

Both in the fairy tale and in the detective story, mystery and mystery are generously used. In the first case, the effect is achieved through a fantastic transformation of reality, a miracle; in the second, another system works (as discussed above). But many examples can be given when a detective resorts to the help of fabulous and miraculous examples in order to ultimately give them a real-life explanation (fantastical Murders in the Rue Morgue Edgar Poe, Hounds of the Baskervilles Conan Doyle, Ten Little Indians Agatha Christie and so on).

Mystery is closely related to fear; it helps to draw the reader-listener-spectator into a game with fear, satisfying his longing for the miraculous. In the fairy tale, the effect of fear is achieved by intensifying the terrible (its heroes have their eyes gouged out, their legs are chopped off, their hearts are cut out and eaten, sometimes the whole person is eaten, they are turned into a dog, a bird, a frog, they are walled up alive. Violence and torture are presented here in all forms - from forced marriage to cannibalism!). In a detective story, fear is not of such a terrible nature and it is born mainly from a feeling of danger, the possibility of a repeat crime (an uncaught killer is a potential danger). The special circumstances of the murder also play a role. It is interesting to note that in many detective codes There is a prohibition against killing children, savoring pathology, fanaticism, using miracles and fantasy. The canonical detective story almost does not show the murder process, but only its result - a corpse, quite abstracted and impersonal. The spring of mystery here is also the mystery of what is happening (who? how? why?) and the incomprehensibility of actions Great Detective, whose train of thought is hidden from us.

The criminal who commits the crime also actively confuses us. good deeds, obscuring the truth from us, helps the detective, takes care of the interests of the victim, performs some kind of good deeds (like Baba Yaga, who feeds, waters, washes the aliens in order to inspire their trust).

From this system that creates mystery, one cannot remove one of its main elements - the image of the Great Detective, strikingly reminiscent of the image of a fairy tale hero. He is a man and at the same time a mythical creature, endowed with a special gift, almost magical abilities. He eliminates the trouble, eliminates the danger, commits an act of triumph of justice, wins the duel with evil. His greatness is emphasized by his loneliness. As a rule, he takes risks on his own, solves the most difficult problems, goes through all the tests, and learns the truth. He is omnipotent, omniscient, invincible, like a fairy-tale hero, and like him, he does not age or change, comes out unscathed and rises from the dead (the second appearance to the reader Sherlock Holmes after his, which turned out to be imaginary, death at the hands of the satanic enemy - Moriarty). And let us not be confused by the oblivion and deliberate realism of the modern Great Detective like Commissioner Maigret. His apparent realism is a way to arouse the reader’s trust in his wonderful gift of inhuman providence.

Maigret, like Father Brown and many others, knows so well the mechanisms of crime, the psychology of the criminal, that he receives special power to magically turn evil into good.

Many literary historians have noticed that in the 19th century the mythologization of the city began, and its descriptions began to increasingly appear fantastical and fabulously epic. Roger Caillois in an essay Paris, modern myth, writes: It is necessary to recognize the fact that this metamorphosis of the city comes from the transfer of Fenimore Cooper's savannas and jungles into his scenery, in which every broken branch means anxiety or hope, behind every stump hides the enemy's gun or the bow of an invisible, lurking avenger. All writers - and Balzac was the first - persistently emphasized this borrowing and gave Cooper his due.

Dumas, Balzac, Sue, Ponson du Terrail did a lot to make Paris appear in literature not only as a modern Babylon, but also as a romantic Cooperian jungle.

Pierre Souvestre And Marcel Allen, creators of Fantômas ( a genius of crime, a master of horror, a master of miraculous transformations of a person without personal marks... the one who is not taken by a bullet, along whom a knife slides, who drinks poison like milk), painted an image of a mystically scary Paris, in which evil and crime lurk around every corner. Their Fantomas hides underground to appear in a labyrinth of underground passages either in the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral or behind a portrait in the Louvre. Countless assistants and informants are waiting for him everywhere; priests, policemen, waiters, and so on serve him faithfully. A man in dark glasses, Fantômas, who changes his appearance, feels at home in Paris like the fairy-tale Leshy in the forest. He is the owner of these palaces and laboratories hidden underground, streets, houses, people located on the ground.

