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GRADUATE WORK

Features of the English-language detective genre in literature (based on the material of English and American detectives)

annotation

The thesis examines the features of the English-language detective genre.

The work consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and a list of sources.

The first chapter of the thesis is devoted to the history of the development of the detective genre, as well as the work of researchers in this area.

The second chapter presents the features of the detective genre in English literature, analysis of works and comparison of English and American detectives.

The work was printed on 69 sheets using 59 sources, contains 1 table.

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………6

1 The detective genre in English literature…………………………………..8

1.1 Formation of the detective genre in literature……………………………...9

1.2 History of the detective genre……………………………………………...10

1.2.1 Detective works before the twentieth century (1838 - 1889)………………10

1.2.2 Detective works of 1890 - 1901……………………………...13

1.2.3 Detective works of the twentieth century (1902 - 1929)……………......15

1.3 Researchers of the detective genre………………………………………………………...18

2 Features of the detective genre……………………………………………..23

2.1 Features of English speakers detective works………………….25

2.1.1 Realization of the image of a detective pair “detective - his companion”……….28

2.1.2 Intrigue and two-story construction of works…………………36

2.1.3 Detective and fairy tale………………………………………………………43

2.1.4 Elements of reality in detective works…………………….46

2.2 Children's detective………………………………………………………...51

2.3 Ironic detective story as a special type of genre……………………………....54

2.4 Implementation of the rules of the genre in various types of detective stories…………………...59

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………...63

List of references………………………………………………………….65

Introduction

Mysteries and riddles have always attracted humanity and the English-speaking society in particular. Ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote history's first detective story English language, interest in this literary genre does not dry up.

The relevance of this study lies in an attempt to highlight something that researchers of the detective genre have not touched upon previously, namely: a comparison of the English and American detective genres.

The object of research is the detective genre in literature.

Subject - genre features of the English-language detective story.

The purpose of this thesis is to highlight the features of the detective genre in English-language literature.

Objectives: compare English and American detective stories, trace the genesis of the genre in English-language literature, and highlight genre features.

The research material was the works of English-language authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, Earl Gardner.

In this work, we relied on the research of such authors as N. N. Volsky, J. K. Markulan, A. Z. Vulis, A. G. Adamov, G. A. Andzhaparidze, T. Keszthelyi, as well as on encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Structure of the work: the thesis consists of an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion, as well as a bibliography.

The introduction outlines the purpose and objectives of the work, its relevance and novelty, as well as the material and research methods.

The first chapter, “The Detective Genre in English-Language Literature,” examines in detail the formation and history of the detective genre, and the directions of work of researchers in this direction.

The second chapter, “Features of the detective genre,” is devoted to the study of the works of English-language authors in order to identify the features of the genre in them.

The conclusion contains conclusions about the work done.

The practical significance of the study lies in the possibility of using its results at seminars on foreign literature at school and university.

The methodological basis of the research in this work was the organizational methods of scientific knowledge and data processing. The study used such general scientific methods as literature analysis, comparison and classification of data.

The novelty of the work lies in the simultaneous consideration and analysis of detective works by English and American authors.

1 The detective genre in English literature

Detective - the very name of the genre (translated from English detective - “detective”) says a lot. Firstly, it coincides with the profession of its main character - a detective, that is, a detective, the one who conducts the investigation. Secondly, this profession reminds us that the detective genre is one of the variants of widespread literature about crimes. Thirdly, it also implies a method plot construction, in which the mystery of the crime remains unsolved until the end, keeps the reader in suspense.

The mysterious has always attracted people, but a professional investigation of a crime could not become a plot in literature before it arose as a phenomenon of social reality. IN XVIII-XIX centuries In the most developed bourgeois countries, a police apparatus begins to form, including for the suppression and detection of crimes. One of the first detective offices was created with the participation of the great English novelist Henry Fielding, and almost a century later Charles Dickens interestedly followed the first steps of the subsequently famous Scotland Yard. For a writer, a crime is a sign of social ill-being, and the process of revealing it allows one to lift the veil of secrecy over the very mechanism of social connections. Thus, an element of detective intrigue appears in the works and the figure of the detective is introduced, initially as an episodic person in E. J. Bulwer-Lytton, C. Dickens, Honore de Balzac, F. M. Dostoevsky. The literary debut of a detective does not yet give rise to talk about the birth of the detective genre. The crime and its disclosure is just one of the plot motifs, which, even becoming the leading one in F. M. Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and in Charles Dickens’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” (unfinished), does not subordinate interest to the only question - who killed? It is more important to find out what kind of person becomes a criminal and what pushes him to do so.

1.1 Formation of the detective genre in literature

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the founder of the detective genre, who shifted the main emphasis from the personality of the criminal to the personality of the one who is investigating the crime. This is how the first famous detective in literature, Dupin, appears, whose extraordinary analytical abilities give the author the opportunity to pose a philosophical question about the unrealized powers of the human mind. The path to detective fiction as an independent genre lies through highlighting the very intrigue of the investigation. It ensures the success of the work, and its dignity is determined by the degree of ingenuity of the solution, the effectiveness of solving the mystery of the crime. Perhaps the first sign of the birth of the detective is in William Wilkie Collins's definition of his novels (The Woman in White and The Moonstone) as sensational. The detective story as a genre will take its classic form in the stories and stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, under whose pen it becomes “a purely analytical exercise,” which, however, “as such can be a perfect work of art within its completely conventional limits.” These words, spoken by another well-known English writer in this genre, Dorothy Sayers, may mean that the detective author is aware of the limitations of his genre form and is not going to compete with Charles Dickens or F. M. Dostoevsky. His goal is more modest - to interest, but on the way to this goal he can achieve a certain perfection. The key to success is the complexity of an unexpectedly solvable logical problem, as well as the originality of the personality of the person who solves it. That is why the names of the most famous heroes, such as Sherlock Holmes from Conan Doyle, Father Brown from Gilbert Chesterton, Maigret from Georges Simenon, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple from Agatha Christie, are not inferior in fame to the names of their creators. If we are accustomed to judging fiction by the richness and skill of words, then in a detective story this criterion disappears: “Style in a detective story is as inappropriate as in a crossword puzzle.” This is how Stephen Van Dyne harshly formulates one of the rules of the genre. Among authors, many share this belief, although not so easily: after all, the literary merit of the genre is called into question.

1.2 History of the detective genre

1.2.1 Detective works beforeXX century. (1838 - 1889)

The first fully mature detective story is considered to be the story published in Philadelphia in 1841, in the April issue of Graham's Magazine - Edgar Allan Poe's story "Murder in the Rue Morgue." This point of view has been repeatedly challenged. “Murder in the Rue Morgue” is not the first work in which there are all the components of a detective story: a detective plus a confidant (a pair that later became known as “Holmes-Watson”), a crime and a solution to the problem by inference. But this is the first work about “an impossible crime in a locked room.” The problem facing the detective is that after a murder, there is no obvious way to leave the room in which the crime was committed. All doors and windows are securely locked from the inside and door keys are in the door locks. Even the chimney is blocked by the victim's body. And, despite the fact that the crime seemed impossible, Dupin finds a solution to the problem. However, the concept of “the secret of a locked room” was not introduced into the detective story by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first used by the famous Irish writer Joseph Sheridan le Fanu. In November 1838, the story "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" was published in the Dublin University Magazine. This story, which was republished in a collection called The Purcell Papers, begins with a previously unsolved murder in a locked room. The following lines contain a message that the heroine of the story almost suffered the same fate. But the heroine survived and managed to explain the secret. The solution is completely different from E.A. Poe's idea. Recognizing the novelty of this plot device, Le Fanu used it with other characters in the story "The Murdered Cousin" ("Murder of the Cousin"), as well as in his fifth novel "Uncle Silas" ("Uncle Silas").

Since then, the "locked room" theme has been used by many writers, and at least three of them, publishing between 1852 and 1868, were authors of fairly high caliber. The February issue of Charles Dickens' Household Words magazine published Wilkie Collins's story "A Terribly Strange Bed", in which the hero escapes a terrible death in a locked room and points out the "devil in the machine" to the gendarmerie. who almost managed to kill him. The story was published in the 1856 anthology After Dark. Subsequently, it was reprinted many times and was used by at least two plagiarists. First -- " Strange story"An Odd Tale" by H. Barton Baker appeared in the Christmas Annual magazine in 1883, and the story was very popular in the days of publication. The second was the story “The Inn of the Two Witches,” written by Joseph Conrad.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich included a detective hero in the story in 1862. Out of His Head is an episodic novel introducing perhaps the first truly eccentric detective, Paul Lynde. It was the last English-language novel of the period to feature a "locked room" theme. There was a lull. But the “impossible crime” genre took off and forever took its place in detective literature.

However, in Europe the picture was different. A book entitled Nena Sahib was published in Germany in 1858. The author was a German by nationality, Hermann O. F. Goedsche, who wrote under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe. This long and not always interesting story is full of strong criticism of British colonial policy in India, and there is very little detective content. But nevertheless, the novel contains a detailed description of a murder in a locked room with a solution so simple and attractive that the real criminal used it in 1881. (But this did not help him, and he fell into the hands of the police).

France has always given the world writers with a love and a knack for stories of impossible crimes. In those early days of the detective story, two French authors had the opportunity to set the bar. The first was Eugene Chavette with his novel La Chambre du Crime (1875). The long, wordy narrative, of typical Victorian complexity, has not been translated into any other language in the world. Later, in 1888, a short story by the famous writer Victorien Sardoy, “The Black Pearl,” was published. In it, the detective is confronted with a theft from a locked room instead of the almost obligatory murder of a detective story. The story is told good language on behalf of Detective Cornelius Pump. The proposed solution, although very ingenious, is hardly realistic. The story can be found in The Romances (Brentanos, 1888) and The Skin of a Lion (Vizetelly, 1889).

1.2.2 Detective works of 1890 - 1901

Until the 1990s, art magazines were filled with many "sensational" stories of brutal deaths in traps, supernatural poisonings and diabolical machines. But in the last decade of the 19th century, the detective component of the “locked room mystery” again came to the fore. The initiative was started by Israel Zangwill. He came up with a completely new explanation for the mysterious crime in the locked room. It was a book written in 1891, The Big Bow Mystery. The events in this work take place in the east part of London, which the author knew well. The word "Bow" refers to the name of an area of ​​the British capital and is in no way associated with archery. The second was the story “The Speckled Band” by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1892, in which the great detective is faced with the problem of a “locked room” and the sinister Doctor Grimsby Roylot. Stories about Sherlock Holmes were very popular, they were published by The Strand Magazine.

Impossible crimes have repeatedly attracted the attention of the writer. An example is the unpublished story of the disappearance of a certain Mr. Phillimore. In the future, the maestro of the “locked room” John Dixon Carr, in collaboration with Arthur Conan Doyle’s son, Adrian Conan Doyle, will write several stories - a continuation of the adventures of the great detective.

In August 1898, The Strand Magazine published The Story of the Lost Special. The mystery was that a train went missing on a short section of track between two stations. Moreover, the regular train following the “special” arrived at the destination station strictly on schedule, and none of its passengers noticed anything unusual along the way. "This is madness. Can a train disappear in broad daylight in clear weather in England? A steam locomotive, a tender, two passenger cars, five people - and all this disappeared on a straight railway line." It is interesting that in this story the detective is not named. However, it quotes a letter from a certain “dilettante logician” who believed that if you discard various impossible options, then the one that remains, even though it is incredible, is the true one. Subsequently, the vanishing train idea was used by Leslie Lynwood, Melville Davisson Post, August Derleth and Ellery Queen. Moreover, the latter went further; in his story “The Divine Lamp” an entire house disappears.

Of the female writers, only Ada Cambridge can be distinguished, who, in the story “At Midnight”, written in 1897, describes the terrible story of the disappearance of a person.

We can say that two novels complete the era, each of which is unusual in its own way. The first is “The Justification of Andrew Lebrun” (1894), which was written by Frank Barrett, combining mystery, drama, investigation and even scientific facts. This is one of the earliest examples of disappearances from a locked and guarded room - a laboratory. The victim is the beautiful daughter of a strange scientist who worked there. The second is the impossible crime described by Louis Zangwill in the work “A Nineteenth Miracle” (1897) and is also very unusual. A man is washed away in front of witnesses from aboard a canal ferry and almost simultaneously his body falls through the upper window of a certain studio in London.

1.2.3 Detective works of the twentieth century. (1902 - 1929)

The Strand Magazine published a story in 1903 that opened a new stage in detective literature about impossible crimes. Samuel Hopkins Adams created the effect of a “locked room” in an open space, without any connection to doors and windows closed from the inside. In fact, the setting of the story “The Flying Death” is a beach. The detective is not faced with the problem of how the criminal left the locked room. She simply isn't there. The effect of “impossibility” is achieved by the fact that there is no way to leave the crime scene without leaving footprints in the sand. But that's exactly what happened. Soon other authors picked up this idea. In 1906, two works were published, which, by a strange coincidence, were even called almost identically, “The Flying Man” and “The Man Who Could Fly.” Their authors were Alfred Henry Lewis with “The Man Who Flew” (U.S.) and Oswald Crawfurd “The Flying Man”. Both works deal with a murder and the subsequent disappearance of the criminal from the crime scene. In both cases, the action takes place in winter on a snowy area, and the killer leaves no traces in the snow.

Another main character of this period was an American journalist who revered the work of Le Fanu and therefore took for himself French name Jacques Futrelle (Jacques Futrelle). He is one of the most prolific writers of impossible crime stories. The reader meets his main character, Professor August Van Dusen, whom the author calls Thinking Machine, in the story “The Problem of Cell 13.” The story was often included in various anthologies of the best detectives. "The Thinking Machine" was able to explain by what trick a man was able to escape from a guarded prison cell. The author's brilliant imagination was expressed in many other stories, where he described more and more new types of impossible crimes or made changes to previously invented methods. In " In “The Case of the Mysterious Weapon” he sucked all the air out of the bodies of the victims, in “The House That Was” roads and houses disappeared, in “The Kidnapping of the Child of Millionaire Blais” ("Kidnapped Baby Blace, Millionaire"), the tracks in the snow ended suddenly - as if the unfortunate child had disappeared into thin air. In one of his best stories, "The Phantom Motor", Futrell described the disappearance of a car from a protected section of the road with one the only exit.

In 1911, the collection “Innocence of Father Brown” by G. K. Chesterton, already known at that time, was published. The adventures of Father Brown have been collected into five collections. The detective priest often encounters impossible crimes. The next author to contribute to the development of the impossible crime literature was Carolyn Wells. Her first detective novel with private detective Fleming Stone, entitled “The Clue,” was published in 1909. She wrote about a hundred works and about twenty of them were about impossible crimes. Never before has a woman writer paid so much attention to this genre.

The First World War ended in 1918, and that same year a new literary detective star was born in the United States. In the novel by Melville Davisson Post, Uncle Abner was introduced, a kind of rural detective of the American outback. Uncle Abner is quite rightly regarded as one of the members of the Big Four, along with A. Dupin, S. Holmes and Father Brown.

In 1926, the first book of the “chief detective novelist” Willard Huntington Wright, “The Benson Murder Case,” was published in the United States. The author signed the novel by S. Van Dine. The work was a success and was hailed as a “masterpiece of detective literature.” Its publication marked the beginning of the “golden age of detective fiction” (1920-1940). This novel included a set of characters that became the standard in detective fiction:

1 The detective is a Philo Vance lover, a snob, a polymath, and a fan of the fine arts;

2 Stephen Van Dyne - a kind of virtual, invisible Doctor Watson;

3 John Marchley - District Attorney of New York, a very weak intellectual in professional terms;

4 Sergeant Has is a mute, almost comically mute, policeman.

This period ends with the release of the first part of Anthony Wynne's novels about the detective, Dr. Eustace Hailey. The first book, The Room with the Iron Shutters (1929), dealt with the standard locked room problem. But then the author established himself as a master of another form of impossible crime: murder with an invisible weapon.

Researchers call the next period in the development of the detective genre the “golden age.” It was the years after the Second World War that can be called the heyday of the detective story as a mass phenomenon that captured all segments of society. Countless stories, novellas and novels were written by different authors - who later became classics of the genre, and who no longer left any memory of themselves. Today, detective fiction is the most read genre in almost all countries. Some of its types have also taken shape into independent genres - police novel, children's detective story, women's novel, ironic novel. Therefore, we can confidently call the detective genre the most diverse in literature.

1.3 Detective genre researchers

Detective genre belongs to that type of literature that has long remained unattended by serious criticism. The general availability and popularity of works of this genre raised doubts about their artistic merits. Perhaps the first theorist of the detective story as a special genre was Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who published the article “In Defense of Detective Literature” in 1902. Since then, many reflections on this topic have been published, and they belonged mainly to practitioners of the detective genre. In our country, the impulse for theoretical understanding of detective literature arose relatively recently. Among the authors who wrote on this topic, we should remember Y. K. Markulan, A. Z. Vulis, A. G. Adamov, G. A. Andzhaparidze. The works of these authors are of a review nature. This is explained by the fact that many do not consider the detective genre to be serious literature: they treat it with some disdain, classify it as mass literature and do not consider it worthy of research. Apparently, this is why in Russia there is neither a tradition nor a school of critical analysis of the detective story. However, in our opinion, grassroots, mass literature is also worthy of study. This idea was also expressed at one time by J. Hankisch: “More and more love from today’s readers falls to the lot of literature, which seems to be “outside the law” and has one foot stuck in waste paper. Criticism, which proclaims the monopoly dominance of a high artistic style, does not deal with “low genres,” but the study of “popular literature” promises many literary, cultural, historical and psychological findings. The history of literature cannot be the history of writers only: it should partly be the history of readers.” Meanwhile, reader interest in detective literature is striking in its stability: the genre is one of the most widespread and readable in modern society. But, as the Hungarian researcher of the detective genre T. Keszthelyi rightly notes, “the popularity of the genre cannot compromise it, just as it cannot be a sign of perfection.” Two translated publications are also noted: from the Bulgarian language - “Black Novel” by Bogomil Raynov and “Anatomy detective" by Tibor Keszthely from Hungarian. In these works, the history of the genre is traced, its morphology is analyzed, and contact and typological similarities in the works of different authors are studied. Literary and art critics are trying to uncover the mystery of the century and a half popularity of the detective genre. All of the above studies have one thing in common: they view the detective story as a phenomenon associated primarily with fiction (mass, or formulaic, literature). One of the first to talk about formulaic literature was John Cavelty, who devoted a serious and voluminous monograph to such fiction genres as melodrama, western, detective story. He proposes to understand a literary formula as certain plot blocks that go back to certain archetypes (for example, a “love story”). Their existence is not limited to any one cultural era. Thus, the first feature of formulaic literature is its standardization. The second feature of formulaic literature, its main function is escape and relaxation. Cavelti explains the unusually wide distribution of formulaic literature in our time as follows: “The fact that the formula is an often repeated narrative and plot model makes it a kind of stabilizing principle in culture. The evolution of formulas is the process through which they assimilate, assimilate ordinary consciousness new values, new interests." Tracing the traditions of the detective genre, the accumulation of elements necessary for its formation, researchers name the names of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Godwin, Dickens, Balzac. Perhaps Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann came closest to creating a model of the detective genre in his short story “Mademoiselle de Scudéry” (1818), where there is both a mystery and an investigation of a crime, but “there is no detective character.” Almost all researchers date the true history of the detective story from the time of the appearance of Edgar Allan Poe’s “logical stories” (or “rationalizations”) “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roger” (1843), “The Stolen Letter” (1844) ), whose common hero was the first famous detective Auguste Dupin. Sometimes two more Poe’s short stories are considered examples of the detective genre: “The Golden Bug” (1843) and “You are the man who did this!” (1844). However, having created the genre, Poe did not become the creator of the term "detective". It was first introduced by Anne Catherine Green, a compatriot of Edgar Allan Poe, who defined the genre in her “The Leavenworth Affair” (1871). So, all researchers of Poe’s work, as well as detective theorists, consider the American romantic to be the founder of this genre, or rather, the detective story. The first one to domestic literary criticism gave a holistic analysis of the works of Edgar Poe and deduced the genre features of his short stories, was Yu. V. Kovalev. In the “Detective Stories” section of his monograph, the scientist analyzes in detail Poe’s “logical stories,” pointing out that this concept is “broader than the concept of a detective story.” The detective story genre has remained faithful to a certain rigid set of rules, a canon, throughout its entire history. “The author of a modern detective story faces the eternal task of being original within the canon.” Here one can trace the similarities with the literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages, where the subordination of art to the canon was determined by the peculiarities of mythological or theocentric consciousness. The detective story seems to carry within itself the remnants of such consciousness, the memories of humanity of a time when faith in the triumph of justice was unshakable. In this way, the detective with his subordination to the canon appeals to modern man with his craving for stability. From the point of view of a writer of the 20th century, a detective story is a “closed structure”, where the plot does not allow semantic fluctuations and the solution is the only possible one. It is precisely because of its normative nature that the aesthetics of the detective genre so often results in sets of rules. It is no coincidence that this genre received its final form precisely in the work of Poe, whose aesthetic views were distinguished by analyticity, rationalism, and a certain normativity.