The materialistic basis for the emergence of the myth of the capitalist city is undeniable. Historical, economic, social, very specific and material reasons gave rise to it. Having experienced an evolution in the era of the formation of capitalism, its Iliad , the city absorbed millions of human existences, condensed passions, gave rise to a great many new conflicts, insurmountable contradictions. By offering man multiplicity, he made him even more lonely, suppressed him with scale, rhythm, materiality, and mechanicalness. Without giving time for natural adaptation, he plunged him into the chaos of the unusual, minimizing personal I, immersed him in the world of fantastic reality. Engels wrote: Fantastic images, which initially reflected only the mysterious forces of nature, now also acquire social attributes and become representatives of historical forces.

The mythologized image of the capitalist city entered literature not only thanks to the great works of prose of the 19th century, but also to a large extent thanks to detective literature. Chesterton wrote about this phenomenon back in 1901: The concept of the big city as something amazingly magical has, without a doubt, found its Iliad in a crime novel. Everyone has probably noticed that in these novels the hero or the one who follows him moves around London, without paying the slightest attention to passers-by, and as freely as fairy-tale princes in the land of the elves. On this adventure-filled journey, an ordinary omnibus takes on the appearance of an enchanted ship... and so on

There is an active mythologization of the city, they curse it and sing its praises, it frightens and attracts, destroys and exalts. The combination of realistic and non-realistic elements gives a surreal image of the city - a fairy-tale forest in which human dramas are played out and in which our hero - the Great Detective - fulfills his mystical mission: helping a person gain the illusion of confidence and balance. Myself Great Detective- the same capitalist myth, an element of the new religion, and every religion, - according to Engels, - is nothing more than a fantastic reflection in the heads of people of those external forces that dominate them in their daily life - a reflection in which earthly forces take the form of unearthly ones.

The secret agent, detective, policeman, called upon to protect real power, bourgeois private property from the real dangers that threaten it, having undergone a literary metamorphosis, became mythical Great Detectives, fighters for abstract justice, fairy-tale defender heroes.

In cinema asphalt jungle of a modern capitalist city will turn from a spectacular decoration into a participant in the drama; more than once it will appear before the viewer as an evil, insidious creature hostile to man. And in this fabulously scary, mysterious forest the heroes will wander, having replaced the gray wolf or the magic horse with a new brand of car.

V. Ya. Propp, speaking about the fairy tale, noted its amazing diversity, its diversity and colorfulness, on the one hand, and on the other, its no less amazing monotony, its repetition. And this can rightfully be attributed to a detective story, which, despite the monotony of its compositional plot schemes, the ossification of its techniques, and the stereotyping of its characters, manages to be diverse and colorful.

What follows from this similarity? What conclusions can be drawn from a comparison of a detective story and a fairy tale? We have already discussed the coincidence of the psychological functions of the two genres, their mythological nature, and their playful and didactic character. The moral and poetic charge of a fairy tale is immeasurably stronger; it has absorbed all the rich experience of humanity, cast it into beautiful images, allegories, symbols, and embodied the dream of people about the victory of goodness, beauty, and justice. A detective story is immeasurably poorer than a fairy tale; it is deprived of its all-humanity, wise and naive poetry and, most importantly, its democracy. The detective story is popular, but not democratic; its main idea is the protection of private property and the strengthening of the basic laws of capitalism. He addresses the same moral categories, like a fairy tale, also advocates for the victory of good over evil, fights for the triumph of justice, but the content of these categories offers something different, more specific, choosing, as a rule, money as the main object of struggle.

A fairy tale from elements of myth and reality forms its own world, in which something magically happens that in life does not happen at all or is achieved with great difficulty. It's the same in a detective story. In both cases a miracle works, with the only difference being that the functions good fairy performed by the Great Detective, who has miraculous powers. This is escapism, the illusory and dreamy nature of the two genres, their conventionality, abstraction from complex real problems. The detective story is one of the modern versions of fairy-tale storytelling, closely associated with the era of rationalism, capital, and bourgeois mass culture.

The fabulousness of the detective story comes through especially clearly in bourgeois cinema, which, as a rule, gravitates towards escapist illusoryness, towards philosophy of happy endings, to conventional heroes. Mass culture strengthened these qualities of the film detective and put them at the service of ideology.