The most important genre feature of a short story is its volume. “By ethicizing the incident, the short story extremely exposes the core of the plot - the central vicissitudes, and brings vital material into the focus of one event.” This event turns out to be, as a rule, surprising, often paradoxical. “A short story is an unheard-of event that has happened,” said Goethe. G. K. Chesterton wrote in his article “On Detective Novels”: “A detective novel should basically be built on the model of a short story, not a novel.” The long detective novel “faces certain difficulties. The main problem is that a detective novel is a drama of masks, not faces. It owes its existence not to the true, but to the false “I” of the characters. Until the very last chapter, the author is deprived of the right to tell us the most interesting things about his heroes. And until we read the novel to the end, there can be no talk about its philosophy, psychology, morality and religion. Therefore, it is best if its first chapter is also its last at the same time. A detective drama based on a misunderstanding should last exactly as long as a novella."

A short story and a novel built on the principle of a short story turn out to be most suitable for the process of solving detective mystery. The combination of improbability with realistic details remains the most important structural element of the detective genre. On the one hand, “until the end of the detective story there can be no question of any credibility.” On the other hand, “the detective story is imbued with the so-called realistic ideology, where each object has one single meaning.” A modern theorist of the detective genre writes: “A successful balance of the real and the unreal is created when the whole situation as a whole, although absurd, is still reliable in detail. The action of the detective is straightforward, but scrolled backwards: from the present, from the riddle shown in the exhibition, we go into the past, into the unknown, in order to reconstruct the events that have already played out” [Cit. according to 11, 210-211].

Thus, since many researchers and literary critics often did not take the detective genre seriously, practitioners became theorists of the genre. They studied the first detective stories, researched classic examples of the genre, so that later on their basis they could create their own works, not inferior in artistic value to world-famous novels, short stories and stories.

2 Features of the detective genre

An important property of a classic detective story is the completeness of facts. The solution to the mystery cannot be based on information that was not provided to the reader during the description of the investigation. By the time the investigation is completed, the reader should have enough information to use it to find a solution on their own. Only certain minor details may be hidden that do not affect the possibility of revealing the secret. At the end of the investigation, all mysteries must be solved, all questions must be answered.

Several more features of the classic detective story were collectively called by N. N. Volsky as the hyperdeterminism of the detective world - “the detective world is much more orderly than the life around us”:

1) Ordinary situation. The conditions in which the events of the detective story take place are generally common and well known to the reader (in any case, the reader himself believes that he is confident in them). Thanks to this, it is initially obvious to the reader which of what is described is ordinary and which is strange, beyond the scope.

2) Stereotypical behavior of characters. The characters are largely devoid of originality, their psychology and behavioral patterns are quite transparent, predictable, and if they have any distinctive features, they become known to the reader. The motives for the actions (including the motives for the crime) of the characters are also stereotypical.

3) The existence of a priori rules for constructing a plot, which do not always correspond to real life. So, for example, in a classic detective story, the narrator and detective, in principle, cannot turn out to be criminals.

This set of features narrows the field of possible logical constructions based on known facts, making it easier for the reader to analyze them. However, not all detective subgenres follow these rules exactly.

Another limitation is noted, which is almost always followed by a classic detective story - the inadmissibility of random errors and undetectable coincidences. For example, in real life, a witness can tell the truth, he can lie, he can be mistaken or misled, but he can also simply make an unmotivated mistake (accidentally mix up dates, amounts, names). In a detective story, the last possibility is excluded - the witness is either accurate, or lying, or his mistake has a logical justification.

One of the most interesting things for all fans of the detective genre is the “Twenty Rules for Writing Detectives” developed by Van Dyne. Ronald Knox, one of the founders of the Detective Club, also proposed his own rules for writing detective stories. However modern painting detective works has long excluded the existence of some points, so we are considering only some of the named rules that are still implemented in detective stories.

1) It is necessary to provide the reader with equal opportunities to unravel the mysteries as the detective, for which purpose it is necessary to clearly and accurately report all incriminating traces;

2) A detective story cannot lack a detective who methodically searches for incriminating evidence, as a result of which he comes to a solution to the riddle;

3) The obligatory crime in a detective story is murder;

4) Only one detective can act in a story - the reader cannot compete with three or four members of the relay team at once;

5) Secret or criminal communities have no place in a detective story;

6) The criminal should be someone mentioned at the beginning of the novel, but it should not be a person whose train of thought the reader was allowed to follow.

7) The detective’s stupid friend, Watson in one guise or another, should not hide any of the considerations that come to his mind; in his mental abilities he should be slightly inferior - but only slightly - to the average reader.

Each of the above features is precedent-setting; the canons and rules of the genre appeared gradually, after the publication of the first works. Trying to understand the success of novels of the new genre, writers created their own works in the image and likeness of previous ones. However, at the same time, everyone tried to bring something of their own, different from the others, something memorable and interesting. That is why we will never find strict observance of all the rules of the genre in one work, and this is of no use, because very soon it would have outlived its usefulness, without even providing the opportunity for further development.

2.1 Features of English-language detective works

The classic English detective story was based on the values ​​of a stable society consisting of law-abiding people. One of the most important motives for reading such detective novels is the experience of the restoration of normative order and, as a consequence, the stabilization of one’s own position (including social status). This basic outline of the detective novel underwent significant changes in the 1930s. in the American detective story, primarily among D. Hammett and R. Chandler and their many followers. The reality of that time with its problems, conflicts and dramas invades the narrative - alcohol smuggling, corruption, economic crime, mafia, etc. “All this happened against the backdrop of a crisis of confidence in the legal and judicial system - it is no coincidence that a new type of hero appeared in American criminal films. novels." Detective literature, and especially the classic detective story, due to its specificity, is more focused on thinking and logic than traditional fiction. In a classic detective story, the story is told not from the 1st or 3rd person, but from the point of view of the assistant detective.

The detective genre, of course, was in fashion in other countries - in France and America, but only in England was the “classical” school of detective fiction founded. Here the literary form underwent the most careful and complete processing. “The main difficulty in writing detective novels arises from the fact that the reader learns and is educated in the process of reading. If you have shown the reader how to examine the traces left by a criminal at a crime scene, then you will no longer surprise him with footprints again.”

An English detective story speaks primarily about England and almost always about the English (Hercule Poirot does not count). England has long traditions - national, social, literary. The English detective story explores some of these traditions and draws on others. The famous British critic and literary critic Walter Allen, in his work “Tradition and Dream,” noted the specifics of the English novel in comparison with the American one. “US writers tend to portray an unusual, lonely individual, who by his very nature is forced out of society, the environment and even his own microcosm, to which he opposes. British novelists, distinguished by their adherence to tradition, thoroughness and balance, on the contrary, tend to take the character in the fullness of his social connections, environment and motivations; revealing the relationship between man and society, they do not oppose them to each other, but consider them in unity.” This observation also seems to be true for the detective genre. In the American detective story, lonely criminals, lonely victims, lonely truth-seekers and detectives act as if there is no society for them, as if they are alone in the world, as if crime is their personal matter, and the vicissitudes of their destinies are dictated not only by the cruel laws of the American social system, but by certain fate, higher powers. In the English detective story it is quite the opposite. Even when this or that character goes back to the American literary prototype, it is closely connected with English reality. “Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey (novels by D. Sayers) are figures close to Dupin, but try to tear them out of their environment, from the system of their personal and social connections! And these characters are moderately conventional, and they are written not without a romantic touch, but you still won’t be able to pull them out.”

The element of national difference even penetrates into the intrigue. In American detective fiction, the emphasis is usually on action or description. judicial trial. English authors prefer unhurried and thorough intellectual and psychological inquiry. Another thing that is very important for them is who exactly carries out this inquiry. “Professionals, especially employees of Scotland Yard, in a word, the police play a secondary role in the English detective story; It happens that it doesn’t perform at all. And if she conducts an investigation, then it is as if in her unofficial capacity, attracted to the case not out of direct duty of service, but through an acquaintance - through relatives, friends, to help “without publicity”, to help out, to assist. The place of professionals, with the light hand of Conan Doyle, was taken by amateurs who became such by vocation, by mentality, or cultivating the investigation of crimes as a hobby, or even simply involved in the investigation by force of circumstances.”

The point here, apparently, is not the author’s whim, but the historically established way of life. Unlike France and even the USA, in England the line between private and social life a person passes through quite abruptly. Not just anyone, but the British came up with the famous formula “My home is my fortress.” The police are still extremely reluctant to be allowed into this fortress. The police, in turn, complain with good reason that this attitude interferes with their work. The policeman cannot become a heroic, let alone a romantic figure in the eyes of the English public, and therefore is hardly suitable for the role of a literary hero. In England there were never conditions for the flourishing of the so-called “police” novel, so popular in France since the 19th century, and in the 20th which gave birth to the multi-volume epic of Georges Simenon. A hero like Commissioner Maigret could not arise in an English detective story. It is impossible to imagine Holmes or Poirot saying something like this:

"... our main task is to protect the state, its governments of all times, institutions, then the protection of money, public goods, private property and only then human life... Has it ever occurred to you to look through the criminal code? You would have to go to Page 177 to find words related to crimes against a person... The 274th paragraph on begging is ahead of the 295th, which talks about the premeditated murder of a person..." .

2.1.1 Realization of the image of a detective pair “detective - his companion”

Poe's most important contribution to the development of the detective genre was the creation of an inseparable pair of main characters: an intellectual detective and his close friend, who plays the role of a chronicler of the events described. This compositional and narrative technique is used by many of Poe’s followers, including A. Conan Doyle and A. Christie. We can say that Edgar Allan Poe in his logical novels created a certain model of the hero of the detective genre. One of the famous writers, a master of the detective genre, Dorothy Sayers, wrote: “Dupin is an eccentric person, and eccentricity has been in high esteem among detective writers for several generations.”

According to many researchers and theorists of the detective genre, in order to write a good classic detective story, it is necessary to comply with some laws of this genre, as examples are “Twenty Rules for Writing Detectives” by Stephen Van Dine or the Ten Commandments of Ronald Knox. These principles were formed after studying detective novels and stories by writers whose works we now call classics of the genre. One of the conditions includes having an assistant detective present during the investigation of the crime. In a classic detective story, such an assistant is most often also the narrator and the detective's friend. We owe the appearance of this tandem in detective stories to Edgar Allan Poe, but the Holmes-Watson pairing of Arthur Conan Doyle gained the greatest world fame. Also no less famous were the heroes of Agatha Christie - Poirot-Hastings and Rex Stout - Wolfe-Goodwin. If you separate these pairs, it becomes obvious that the presence of an assistant hardly has any effect on the talents of famous detectives. What are these companions of the great detectives and what are they for? Firstly, according to the same written and unwritten rules of the genre, the detective himself cannot perform the function of a narrator, but someone is needed who will be next to the detective, describe the progress of the investigation and present to the reader the facts, evidence, suspects, as well as their own inferences. Secondly, characters like Watson, Hastings or Goodwin contrast perfectly with their eminent friends. Great detectives look even greater against their background, which means that a companion is needed, first of all, by the author of a detective story in order to emphasize the importance of the main character of the work. And thirdly, as Ronald Knox's ninth commandment states:

"The detective's foolish friend, Watson in one guise or another, should not hide any of the thoughts that come into his head; in his mental abilities he should be slightly inferior - but only slightly - to the average reader.".

From this we can conclude that the detective’s assistant represents the quintessence of all readers at once, their reflection on the pages of the work. This is the character who draws the reader into the action, giving him a personal place in the detective story. However, despite the same role, each character “plays” it differently. If Christie and Conan Doyle can trace some similarities in their secondary characters, then Stout's Archie Goodwin is strikingly different from his colleagues. Readers will learn about the circumstances of Captain Hastings and Doctor Watson's acquaintance with their companions in the very first works of their creators. The position of both heroes is also quite similar. Here's what Christie writes:

"I had been invalided home from the Front; and, after spending some months in a rather depressing Convalescent Home, was given a month"s sick leave. Having

no near relations or friends, I was trying to make up my mind what to do, when I ran across John Cavendish" .

And this is a quote from Conan Doyle:

"I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. (...)For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. (…)I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air - or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be" .

Stout has a different picture - at the time of the events described, Goodwin had been living in Wolfe’s mansion for 7 years, but there is no information about how they met and what brought them together:

"In seven years I've only seen Wolfe surprised three times." Or "- Archie! It is completely pointless in this case to listen to the opinion of Mr. Cramer. It seemed to me that in seven years you have learned this." .

If we talk about the position occupied by these three heroes, here we can also highlight some similarities and differences. What they have in common is that each of the heroes lives or lived for some time together with his detective friend, as well as the fact that each of the couples is truly connected friendly relations, not professional ones. But even here Archie Goodwin stands out from the overall picture. He is not just a friend and assistant to the detective, but works for him:

“I told you a long time ago, Mr. Wolfe, that I get half my salary for my daily work, and the other half for listening to your boasts.”

“I used it as a case for documents: police ID, firearms permit and detective’s license.” .

We have no such information about Hastings or Watson and do not know whether the great detectives shared their salaries with them. However, they both have a military background, respectively, each knows how to handle weapons and, if necessary, can use them.

It should also be noted the attitude of the detectives themselves towards their friends and vice versa. The most harmonious relationship, in our opinion, is between Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Naturally, Watson admires, and deservedly admires, Holmes's talents:

"I confess that I was considerably started by this fresh proof of the practical nature of my companion"s theories. My respect for his powers of analysis increased wondrously."

"You have brought detection as near an exact science as it will ever be brought in this world. My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty" .

Holmes does not treat his friend with disdain. In every case, he emphasizes in every possible way how significant Watson’s presence is for him, praising him for his ability to grasp the essence of events and their accurate presentation.

"It is really very good of you to come, Watson," he said. "It makes a significant difference to me, having someone with me on whom I can thoroughly rely" .

"Watson, if you can spare the time, I should be very glad of your company".

"I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss my results" .

In Agatha Christie, we see a completely different picture: Hercule Poirot does not miss the opportunity to speak unflatteringly about his friend’s mental abilities and exalt himself.

"Then," I said, "what do you deduce?" To which my friend only made a rather irritating reply, encouraging me to use my own natural faculties" .

“You have a wonderful heart, my friend, but you don’t know how to use your brain properly.” .

At the same time, Hastings himself often doubts the talents of the famous detective and allows himself to express his doubts to his face:

"I had a great respect for Poirot"s sagacity - except on the occasions when he was what I described to myself as "foolishly pig-headed" .

“Sometimes you remind me of a peacock with a loose tail,” I quipped. .

Nero Wolfe's relationship with Archie Goodwin cannot be called unambiguous - on the one hand, they are undoubtedly friends, ready to do anything for each other in times of danger. On the other hand, it is impossible to imagine more dissimilar and unsuitable people for living together. This effect is only enhanced by the fact that all the novels and stories about Nero Wolfe are written in an ironic manner, which cannot but affect the boss’s communication with his subordinate. Goodwin is a man of action, he cannot sit in one place for a long time, but even the need to get up from his favorite chair plunges Wolf into despondency.

“Archie, understand this: as a man of action you are acceptable, you are even competent. But, not for one minute could I reconcile myself with you as a psychologist.” .

“How are you?” Wulf asked politely. “Sorry that I don’t get up, I rarely do this at all.” .

Goodwin, while recognizing his friend's genius, is still dissatisfied with his methods of work or his role in the investigation:

“When we were investigating a case, I wanted to kick him a thousand times, watching how lazily he moved towards the elevator, heading upstairs to the greenhouse to play with his plants, or reading a book, weighing every phrase, or discussing with Fritz the most efficient way to store dry herbs when I'm running around like a dog waiting for him to tell her where the hole is."

"I have a feeling that I am something like stylish furniture or a lap dog for you" .

In a classic detective story, it is generally accepted that the detective always works for an idea, and not for a reward. The motives that motivate him to do this or that business are different, be it the acquittal of an unjustly accused person or the desire to solve an extremely complex puzzle in which he sees some challenge to his abilities. In any case, it's not money. Conan Doyle fully agrees with this stereotype, and therefore Watson characterizes Holmes this way:

"Holmes, however, like all great artists, lived for his art"s sake, and, save in the case of the Duke of Holdernesse, I have rarely known him claim any large reward for his inestimable services. So unworldly was he - or so capricious - that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of the most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity" .

Hercule Poirot, by and large, also fits the image of a disinterested lover of mysterious stories. He is interested in the process of solving a crime. And if during the investigation family dramas are revealed or love secrets, he does not always make them public. Nero Wolfe differs somewhat in his opinions:

“I have other ways to deal with boredom, but fighting criminals is my job. And I will hunt anyone if they pay me for it.” .

However, it cannot be said that Wulf takes on every case he hears about; he, like other detectives, is primarily attracted by the mystery and how interesting and exciting this very case can be.

A separate point is the question of the relationship between private investigators and law enforcement officers. According to the typical set of heroes of a classic detective story, the presence of an official representative of the law is necessary in the novel or story. Otherwise, an amateur detective engaged in investigations “for the love of art” would not have the right to exist. Another important function of the image of a policeman is to again emphasize the merits of the main character. When creating this image, authors most often use irony, sometimes grotesque or sarcasm, and this choice is quite justified. When Watson or Hastings make mistakes in conclusions, reasoning and actions, we can forgive them for this and understand, because, as mentioned above, we ourselves are reflected in them. But when the same mistakes are made by the police, and even against the backdrop of the impeccable logic of an amateur detective, one cannot do without irony, especially since the detective himself, with all his talent, cannot do without a policeman. However, every detective realizes that the laurels of the next solved case will not go to him, and therefore the notes of disdain and unflattering epithets that sometimes escape from the lips of the main characters of detective novels are not surprising.

“This will bring you new glory,” I remarked. “Pas du tout,” Poirot calmly objected. “The glory will be shared between Japp and the local inspector.” .

"That's all I wanted to find out, madam. But don't worry - your English policeman, who does not have the extraordinary abilities of Hercule Poirot in the least, will not be able to do such a task." .

"And supposing the Coroner's jury returns a verdict of Wilful Murder against Alfred Inglethorp. What becomes of your theories, then?-They would not be shaken because twelve stupid men had happened to make a mistake! But that will not occur. For one thing, a country jury is not anxious to take responsibility upon itself, and Mr. Inglethorp stands practically in the position of local squire. Also," he added placidly, "I should not allow it!" .

"I "m not sure about whether I shall go. I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather - that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times."

"Why, it is just such a chance as you have been longing for."

"My dear fellow, what does it matter to me? Supposing I unravel the whole matter, you may be sure that Gregson, Lestrade, and Co. will pocket all the credit. Thatcomesofbeinganunofficialpersonage" .

Officials, in turn, do not like private detectives for their great insight and ability to see what was beyond their own understanding. However, this does not prevent them from admitting defeat and sometimes admiring the work of a private detective:

“Do you remember the Altard case? What a rascal he was! Half the European police were chasing him, and all to no avail. In the end, we captured him in Antwerp, and only thanks to the efforts of Monsieur Poirot.” .

Summarizing all of the above, it can be noted that, despite the difference in styles, methods of describing the investigation, as well as our own interpretation of the image of the obligatory “detective-assistant” pair, we find some similarities in this image, which emphasizes the limitations of the genre. However, the differences in the vision of this image prove the skill of the authors who created it within the framework of a detective novel.

2.1.2 Intrigue and two-story construction of works

The detective story attracts the researcher with such genre properties as the stability of compositional schemes, the stability of stereotypes, and the repetition of basic structures. This certainty of features makes it possible to consider a detective story as a “simple cell.” In the detective genre, a certain standard for plotting has developed. At the very beginning, a crime is committed. The first victim appears. From this epicenter of future events, three rays of questions diverge: who? How? Why? Detective intrigue comes down to a simple scheme: crime, investigation, solution to the mystery. This scheme develops into a chain of events that forms a dramatic action. The variability here is minimal. The plot looks different. The choice of life material, the specific character of the detective, the location of the action, the method of investigation, and 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.

From the point of view of intrigue, two types of works can be distinguished in detective stories: those that captivate with intense action, and those that captivate with the intensity of intellectual search. Psychological motivations and the persuasiveness of fictional characters are required in both cases. The most striking example of an adventurous detective story is the works of the American author Dashiell Hammett. The instantaneous change of events and their alternation create the effect of continuous action, through which characters are revealed, the social atmosphere is shown and, most importantly, the crime is revealed. Detective novels of this type create a kind of picture before the reader's eyes, a film showing what is written.

"I contacted Panburn by telephone and told him that Axford had vouched for him."

"The only noteworthy thing I learned on Ashbury Street was that the girl's suitcases were taken away in a green van."

“In the storage room I learned that the suitcases were sent to Baltimore. I sent another telegram to Baltimore, in which I reported the luggage receipt numbers.”

“In the afternoon I received photocopies of the photograph and the girl’s letters, sent one copy of each original to Baltimore. Then I returned to the taxi companies. Two of them had nothing for me. Only the third informed me of two calls from the girl’s apartment.”

"A young man with shiny blond hair brought them with lightning speed - a rather thick folder,-and Axford hastily found among them the one I mentioned.”