All of the listed elements-signs add up to a common system, the meaning of which is a kind of didactic lesson. Detective fiction is one of the most didactic genres; its main task is condemnation. The whole point is in the name of what this condemnation occurs, what is its ultimate moral goal. Any manipulation, any shifting of moral criteria is possible here. It is enough to recognize the slogan end justifies the means, and before any lawlessness is justified, very little remains to be done. Deception, bribery, and subsequently murder will become only natural links in achieving main goal- wealth. Only those who encroach on someone else's prey and violate the laws of the jungle will be condemned. Wealth, obtained at the cost of someone else's blood, but already obtained, becomes protected and recognized, but a new encroachment on it is regarded as a gross violation of the rules. Hundreds of detective stories (in literature and cinema) are based on the theme of a criminally acquired inheritance and the struggle for it in a new generation. The inheritance itself, its origin, as it were, are not subject to moral assessment; the focus of attention is on the forces trying to disrupt the already established harmony, break the social hierarchy. It is no coincidence that the criminal is usually a stranger. He is either an illegitimate son, or a lover (mistress), or a castaway companion; he belongs to a different social rank, to a different class, to a different nation, and so on.

Didactics, thus, comes down to a property taboo, to a law on the inviolability of spoils. And to make the lesson impressive, intelligible and instructive, all the elements of a detective story are brought into play - compositional, structural and semantic, formal and emotional, social and psychological. In fact, it turns out that everything - from the title to the last phrase - is designed for the final effect. As in a church sermon, where not only the topic, but also the manner of the preacher, his ability to lower and raise his voice, use a pause or a declamatory technique at the right moments, introduce figurative symbolism into the speech so that a real situation understandable to those gathered shines through it, so and in a detective story decorum, rhythm, selection of details, decrease and increase become important tones, traps and deceptions, fabulousness disguised as reality (or vice versa). In both cases, an act of condemnation is committed. In a sermon, the priest acts as a mediator; he, as it were, expounds the teaching on behalf of the Lord God himself. In the detective story, the author is also hidden, the supreme judge is Great Detective, in fact, it alter ego.

All of the above does not close the topic. The detective's ambivalence is his natural property, his specificity. And the same elements, the preaching essence of the detective, can be used not only for evil. If the ultimate goal, the ideological super task, pursue truly moral, humane goals, then the didactic lesson will receive a completely different content. In such cases, the end will not justify the means; the focus of attention will be on criticism of both ends and means. The pursuit of wealth will be revealed as a mechanism of social relations, in which the predatory struggle for spoils, fame, and power becomes an indispensable condition of the social system. Detective story in this case it will be a way (albeit conditional, limited) of displaying real relations.

In the first version, crime is considered as an accident, as a violation of social balance, in the second it is deduced as a social pattern. Hercule Poirot - Great Detective Agatha Christie And Commissioner Maigret Georges Simenon differ not only in the way they conduct the investigation, but above all in their worldview. This difference can be seen even more strikingly in the works of such ultra-bourgeois authors as Spillane or Flemming, whose detective constructions have an obvious protective character, their political bias is demonstrative and consistent. In both cases, the elements of the structure do not remain passive, they are filled with different content and change their functions. This can be seen in any of the signs. Choice Great Detective, characteristics of the environment, a method of analyzing cause-and-effect relationships, a measure of realism and conventionality, fabulousness and authenticity, in turn, affect the composition, the dosage of mystery, the catalog of techniques and characters.

The number of structural elements is far from being limited to the above. We have highlighted only the main ones. But it is impossible, for example, not to pay attention to such seemingly external signs of a detective story as the nature of the title of the work, the design of the cover (features of movie credits), the popularity of the authors (director, actors), the names of the characters, their professions, the specifics of advertising and etc.

A. A. Gozenpud by Edgar Allan Poe. L., 1928, p. 101

There, p. 105.

K. Marx And F. Engels. Essays , t. 20. M., 1961, p. 329.

A. K. Chesterton. Defense of the detective story . London, 1901, p. 158

K. Mapks And F. Engels. Essays , vol. 20, p. 328

A good detective story will have charming characters, gripping suspense, and a puzzle that will keep you reading. But writing a truly worthwhile detective story, especially if you haven't done it before, can be difficult. With the right preparation, brainstorming, planning and editing, and character development, you can write a compelling mystery story.