“Our appeal to the press brought results. The very next morning, information began to arrive from all sides from many people who had seen the disappeared poet in dozens of places.” .

These quotes from Hammett's story "The Woman with the Silver Eyes" perfectly reflect the style of the American detective. Each of the detective's actions is not described in detail. All examples illustrate the events of one day. Dialogues are most often replaced by indirect speech.

Examples of an intellectual psychological detective story are the best novels of Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Gilbert Chesterton and many others. The works of these authors captivate you, just as solving a chess problem, a puzzle, or a mathematical equation captivates you. Here the reader is not an outside observer of events, worried about the heroes, but a full participant in the inquiry. The fewer characters, the deeper you can penetrate into the character of each of them, study the personality formed by time and environment. The most striking example is Agatha Christie's story “The Four Suspects.” From the title it is clear that the circle of persons involved in this case is very limited.

"But there"s the other aspect of the case - the one I was speaking about. You see, there were four people who might have done the trick. One "s guilty, but the other three are innocent. And unless the truth is found out, those three are going to remain under the terrible shadow of doubt."

"Dr. Rosen fell down the stairs one morning and was found dead about half an hour later. At the time the accident must have taken place, Gertrud was in her kitchen with the door closed and heard nothing - so she says. Fraulein Greta was in the garden, planting some bulbs - again, so she says. The gardener, Dobbs, was in the small potting shed having his elevenses-so he says; and the secretary was out for a walk, and once more there is only his own word for it. No one had an alibi - no one can corroborate anyone else"s story. But one thing is certain. No one from outside could have done it, for a stranger in the little village of King"s Gnaton would be noticed without fail" .

This is the main intrigue similar works- there are suspects and not many of them, there is a crime and a possible alibi for each character. Now the reader is given the opportunity to unravel the mystery along with the heroes of the work. Competing in the ability to draw conclusions or being content with the author’s explanation is a purely individual matter.

A talented detective story fulfills all three of its functions: it condemns a crime, provides knowledge of some new aspects of life, and “packs” all this into a tightly coherent plot that can capture the reader’s attention. That is why the classic detective genre is no less popular in our time. In the classic English detective story we will not find any naturalism or depiction of bloody scenes. The crime appears as a purely intellectual mystery. The French detective, unlike the English one, is open-ended, the number of suspects is not determined in advance, anyone could be among them. Unlike English, it portrays crime as a product of circumstance rather than character. This is Simenon's detective story, containing great amount picturesque details, replete with descriptions of localities and customs. America, unlike England and France combined, prefers the rapid development of events. There is even an opinion that in America there is no detective story, there is only an action movie. This is not entirely true, although in general heroes value decisive action first and legality only second. Perhaps for a country like the United States, this kind of work provides the reader with a much-needed opportunity to let off steam. Entrepreneurship, readiness to circumvent the law if necessary, or at least use it at one's own discretion - these are the virtues of American heroes.

It turns out that in each country there has been a distribution of priorities, and therefore the functions of a detective. In England, the moral function comes first - the criminal must be punished, family secrets preserved, and tarnished honor restored. In France, authors gravitate towards the cognitive function - the depiction of the psychology of the detective, the actions of people in certain circumstances, the causes and motives of the crime are described as carefully as the investigation process itself. American detectives prefer to give the reader the opportunity to relax, take a break from everyday life, and accordingly, the entertainment or entertaining function becomes paramount for them.

Researchers of the detective genre point to a special “two-plot construction” of the detective story. It includes “the plot of the investigation and the plot of the crime, each of which has its own composition, its own content, its own set of heroes.” For the authors of later detective stories, the investigation of a crime will become an end in itself and will acquire independent artistic value. In classic English detective stories, the plot of the crime is usually presented in the form of a story. The reader almost never witnesses a murder or theft, and often does not “visit” the crime scene, but learns all the details from a third party. A textbook example is Agatha Christie's stories from the Miss Marple series - an excellent example of the fact that a crime can be solved while sitting at home.

"When I was here last year, we made it a habit to discuss various mysterious cases. There were five or six of us. It was all an idea of ​​Raymond West. He's a writer! Well, everyone in turn told some mysterious story, the solution to which he knew only. They competed, so to speak, in deductive reasoning: who would be closest to the truth.

- And what?

“We had no idea that Miss Marple would want to join us, but out of politeness, of course, we offered.” And then something unexpected happened. The venerable lady outdid us all!

- Yes you!

- Pure truth. And, believe me, without much effort.

- Can't be. She hardly ever left St. Mary Mead.

“But, as she says, there she had unlimited opportunities to study human nature as if under a microscope.” .

In Conan Doyle, Holmes most often receives a letter or note describing the crime, or the client tells himself why he needed the detective’s services.

"It was a few weeks before my own marriage, during the days when I was still sharing rooms with Holmes in Baker Street, that he came home from an afternoon stroll to find a letter on the table waiting for him" .

"By the way, since you are interested in these little problems, and since you are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you may be interested in this." He threw over a sheet of thick, pink-tinted notepaper which had been lying open upon the table. “It came by the last post,” he said. “Read it aloud”

In the American detective story, more attention is paid to the plot of the crime. A murder can happen completely unexpectedly in a building full of people, as, for example, in Rex Stout's story "Black Orchids", and the author will certainly pay attention to the description of the corpse, its unnaturally twisted leg or the trickle of blood on the forehead. It cannot be said that there are no such descriptions at all in English detective stories, but they are presented without any particular details and rather resemble a police report - only facts and no emotions. If we talk about the heroes of the plot of crimes, then here too you can find some differences. In the English detective story, people kill reluctantly: the detectives are under pressure from circumstances, the criminals are burdened by social injustice. In American - easily.

"Fag was in favor of immediately killing both Bark and Ray. I tried to knock this thought out of my head: it would not have given anything. I had Rhea around my little finger. He was ready to throw himself into the fire for me. It seemed to me that I had convinced Fag, but... In the end, we decided that Bark and I would take the car and leave, and Ray would play the fool in front of you, show you some pair and say that he mistook them for us. I went to get a cloak and gloves , and Bark walked towards the car. And Fag shot him. I didn't know he wanted to do that! I wouldn't let him! Believe me! I wouldn't let Bark get hurt." .

The content of the investigation plot in each detective story comes down to one thing - the detective investigates the crime, finds the culprit, and reveals the secret. Naturally, this is only the basis on which the rest of the plot and the author’s skill are superimposed. One point becomes common to all detective stories of any author in any country - the revelation of the secret always occurs at the very end of the work. Otherwise, the authors find their own ways to depict the detective's methods, character and actions. The English detective is a detective of thoughts, the American one is of action. It is not for nothing that Holmes’s statement “This is a three-way case, Watson” has become an aphorism reflecting the main essence of the English detective novel - the main skill of any detective is the ability to think outside the box and reason logically.

One way or another, the detective genre today has a countless number of works that can please any reader. People facing their inner life and those with an analytical mind gravitate toward classic English detective stories. Realists prefer French authors. Typically, such people are attentive to the little things in life. Anyone who reads the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler or Rex Stout has a determined and unbalanced character, prone to unbridled expression of feelings. He is not interested in focused unraveling of intellectual mysteries. However, all detective lovers are attracted by one thing - a mystery that needs to be solved.

2.1.3 Detective and fairy tale

A very interesting idea was expressed by Tibor Keszthelyi in his “Anatomy of a Detective”: “The godparents of the detective seriously underestimated the newborn child of literature. They called it a novel or a short story and condemned it as such, although it is a fairy tale.”

The main figure in a detective story is a detective, a man of exceptional abilities, an urban folk hero, similar to the hero of a fairy tale. Both of them commit never-before-seen, never-heard-of, inimitable acts, and in the process are sometimes exposed to mortal danger. They fight with riddles, secrets, puzzling mysteries. They fight against witches and wizards, terrible, brilliant villains. In adventures and struggles, they are led and attracted by the hope of a successful search for treasures, of enrichment, but in most cases a more noble goal is the salvation of a person, the destruction of evil. The detective must acquit the innocently convicted suspect and must expose the murderer. And he, like a fairy-tale hero, is driven by faith in his calling, fueled by a passion for searching for truth.

Both of them need either witty thinking or physical courage to solve the problem. “The prince on a white horse must give a cunning answer to three tricky questions or fight tooth and nail with a seven-headed dragon to win the princess’s hand. The famous detective - to conduct a brilliant investigation to reveal the mystery and, perhaps, with the help of a weapon, to neutralize a dangerous villain, ready for anything, backed up against the wall” - Keszthelyi’s words only confirm the fact that a fairy tale and a detective story equally show a chain of events around only sketchily outlined images . Neither a fairy tale nor a detective story provide developed characters. The characters in a detective story are as static and unchanging as in eternal peace fairy tale The reader receives them ready-made, in a certain state. They do not change, do not improve, do not develop.

The marital status of the master detective also remains unchanged; time stops for him, like for a sleeping beauty who wakes up after a hundred years fresh, vigorous and youthful. Hercule Poirot retired from the Brussels police in 1904, and only then began to practice his craft again as a private detective in London. Since then, he has carried out investigations with unremitting energy for decades, without losing either physical vigor or freshness of spirit. If we assume that he retired at sixty, then in 1974 he would have been exactly one hundred and thirty years old. The old maid, the famous detective Jane Marple was introduced to the general public in 1928 in a short story, and in the more than half a century since then she has aged only twenty years. The faces around them also do not age. Sherlock Holmes's housekeeper, Doctor Watson, Jane Marple's nephew and others appear before readers again and again.

The Innocent Suspects are the Cinderellas and princesses of a detective story at the mercy of the villain. Both there and here events are replete with repetitions and constant motifs. The youngest prince is always accompanied by happiness. Having solved all three problems, he wins the award. The detective story is also full of stereotypical twists. Sherlock Holmes usually selects interesting cases from his correspondence. The Perry Mason adventures of the American writer Earl Gardner invariably begin with the fact that someone wants to use the services of the famous lawyer in some strange or suspiciously trivial case.

"My secretary," said Perry Mason, in a calm tone of voice, "told me that you wanted to see me about a dog and about a will." The man nodded. "A dog and a will," he repeated mechanically.

"Well," said Perry Mason, "let's talk about the will first." I don"t know much about dogs" .

"I"m going to begin at the beginning and give you the whole business. I won't take much of your time. Do you know anything about glass eyes?

Perry Mason shook his head.

"All right, I"ll tell you something. Making a glass eye is an art. There aren't over thirteen or fourteen people in the United States who can make them. A good glass eye can"t be distinguished from a natural eye, if the socket isn't damaged."

Mason, watching him closely, said, "You"re moving both eyes."