Steps

Part 1

Getting ready to write

Understand the difference between detective and thriller genres. Detective stories always start with a murder. The main question in a detective story or novel is who committed the crime. Thrillers usually begin with a situation that leads to a major disaster, such as terrorist attack, bank robbery, nuclear explosion, etc. The main question in a thriller is whether the main character will be able to prevent a disaster.

• In detective stories, the reader does not know who committed the murder until the end of the novel. Detective stories are built on logical chains of searching for crime targets or on a puzzle.
• Mysteries are written in the first person, while thrillers are usually written in the third person and feature multiple points of view. In detective stories, the passage of time is usually more gradual as the protagonist/detective tries to solve the crime. Also, mysteries tend to have less action sequences than thrillers.
• Because the passage of time is slower in detective stories, the characters tend to be more deeply developed and well-rounded in detective stories than in thrillers.

1. Read examples of detective stories. There are many excellent detective stories and novels from which you can learn how to write a mystery with a good plot and well-developed characters.

   Identify the main character in the presented stories and novels. Think about how the author introduces the main character and how he describes him.

   Identify the location and setting of the example story. Think about how the author shows the place and time of the story.

   • For example, in the second paragraph of the first page deep sleep Marlow places the reader in the place and time of the story: “The Sternwoods' main hall had two floors.”
   • The reader realizes that Marlowe is in front of the Sternwood house, and it is a large house, most likely a wealthy one.

2. Think through a crime or puzzle that the main character has to solve. What crime or puzzle will the main character have to deal with? It could be a murder, a missing person, or a suspicious suicide.

   • IN Deep sleep General Sternwood hires Marlowe to “take care” of a photographer who is blackmailing the general with scandalous photographs of his daughter.

3. Identify obstacles and problems that the main character may face. A good detective will captivate the reader with the difficulties that the main character will face while fulfilling his mission (solving a crime).

   • IN Big dream Chandler complicates Detective Marlowe's pursuit of the photographer with the photographer's murder in early chapters, as well as the suspicious suicide of the general's chauffeur. Therefore, Chandler introduces two murders into the narrative that Marlowe must solve.

4. Think about solving the crime. Think about how a crime is solved at the end of a detective story. The solution to the crime should not be too obvious or far-fetched, but it should also not be implausible or out of the blue.

   • The solution to the crime should surprise the reader without confusing him. One of the advantages of the detective genre is that you can pace your story so that the revelation comes gradually, rather than in a rushed manner.

Part 2

We write the main character and plan the story

1. Create a detective or sleuth. Your main character can also be a private citizen, an ordinary citizen, or a crime witness who becomes embroiled in a crime investigation. Consider the characteristics of your main character, including:

   Determine the situation. Place everything that happens in a place that you know well, for example, let events unfold in your hometown or school. Or explore a place you're not very familiar with, like California in the 70s or Britain in the 40s. If you're using a place you don't know, look at the features of the place, such as country houses in California in the 70s or boarding houses in Britain in the 40s.

   • If you decide that your story will take place in a place and time that you are not very familiar with, do some research and find information about that place and time at your local library, on the Internet, or by interviewing experts on the subject. . Pay attention to detail during interviews and when researching information to ensure that all the nuances of time and place in your story are accurately and clearly identified.

2. Create a puzzle or riddle. Not all detective stories have to involve murder or another serious crime. But, the greater the crime, the greater the expectation from the story or novel. High expectations are important because they force your reader to continue reading. Possible sources of the mystery could be the following:

   • Your main character or his close friend has had something stolen.
   • A person who was close to your main character disappears.
   • The main character receives threatening notes.
   • The main character witnesses a crime.
   • The main character is asked to help solve a crime.

3. The main character stumbles upon a riddle.

   • You can also combine several of the above scenarios to create multiple story lines. For example, your main character might have an item stolen, someone close to him disappears, then the main character witnesses a crime that he is then asked to help solve.

4. Decide how you will confuse your puzzle. Add tension to the story by making it difficult for your character to solve a puzzle or riddle. You can use obstacles such as other people, suspects, false landmarks and evidence, or another crime.

   Use events with difficult to predict outcomes to make your story exciting. Hard to predict events are moments, usually at the end of an episode, when the main character finds himself in a trap situation and is in danger. Events with difficult to predict outcomes are important in detective stories because they captivate the reader and drive the narrative forward. Possible events with a difficult to predict outcome:

   • The main character alone investigates a possible lead and comes across a criminal or murderer.
   • The main character begins to doubt his abilities, weakens the investigation, which allows the killer to commit a crime again.
   • Nobody believes the main character, and he begins to investigate the crime alone, which is why he is kidnapped.
   • The main character is wounded and in a dangerous place.
   • The main character may lose important evidence if he cannot find a way out of a certain place or situation.

5. Create a denouement or ending. Complete the story with the solution to the puzzle. At the end of most detective stories, the main character experiences a positive shift in his quest. Possible endings:

   • The main character saves a loved one or just an innocent person who is caught up in the story.
   • The main character saves himself and changes under the influence of his courage and resourcefulness.
   • The main character reveals the activities of a bad person or organization.
   • The main character exposes a murderer or criminal.

6. Write a story outline. Now that you've thought through all aspects of your narrative, make a clear plot outline. It is important to plan exactly how a detective story will develop before you sit down to write the detective story itself. This way you can make sure there are no flaws in the story. Your plan must coincide with the order of events in the detective story itself. It should include:

   • Introduction of the main character and setting.
   • Incident or crime.
   • Calls to action: the main character gets involved in a crime investigation.
   • Trials: The main character finds clues, faces potential suspects, and tries to survive in the pursuit of the truth. Loved ones may be kidnapped as a threat.
   • Confusion: The protagonist thinks he has found a key clue that will lead him to the suspect and believes he has solved the crime. This is an untrue conclusion, and is also a great way to surprise the reader when it turns out that the main character is wrong.
   • The main failure: everything seems to be in vain for the main character. He found the wrong suspect or the wrong evidence, someone else was hurt or killed, and everyone else abandoned the main character. The major failure will increase the tension of the story and force the reader to continue to speculate.
   • Reveal: The main character gathers everyone, shows the evidence, explains the confusion, and exposes who is the murderer or the perpetrator of the crime.

Part 3

Writing a detective story

1. Use your senses to describe the environment. One of the best ways to describe the place or atmosphere of a work will resort to the help of 5 senses: sight, hearing, smell, tactile sensations and taste. Describing sensory experiences can also help create your character's backstory. For example, instead of directly telling the reader that your character ate oatmeal for breakfast, you could describe the taste of the leftover oatmeal on your character's tongue. Or he may smell oatmeal dripped onto his hand.

   • Think about what your character might see in a certain environment. For example, if your character lives in a house similar to your own in a small town, you could describe their bedroom or the way to school. If you're setting the story in a specific historical location, such as California in the 1970s, you might start off with the character standing at an intersection looking at the unique architecture and cars passing by.
   • Think about what your character might hear in a certain environment. Your character can hear the sounds of singing birds and a sprinkler on the way to school. Or your detective may hear the sounds of cars and ocean waves crashing on the shore.
   • Describe what smells your character can smell in a certain environment. Your hero may wake up to the smell of coffee being brewed in the kitchen by his parents. Or your hero may be unpleasantly impressed by the smells of the city: rotten garbage and the smell of unwashed bodies.
   • Describe what the character might feel. It could be a light breeze, a sharp pain, a sudden blow or a chill down the back. Focus on how your character's body reacts to a specific sensation.
   • Think about what your character might taste like. Your character's mouth may still have the taste of the oatmeal he ate for breakfast, or the taste of the drink he drank the previous evening.

2. Start straight from the point. Skip long paragraphs describing the setting or main character, especially in the opening pages. You should hook the reader by starting right away with the action, with where your hero is moving and what he thinks.

   Show, don't tell. If you tell the reader “this was a first-rate detective story,” the reader will have to take your word for it. But if you show the reader that the detective was first-class by describing his clothes and the way he walked into the room, the reader will see for himself how excellent the hero is. The effect that showing specific details has on readers is much greater than simply writing about it directly.