"Of course I"m moving both eyes. My eye socket wasn't injured. I've got about ninety per cent of natural motion. "I"ve got a set of half a dozen eyes - duplicates for some, and some for wear under different conditions. I had one eye that was made bloodshot. It was a swell job. I used it when I"d been out on a binge the night before."

The lawyer nodded slowly. "Go on," he said.

"Someone stole it and left a counterfeit in its place" .

In both the first and second examples, the cases start out rather strange and unusual, the howling of a dog and the theft of a glass eye can hardly be called serious offenses, but subsequently, in both cases, the detective has to deal with murders. After the crime is discovered, there is a series of obligatory episodes: interrogations, conversations. The exposure is usually followed by an explanation. Both here and there the presence of persons is required, hiding their true name, title, profession. Therefore, both here and there the motive of recognition-exposure is characteristic. In both actions, rhythm matters: slowing down events, intervening in them exactly at midnight.

The Industrial Revolution dealt a mortal blow to feudalism. The city absorbs the village and transforms human relationships. Folk art is giving way popular culture. The fairy tale, delighting with miracles and surprises, this time itself transformed into a detective story, and by the second half of the 20th century it changed again, turning into science fiction. However, the structure remained the same. The compositions of a fairy tale and a detective story are equally bipolar: they are divided into a problem and a solution. A study of the compositions of various fairy tales has shown that a simple structure of this kind can support at most two storylines and a maximum of ten episodes. The detective also does not transgress these limits: murders are rarely committed serially (in this case they are also strung together in one storyline), and the number of suspects is always expressed in a single digit. V. Ya. Propp in his book “Morphology of a Fairy Tale” derives a simple formula for the structure of the division of roles: enemy - hero - giver, helper. The same formula can be successfully applied to a detective story: killer - detective - witness, suspect, respectively.

It is impossible to say for sure how legitimate this theory is, but it is interesting that the detective genre has spread to children's literature.

2.1.4 Elements of reality in detective fiction

Nevertheless, the detective story still remains a realistic genre, despite the elements of the game and the similarity to a fairy tale. The reader is reliably informed of the facts of reality and the real events of the described century.

In Conan Doyle, the seemingly unshakable order of the Victorian era with its calm and stability is as if absorbed into the personality of Sherlock Holmes, his cold analysis, superiority, and self-confident gestures. Even an intense interest in crime also testifies to the secret desire of a person of that time to hear an amazing sensation that would save him from the boredom of life. “The imperial authority of England was at its zenith, the whole world was at her feet, it seemed to her, like Sherlock Holmes, who, with condescending insight, again and again restored the Victorian order, exposing the criminals who were destroying it.” Street pictures of the outskirts of London, descriptions of carriages, estates, suburbs - all these are real images against which the plot unfolds.

"It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths" .

Upper Swandam Lane is a vile alley lurking behind the high wharves which line the north side of the river to the east of London Bridge. Between a slop-shop and a gin-shop, approached by a steep flight of steps leading down to a black gap like the mouth of a cave, I found the den of which I was in search" .

Agatha Christie's composition, simple plot formula, closed location, limited circle of suspects, rationally constructed plot reproduce another historically characteristic geographical unity - the “peaceful” mood of the twenties and thirties. The English countryside with all its boredom, rustling gossip, superstitions, ancient castles with fireplaces in them, five o'clock tea, library rooms, family secrets, written and unwritten wills, tired retired colonels and majors, provincial aristocrats living surrounded by family.

"It does remind me a little of Annie Poultny," she admitted. "Of course the letter is perfectly plain - both to Mrs. Bantry and myself. I don"t mean the church-social letter, but the other one. You living so much in London and not being a gardener, Sir Henry, would not have been likely to notice."

"My sister and I had a German governess - a Fraulein. A very sentimental creature. She taught us the language of flowers - a forgotten study nowadays, but most charming."

In the end he chose a village in Somerset - King "s Gnaton, which was seven miles from a railway station and singularly untouched by civilization" .

American detectives have a different natural background. There, reality presents a different kind of scene. From the stories of Earl S. Gardner, the reader learns about the manipulated power of the press, the environment of large American cities, airplanes as a common means of transportation within the country, and the procedure for legal proceedings.

"Have you located Patton? - Mason asked.

Yes, we"ve located him, and we"re pretty certain that he"s in his apartment. We"ve got quite a bit of dope on the racket he runs, perhaps enough to make it look as though we could start a criminal prosecution. He"s living at the Holliday Apartments out on Maple Avenue, 3508 is the number. He"s got apartment 302.

I"ve looked the place up. It"s an apartment house that pretends to have a hotel service, but doesn"t have very much. There"s an automatic elevator and a desk in the lobby. Sometimes there"s some one on duty at the desk, but not very often. I have an idea we won"t have any trouble getting up there unannounced. We can give him a third degree, and we can probably get a confession out of him" .

Despite this, Gardner's famous hero, detective lawyer Perry Mason, did not become the model of the American detective. His image is completely different - he is more like a sheriff, in his behavior, gestures, methods of investigation, and adventures, one can feel that his main law is still physical superiority or weapons. Neither intellectual argumentation nor psychological reflection suits him. He is characterized rather by self-confidence based on excellent physical training and a loaded revolver, taciturnity, monotonous severity and coldness, perseverance, vigilant readiness for decisive action. A direct line from here leads to the American detective hero of the twenties and thirties, who wears an ordinary street jacket instead of a tuxedo, and exchanges the fragrant cigar of the English “gentleman detective” for a strong cigarette or tobacco. For the legacy of the “wild west” was already permeated by new social phenomena, the gangster romance of America in the twenties, and the energetic pace of life. In a word, the most typical American detective is Dashiell Hammett. Among his followers, the detective master becomes increasingly deformed, distorted, and becomes rude and cruel. Pictures of the life of American crime are accurately reflected from the inside.

"It's a joint. It's run by Joplin Tin Star, a former safecracker who put his money into the place. Prohibition made motels profitable. He's making more money now than he did when he was emptying the cash register. The restaurant is just a front. "White Shack "This is a transshipment point for alcohol, which then spreads through Halfmoon Bay throughout the country; Joplin makes a huge profit from this" .

In England, the genre actually tangibly reflects the life sense of the middle and upper strata. This is also clear from the social environment that is traditional for the English detective story - an elegant world located at a safe distance from little people, from the street, professional criminals, foreign crooks, ordinary places of action, objects, events. Sherlock Holmes' investigations often involve people and objects originating from exotic locales. Australia, South America, Latin and Slavic Europe, Norway, Switzerland, North America, India - in the eyes of the citizens of the island country, all this is some kind of distant and exciting world.

"From time to time I heard some vague account of his doings: of his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee, and finally of the mission which he had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland" .

The stories of Dorothy Sayers featured respectable, decent, well-mannered young men with good manners and rosy-cheeked young ladies. The impressive army of guests invited to the weekend were either always changing clothes for lunch, dinner, for walks, or conducting an investigation into the disappearance of daggers. They strictly observed meal times even if the owner of the house lay stabbed or strangled in his room. “Of course, there was never a murder in the cafeteria. The night hours were not intended for love, but - in accordance with the code of decency of the genre - for sleep or murder."

"My dear Charles," said the young man with the monocle, "it doesn't do for people, especially doctors, to go about "thinking" things. They may get into frightful trouble. In Pritchard's case, I consider Dr. Paterson did all he reasonably could by refusing a certificate for Mrs. Taylor and sending that uncommonly disquieting letter to the registrar. He couldn't help the man's being a fool. If there had only been an inquest on Mrs. Taylor, Pritchard would probably have been frightened off and left his wife alone. After all, Paterson hadn't a spark of real evidence. And suppose he'd been quite wrong- what a dustup there'd have been!"

The downside to this approach is the portrayal of servants. The driver, the footman, the maid, the maid, the cook, the gardener, the valet - they are all comic figures or dubious characters. Agatha Christie makes them speak in slang, thereby emphasizing their primitiveness. For some reason, drivers are traditionally described most unkindly. This approach is clearly noticeable in England, where the arrogance of the upper and middle classes was felt in relation to the large layer of domestic servants at that time.

"Instead he asked what the mysterious Zarida was like. Mrs Pritchard entered with gusto upon a description.

Black hair in coiled knobs over her ears - her eyes were half closed - great black rims round them - she had a black veil over her mouth and chin - and she spoke in a kind of singing voice with a marked foreign accent - Spanish, I think -

In fact all the usual stock-in-trade, - said George cheerfully" .

“What vile hints! They suspect that I robbed Madame! Everyone knows that the police are unbearably stupid! But you, monsieur, are like a Frenchman...

“Belgian,” Poirot corrected her, to which Celestine did not pay the slightest attention.

- Monsieur should not remain indifferent when such a monstrous lie is erected against her. Why doesn't anyone pay attention to the maid? Why should she suffer because of this impudent red-cheeked girl, no doubt a born thief. She knew from the very beginning that this was a dishonest person! She watched her all the time. Why didn't those idiots from the police search the thief! She wouldn’t be at all surprised if Madame’s pearls were found on that mean girl!”

Thus, no matter how much imagination the author of detective stories has, when inventing the plot of his works, he builds them on a solid foundation of the surrounding reality, reflecting the spirit and mood of his era.

2.2 Children's detective

Speaking about the detective genre, one cannot fail to mention such a phenomenon as a children's detective story. It is believed that this genre came to children's books at the beginning of the 20th century in the wake of a general fascination with stories about famous detectives. However, back in 1896, Mark Twain’s story “Tom Sawyer the Detective” was published, in which a crime that has baffled all adults is solved by world-famous boys. In 1928, a story for children by the German writer Erich Köstner entitled “Emil and the Detectives” appeared. Also worth noting are the stories of the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren about the “famous detective Kalle Blomkvist.” In Russia, the first detective work for children was the novel “Dirk” by Anatoly Naumovich Rybakov.

Most likely, it was these works that became the forerunner to the development of children's detective fiction into a separate genre. One of the first to work in this genre was the English writer Enid Mary Blyton, the author of the most famous series of 15 books “The Five Find-Outers”. Books in this series were published from 1941 to 1960. During these same years, many other authors appeared in the USA and Western Europe, writing detective stories for children in series. Since the late nineties, this genre has taken shape in Russia, giving rise to its own authors and heroes.

No matter in which country such works were written, we find much in common in them. In almost all books the action takes place in real cities and countries, the names of streets and landmarks are not fictitious. In Enid Blyton's books, the action takes place in the fictional town of Peterswood, but all the surrounding towns and areas are real. And Wilmer Green, and Farring, and many other cities, including London, can be found not only on the pages of books, but also on the map of Great Britain.

"So now Pip and Daisy and I are going on our bikes to Wilmer Green," said Larry. "It"s only about five miles. At least, we"ll have tea first and then go" .