   • Think about how you would react to a situation if you were scared or angry. Let your hero react as if he is scared or angry, but don't directly reveal your protagonist's emotions to the reader. For example, instead of writing “Stephanie was angry,” you could write: “Stephanie set her glass of water down on the table so hard that her plate shook. She gave him a hard look and began to tear the thin white napkin into small pieces.”
   • The “show, don’t tell” method also works great when describing a setting. For example, in Deep sleep Instead of directly telling the reader that the Sternwoods were rich, Chandler describes the luxurious details of their mansion: “At the back of the room there was a French door, behind which was a strip of emerald grass leading to a white garage, in front of which was a thin young chauffeur in shiny black trousers. I was wiping down a burgundy Packard convertible. Behind the garage were several ornamental trees, neatly trimmed like poodles. Behind them was a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Further on, some trees were again visible, and behind all this were the massive shapeless outlines of the foothills.”

3. Surprise the reader, but don't confuse him. When creating a detective story, it is important to remember that the outcome should not be too sudden and simple. Always be honest and aim to surprise the reader rather than confuse him. The evidence introduced into the story must lead logically to the solution, despite any falsehoods or false clues. Your reader will love the ending if you make him think, “This is so obvious! I should have known!”

4. Review the first draft copy. Once you've drafted your mystery, go through the story, taking care to review key aspects such as:

   • Plot. Make sure your story flows according to plan and has a clear beginning, middle, and end. You should also note the changes in your main character at the end of the story.
   • Heroes. Are your characters, including the main one, unique and vibrant? All your heroes behave in a similar way or are they different? Are your characters original and charming?
   • Pace of the story. Story pacing is how quickly or slowly the events in your story unfold. Good pacing will go unnoticed by the reader. If things seem to be moving too quickly, focus more on the feel to highlight the characters' emotions. If you feel like you're bogged down in details, cut scenes down to the most essential information. Good rule is to always end an episode earlier than you think you should. This will help maintain tension from episode to episode, allowing the story to move at the right pace.
   • Turn. A twist can either ruin or make the whole detective story. It's up to the writer's discretion, but many good mysteries have a twist at the end. Make sure your twist isn't too cheap. The more unique the twist, the easier it will be to describe. When you write a tired "and here they woke up" twist, you have to be a great writer to make the twist work. A good twist can leave not only the reader, but also the hero himself, in the cold. Hint at the twist throughout the scenes of the episodes so that when the reader begins to remember earlier parts of the story, they will be surprised at how they could have missed it. However, try not to make the turn obvious too early.

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1) The reader should have equal opportunities with the detective to solve the mystery of the crime. All clues must be clearly identified and described.

2) The reader cannot be deliberately deceived or misled, except in cases where he and the detective are deceived by a criminal according to all the rules of fair play.

3) There should be no love line in the novel. We are talking about bringing the criminal into the hands of justice, and not about uniting yearning lovers with the bonds of Hymen.

4) Neither the detective himself nor any of the official investigators should turn out to be a criminal. This is tantamount to outright deception - the same as if they slipped us a shiny copper coin instead of a gold coin. Fraud is fraud.

5) The criminal must be discovered deductively - using logical conclusions, and not due to chance, coincidence or unmotivated confession. After all, by choosing this last path, the author quite deliberately directs the reader along a deliberately false trail, and when he returns empty-handed, he calmly reports that all this time the solution was lying in his, the author’s, pocket. Such an author is no better than a fan of primitive practical jokes.

6) A detective novel must have a detective, and a detective is only a detective when he tracks and investigates. His task is to collect evidence that will serve as a clue, and ultimately point to who committed this vile crime in the first chapter. The detective builds his chain of reasoning based on the analysis of the collected evidence, otherwise he is likened to a careless schoolboy who, having not solved the problem, copies the answer from the back of the problem book.

7) You simply cannot do without corpses in a detective novel, and the more naturalistic the corpse, the better. Only the murder makes the novel interesting enough. Who would read three hundred pages with excitement if we were talking about a less serious crime! In the end, the reader should be rewarded for their trouble and energy.

8) The mystery of the crime must be revealed in a purely materialistic way. Such methods of establishing the truth as divination, seances, reading other people's thoughts, fortune telling, etc., etc. are completely unacceptable. The reader has some chance of being as smart as a detective who thinks rationally, but if he is forced to compete with the spirits of the other world, he is doomed to defeat ab initio.