"Fatty had to go and get his bicycle, and so had Bets and Pip. To her joy Bets was allowed to come, as Farring was not a great distance away. Thechildrenrodeoffgaily" .

The main character never acts alone; there is always a group of friends, a brother or sister. This is evident even from the names of the series of children's detective stories: “The Five Find-Outers” by the English writer Enid Blyton, “Company with Bolshaya Spasskaya” by Russian authors A. Ivanov, A. Ustinova, “The Hardy Boys” by the American writer Franklin Dixon.

It is also necessary to have a friend who is a police officer or a relative working in law enforcement. Heroes of children's detective stories very rarely encounter murders. If in “adult” detective stories this is almost the most observed rule of the genre, then in detective stories for children, the title most often appears in the title. "The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage", "The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat", "The Mystery of the Secret Room", "The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters", "The Mystery of the Missing Necklace", "The Mystery of the Hidden House" are the titles of books by the already mentioned writer Enid Blyton. Comparing with the titles of novels and stories, for example, by Agatha Christie - “Murder on the Links”, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, “The Murder at the Vicarage”, “Murder on the Orient Express”, “Murder in Mesopotamia”, “ Murder in the Mews”, “Murder is Easy”, “And Murder is Announced” - and this is not a complete list, we can confidently say that the children's detective story is also psychological. No matter how serious the investigation, it is always presented in the form of a game, therefore, the authors have to observe some restrictions in the choice of plot, because the confrontation of children and teenagers with murder directly in real life cannot be called a game.

A children's detective story gives adults the opportunity to speak the same language as teenagers, allows them to be drawn into the world of reading and adventure, and also instills the moral values ​​necessary for the development of a harmonious personality. It can sometimes teach, perhaps, even more than a serious book written by a recognized author. Strong friendship, the ability to work in a team, the fight between good and evil - these are the main values ​​of a detective story written about children and for children.

2.3 Ironic detective story as a special type of genre

It is impossible to imagine the modern picture of the detective genre without the ironic detective story, perhaps the most widespread type of literature among today's readers. As an independent genre, the ironic detective story was finally formed only in the twentieth century, but almost immediately gained incredible popularity. Most likely, the basis for the birth of such a subgenre in literature was the first parodies of classic detective stories. Among the authors of literature of this kind one can find recognized classics - Mark Twain, O. Henry, James Barry. The parody detective genre is still popular today. One of the most striking examples is the work “Sherlock Holmes and All-All-All” by the Russian author Sergei Ulyev, published under the pseudonym Jack Kent. A parody of “Ten Little Indians” by Agatha Christie, which gathered ten famous detectives on an island in a castle. Irony, grotesquely depicted images and all this based on the classic English detective story.

“Ah,” Miss Marple sighed dreamily, “The old castle, the cold walls and - swamps, swamps for hundreds of miles around... What a magnificent backdrop for a murder! A prim, mysterious, purely English murder...

- Oh, Miss Marple, it's incredibly interesting when someone is constantly being killed! - Della Street exclaimed, pressing her hands to her chest.

“Of course,” said Sherlock Holmes. - Unless they kill you.

“But excuse me,” Juve intervened, waving his hands in front of his nose, “Miss Marple might not have talked about murder!”

“That’s out of the question,” Goodwin said. “I suspect that her head is full of murders.”

“Unfortunately, you are right, monsieur,” Poirot sighed. - Oh, our craving for great art..." .

However, we cannot say that before the appearance of such works, fans of the detective genre were not familiar with such a phenomenon as irony. On the contrary, in almost every author the reader finds its manifestations to one degree or another. An ironic approach to matters, sarcasm in dialogues or descriptions, even an ironic attitude of the author himself towards the main character.

In classic French detective stories, irony is almost not expressed. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that most of the detective heroes are official representatives of the law - Commissioners Juve and Maigret, detective police agent Lecoq. Authors of English-language detective novels are less biased in this issue- They easily portray the police in an unfavorable light, making fun of clients, victims or detectives. In the American detective story, irony is obvious, most often manifested in the description of the course of the investigation and in dialogues. Any work by Rex Stout is filled with caustic remarks or sarcastic epithets, which can equally belong to the main character, Nero Wolfe or his assistant Archie Goodwin, or to any other hero of the work, even if this is his only remark.

"I didn't really mind when Nero Wolfe sent me [Archie Goodwin] there. I kind of expected this. After the publicity created by the Sunday newspapers about the exhibition, it was clear that someone in our family would have to go and look at these orchids. And since Fritz Brenner cannot be separated from the kitchen for so long, and Wolf himself, as you know, is most suited to the nickname “Stationary Body”, like those bodies that are talked about in physics textbooks, it seemed that the choice would fall on me. I was chosen" .

The authors of the English classic detective story, although they do not go beyond the rules and canons of style, still use irony in its various manifestations. In the stories of the recognized classic Arthur Conan Doyle, readers feel, oddly enough, the author's ironic attitude towards his hero. Doyle himself never attached importance to his detective work as much as Holmes' admirers did. Considering his stories a kind of entertainment, he did not consider it necessary to deeply respect the famous detective, which is felt in his more later works. Since the image of Holmes was sufficiently defined from the very beginning, the author could not “destroy” it later. Sherlock Holmes is well aware of all the phenomena and things that could be useful in investigating crimes, every little thing is carefully studied. When Scotland Yard employees or Watson's companion argue whether it is worth paying so much attention to this or that piece of evidence, it turns out that the famous detective has extensive knowledge of this subject and is even the author of a number of articles, monographs or manuals. He wrote an article on types of encryption (the story “The Dancing Men”), a book on the practical breeding of bees (“The Second Spot”), a work entitled “Identification of tobacco varieties by ashes” (“The Sign of Four”), as well as a number of articles on footprints and tires, about the influence of profession on the shape of the hand and many others. Sometimes the author allows himself to express irony towards Holmes by putting it into the characters’ remarks:

"Perhaps you will explain what you are talking about.

My client grinned mischievously. - I had got into the way of supposing that you knew everything without being told, - he said" .

One can also note the similarity in the use of this technique in Agatha Christie’s series of works about Miss Marple and Gilbert Chesterton in the stories about Father Brown. The stories themselves, in terms of narrative style, comply with the rules of the detective genre, but the authors put ironic remarks in the mouths of the main characters and, most often, at the end of the work. This final remark with some subtext often represents the conclusion or the main artistic idea of ​​the entire work.

"The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. "And can you tell us why," he asked, "you should know your own figure in a looking-glass, when don't two such distinguished men?"

Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered: "Really, my lord, I don’t know unless it’s because I don’t look at it so often" .

"Why do you say, "called himself the gardener," Aunt Jane?" asked Raymond curiously.

"Well, he can"t have been a real gardener, can he?" said Miss Marple."Gardeners don"t work on Whit Monday. Everybody knows that." She smiled and folded up her knitting. "It was really that little fact that put me on the right scent," she said. She looked across at Raymond. "When you are a householder, dear, and have a garden of your own, you will know these little things" .

Subsequently, as noted above, all these ironic intentions and allusions in classic detective stories formed into a separate genre, which became extremely popular in almost every country. An interesting fact is that in Russia the majority of authors writing in the ironic detective genre are women; in England, the name Georgette Heyer is on the list of founders of this trend, while in France there are simply no ironic detective stories written by a woman.

Researchers and theorists of the genre believe that the ironic detective story is a phenomenon of mass literature and cannot be classified as a serious work, and in some ways they are right. In works of this genre, the entertainment function comes first. Subtle humor, “light” dialogues and atypical main characters allow you to escape from reality for a while, without delving into what the author wanted to convey and how deeply psychological his images are. Then, I think, comes the cognitive function - the more information in life that can be gleaned from a detective story, and the more diverse this information is, the more valuable the work itself. In this regard, modern ironic detective stories are superior to classic ones, since the main characters are ordinary people who are not associated with the work of official representatives of the law. And finally, the third function is moral. Depiction of crime, violence, bloodshed automatically deprives the author of the right to the high title of writer. Unfortunately, such scenes are not uncommon in modern detective stories. However, the harmonious combination of all three functions gives rise to a high-level work, which cannot be called just entertaining reading aimed at the mass reader. If we talk about modern English-language ironic detective stories, we can single out several writers who managed to create just such works. These are English writers Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie and their American colleague Lawrence Block. The works of these authors are distinguished by the embodiment of all functions, multiplied by a humorous style. Also, despite the different mentalities of the authors, their books have a lot in common:

1) each novel is based on a detective plot, built according to a certain scheme, aimed at creating a comic effect;

2) unlucky heroes, as a rule, find themselves in an unusual, alien environment and are forced to act in a world completely incomprehensible to them;

3) the absurdity of the situation, the complete incompatibility of the main characters with the circumstances in which they have to act by chance, give rise to a lot of misunderstandings and funny scenes; the text is presented in the form of an extended monologue of the main character, who seems to be talking with the readers, talking about his adventures, quoting the funny opinions of his companions, often interrupting the flow of the story to speculate about life, laughing with the readers at the absurdity of various situations; lament the sad fate of people living in a poorly organized world;

4) eloquent titles of books that are built on certain models and are based on a language game;

5) all novels certainly have a happy ending.

Thus, taking into account the above, we can conclude that the genre of the ironic and parody detective story appeared thanks to the rules and canons of the classic detective story. It was precisely the framework within which the classics of the genre tried to fit their works that gave rise to the desire to “liberate” detective novels and stories, making them more accessible to most readers.

2.4 Implementation of rules in various types of detective stories.

As already noted in the first chapter of this work, the detective genre has a set of different rules and canons, but not all of them are implemented in the works. As a clear example, we have compiled a table with different types of detective stories to demonstrate the presence or absence of one or another rule of the genre in them. For comparison, we took such types of detective stories as classic English, ironic, children's and “cool” American, since, in our opinion, these types more fully reflect genre diversity and, in some senses, even contradict each other.

Table 1 - Implementation of the rules of the genre in different types of detective works

Detective type/rule number
Classic English
Ironic
"Cool" American

1) It is necessary to provide the reader with equal opportunities to unravel the mysteries as the detective, for which purpose it is necessary to clearly and accurately report all incriminating traces.

2) A detective story cannot lack a detective who methodically searches for incriminating evidence, as a result of which he comes to a solution to the riddle. As can be seen from the table, the first two rules are fully implemented in every type of detective story, so they can be called fundamental for any work of this genre.