9) There should be only one detective, that is, only one main character of deduction, only one deus ex machina. To mobilize the minds of three, four, or even an entire squad of detectives to solve a crime means not only to distract the reader’s attention and break the direct logical thread, but also to unfairly put the reader at a disadvantage. If there is more than one detective, the reader does not know which one he is competing with in terms of deductive reasoning. It's like forcing the reader to race a relay team.

10) The criminal should be a character who played a more or less noticeable role in the novel, that is, a character who is familiar and interesting to the reader.

11) The author should not make a servant a murderer. This is too easy a solution; choosing it means avoiding difficulties. The criminal must be a person of a certain dignity - one who does not usually attract suspicion.

12) No matter how many murders are committed in a novel, there should be only one criminal. Of course, the criminal may have an assistant or accomplice, but the entire burden of guilt must lie on the shoulders of one person. The reader must be given the opportunity to concentrate all the fervor of his indignation on one single black character.

13) In a true detective novel, secret gangster societies, all sorts of Camorras and mafias are inappropriate. After all, an exciting and truly beautiful murder will be irreparably spoiled if it turns out that the blame falls on an entire criminal company. Of course, a murderer in a detective story should be given hope of salvation, but allowing him to resort to the help of a secret society is going too far. No top-notch, self-respecting assassin needs such an advantage.

14) The method of murder and the means of solving the crime must meet the criteria of rationality and science. In other words, pseudoscientific, hypothetical and purely fantastic devices cannot be introduced into a detective novel. As soon as the author soars, in the manner of Jules Verne, into fantastic heights, he finds himself outside the detective genre and frolics in the uncharted expanses of the adventure genre.

15) At any moment, the solution should be obvious - provided that the reader has enough insight to figure it out. By this is meant the following: if the reader, having reached the explanation of how the crime was committed, re-reads the book, he will see that the solution, so to speak, lay on the surface, that is, all the evidence actually pointed to the culprit, and, even if he, the reader , as smart as a detective, he would be able to solve the mystery on his own, long before the final chapter. Needless to say, a savvy reader often reveals it this way.

16) In a detective novel, long descriptions, literary digressions and side themes, sophisticated character analysis and recreation of atmosphere are inappropriate. All these things are unimportant to the story of the crime and its logical solution. They only delay the action and introduce elements that have nothing to do with the main goal, which is to present the problem, analyze it and bring it to a successful solution. Of course, a novel should include enough description and well-defined characters to give it credibility.

17) The blame for committing a crime should not fall on a professional criminal. Crimes committed by burglars or bandits are investigated by the police department, not by a mystery writer and brilliant amateur detectives. A truly exciting crime is one committed by a pillar of the church or an old maid known to be a philanthropist.

18) A crime in a detective novel should not turn out to be suicide or an accident. To end a tracking odyssey with such a drop in tension is to fool the gullible and kind reader.

19) All crimes in detective novels must be committed for personal reasons. International conspiracies and military politics are the property of a completely different literary genre - for example, a spy or action novel. A detective novel should remain within a cozy, homely framework. It should reflect the reader's daily experiences and, in a sense, give vent to his own repressed desires and emotions.

20) And finally, the last point: a list of some techniques that no self-respecting author of detective novels will now use. They have been overused and are well known to all true lovers of literary crime. To resort to them means to admit your incompetence as a writer and lack of originality.

a) Identification of the criminal by a cigarette butt left at the crime scene.

b) Arrangement of an imaginary spiritualistic seance in order to frighten the criminal and force him to give himself away.

c) Forgery of fingerprints.

d) An imaginary alibi provided by a mannequin.

e) A dog that does not bark and therefore allows one to conclude that the intruder was not a stranger.

f) At the end of the day, placing the blame for the crime on a twin brother or other relative who is like two peas in a pod like the suspect, but is an innocent person.

g) Hypodermic syringe and drug mixed into wine.

h) Committing a murder in a locked room after the police broke in.

i) Establishing guilt using a psychological test for naming words by free association.

j) The mystery of a code or encrypted letter, eventually solved by a detective.