3) The obligatory crime in a detective story is murder. This rule applies not only to the genre of the “cool” American detective story, but also to the ironic one. As an example, we can cite the works of D. Hammett; one of the collections of stories is called “The Murders of Dashiell Hammett.” Perhaps the code of the American detective story, which is often equated with the action film, does not allow authors to abandon the most common theme in the detective novel. Since the ironic detective story belongs to the mass form of literature, the authors use all means to hold the attention of readers longer. In the modern world, the most attractive and exciting crime for a detective lover remains murder. In a classic detective story, writers are more loyal to this rule. Having studied all of Conan Doyle's works about Sherlock Holmes, we found that out of fifty-six short stories and four novellas, only twenty-one works describe murder, while the rest were evenly distributed among crimes such as fraud, theft and robbery, forgery and criminal intent. for inheritances. In a children's detective story, the name itself makes it clear that it is too early to involve young readers in this area of ​​the detective world, therefore the most serious offense in such detective stories can only be kidnapping, but not deprivation of life.

4) There can only be one detective in a story - the reader cannot compete with three or four members of a relay team at once. From the proposed table it becomes clear that the authors of detective stories for adults adhere to this law. In a children's detective story, most often the investigation is carried out by a group of friends consisting of at least 3-4 people. Moreover, each hero has its own characteristics and distinctive features. And all of them together make it possible for a group of children to uncover the criminal plans of scammers, which adults cannot always cope with. As an example, let’s look at the titles of series of famous children’s detective stories: “The Five Find-Outers” by the English writer Enid Blyton, “Company with Bolshaya Spasskaya” by Russian authors A. Ivanov, A. Ustinova, “The Hardy Boys” by the American writer Franklin Dixon.

5) Secret or criminal communities have no place in a detective story. In a classic detective story, this rule is not always followed. The already mentioned Conan Doyle’s story “The Five Pips of Orange” describes the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, and also in the stories “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Valley of Terror” the reader encounters a description of the actions of Masonic organizations. In a children's detective story, young detectives may well encounter the activities of a criminal gang or group.

6) The criminal should be someone mentioned at the beginning of the novel, but it should not be a person whose train of thought the reader was allowed to follow. This rule applies only to the classic detective story. The most striking example is the works of Agatha Christie from the Miss Marple series. However, the second part of the rule, concerning the inability to follow the criminal’s train of thought, is implemented in all types of detective stories.

7) The detective’s stupid friend, Watson in one guise or another, should not hide any of the considerations that come to his mind; in his mental abilities he should be slightly inferior - but only slightly - to the average reader. This law of the genre is again characteristic only of examples of the classic detective story, since it is its feature. It is in the classic detective story that there is a pair conventionally called “Holmes-Watson”; in other types, this rule cannot be implemented.

Thus, having compared the results obtained from the study of the stated types of detective stories, we came to the conclusion that the detective genre in literature is still a developing and changing genre, but it retains the features and characteristics of classical examples and some canons.

Conclusion

This work is devoted to the consideration of the features of the detective genre in English-language literature using the example of works by English and American authors.

To achieve this goal, in the first chapter of our study, we covered the detailed history of the genre and its development from its inception to the present day. The second chapter presents the results of studies of English-language detective stories to identify genre features in them. The main criterion for selecting works for our study were the rules and canons of the genre developed by Stephen Van Dyne and Ronald Knox. Their direct implementation in works is presented in one of the paragraphs in the form of a table.

We analyzed more than a hundred detective stories, novels and short stories by English-language authors in order to present the most accurate picture of the implementation of genre features in them.

In the course of our research, we came to the conclusion that an element of national difference also manifests itself in detective literature, therefore American and English authors present each of the features of the genre differently. In this work, more attention is paid to such features as the implementation of the image of a detective pair - a detective - his companion, the expression of intrigue and irony in a detective story, and the peculiarities of the two-story structure of the work. We also separately examined special types of detective stories - children's detective stories and ironic detective stories - and highlighted their features.

A comparative analysis of American and English detective works made it possible to clearly show that the code of the English detective novel is the richest and most closed. The American detective has weaker schemes. Today, the detective novel can confidently be considered a thriving literary industry. The reason for the success and popularity of the detective genre is that the reader seeks in a detective story not only reinforcement of ideas about the rational structure of the world around him, but also the experience of his sense of insecurity in it.

Thus, in our work, we tried to more thoroughly examine the features of English-language detective stories, having simultaneously examined the works of English and American authors, to highlight similar features and differences, and also to identify the implementation of the rules of the detective genre in its different types.

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17 Van Dyne,S. S. Twenty rules for writing detective stories; Knox, R. Ten commandments of a detective novel // How to make a detective story. - M.: NPO "Raduga", 1990. - 317 p.

18 Epshtein, M. N. Literary encyclopedic dictionary / M. N. Epshtein-M. 1987. - 248 p.

19 Eckerman, P. P. Conversations with Goethe / P. P. Eckerman. - M, 1981. - 215 p.

20 Chesterton, G. K. In Defense of Detective Literature / G. K. Chesterton. - Access mode: http://fantlab.ru/work107784.

21 Carr, J. D. Lecture on a locked room // How to make a detective story. - M.: NPO "Raduga", 1990. - 317 p.

22 Volsky, N. N. Mysterious logic. Detective as a model of dialectical thinking / N. N. Volsky. - Novosibirsk, 1996. - 216 p.

23 Vulis, A.V. Poetics of the detective / A.V. Vulis // “New World”, - No. 1 1978. - P. 244-258

24Sayers, D. English detective novel / D. Sayers // British Union Nick, - No. 38, 1944. - Access mode: http://litstudent.ucoz.com/publ/literaturnye_zhanry_i_temy/doroti_sehjers_anglijskij_detektivnyj_roman/6-1-0- 21.

25 Allen, W. Tradition and Dream / W. Allen - M.: Progress, 1970. - 423 p.

26 Snow, Charles P. English detective / Gr. Green, D. Francis - M.: Pravda, 1983. - P. 3-16.

27 Georges Simenon "Maigret and the Lazy Burglar". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/zhorzh_simenon.php.

28 Rex Stout "The League of Frightened Men." - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/reks_staut.php.

29 Agatha Christie "A Visit from a Stranger". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

30 Agatha Christie "Theft at the Grand Hotel". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

31 Agatha Christie "The Mysterious Incident at Styles." - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

32 Jack Kent "Sherlock Holmes and all-all-all." - Access mode: http://www.livelib.ru/book/1000289479.

33 Rex Stout "Black Orchids". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/reks_staut.php.

34 Dashiell Hammett "The Woman with the Silver Eyes." - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/dyeshil_hyemmet.php.

35 Antsyferova O. Yu. Detective genre and romantic artistic system // National specificity of works of foreign literature of the 19th - 20th centuries / O. Yu. Antsyferova. - Ivanovo, 1994. - pp. 21-36.

36 Agatha Christie "Blue Geranium". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

37 The Strand Magazine. - Access mode: http://www.acdoyle.ru/originals/magazines/strand/my_strands.htm#1930.

38 Caweltу J.G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture / J. G. Cawelty. - Chicago, 1976. - 470 s.

39 Agatha Christie "The Mysterious Affair at Styles". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

40 Arthur Conan Doyle "A Study in scarlet". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

41 Arthur Conan Doyle "The Boscombe Valley Mystery". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

42 Arthur Conan Doyle "The adventure of the black Peter". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

43 Arthur Conan Doyle "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle". -Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

44 Agatha Christie "The King of Clubs". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

45 Arthur Conan Doyle "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

46 Gilbert Keith Chesterton "The Man in the Passage". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/gilbert_chesterton.php.

47 Agatha Christie "Ingots of gold". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

48 Agatha Christie "The four suspects". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

49 Arthur Conan Doyle "The adventure of the noble bachelor". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

50 Arthur Conan Doyle "A scandal in Bohemia". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

51 Erle Stanley Gardner, "The Case of the Howling Dog." - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/yerl_gardner.php.

52 Erle Stanley Gardner, “The Case of the Counterfeit Eye.” - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/yerl_gardner.php.

53 Enid Mary Blyton "The mystery of the burnt cottage". - Access mode: http://www.litmir.net/bd/?b=111865.

54 Enid Mary Blyton "The mystery of the disappearing cat". - Access mode: http://www.litmir.net/bd/?b=125784.

55 Arthur Conan Doyle "The adventure of the copper bees". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

56 Arthur Conan Doyle "The man with the twisted lip". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/konan_doyl__artur.php.

57 Erle Stanley Gardner, “The Case of the Lucky Legs.” - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/yerl_gardner.php.

58 Dorothy Leigh Sayers "Unnatural death". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/doroti_syeyers.php.

59 Agatha Christie "The blue geranium". - Access mode: http://detektivi.net/avtor/agata_kristi.php.

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Detective this a work of art with a special type of plot construction, which is based on the conflict between good and evil realized in solving a crime, which is resolved by the victory of good. The detective story is based on the adventure plot model, but uses traditional techniques to set up and resolve a fundamentally different conflict. In one of the first detective stories - “The Murder in the Rue Morgue” (1841) by E.A. Poe - the conflict between good and evil develops within the framework religious consciousness(a man created in the image and likeness of God and a beast that brings evil - a gigantic orangutan), but the detective story becomes widespread precisely with the weakening of religious principles in society, when ethical conflicts come to the fore and there is a need to affirm the power of good and its obligatory victory in the struggle with evil. The detective story in this sense performs a certain “protective” function and therefore becomes one of the most popular types of mass literature. The key characters in the detective system are three heroes - the victim, the criminal and the detective, and in the confrontation between the last two the conflict of evil and good is realized, and the victim in most cases is not directly involved in the conflict and therefore should not cause either antipathy or compassion among readers. The expansion of the character system occurs either through the appearance of “witnesses” who help solve the crime, or through the introduction of a number of “imaginary” criminals - those who are suspected of villainy. The detective's task is not only to expose the criminal, but also to acquit the innocent. As an additional conflict in a detective story, the clash between stupidity and intelligence is often used: the opposition of a stupid detective and a smart detective, or a smart detective and his stupid assistant. Depending on what, in the opinion of the author and the society to which the work is addressed, is called upon to stand up for the good - reason, the press, faith or power - the social status of the detective changes: This could be a policeman, a journalist, a pastor, a private detective.

Detective plot composition

The composition of the detective story is based on the centripetal principle: all plot lines, seemingly little connected at the beginning of the work, must converge in the finale within a single denouement. Two lines of plot development become key and mandatory, one of which is based on the conflict between the criminal and the victim (committing a crime), and the other is based on the conflict between the criminal and the detective (solving the crime), and most often they develop in the work not sequentially, but in parallel , as if “toward” each other: the first is revealed within the framework of the second, although the denouement of the first is only an exposition for the second. The beginning of the second line is the discovery of a crime, and then, during the investigation process, a picture of the crime gradually emerges, which is fully restored only in the denouement at the time the criminal is exposed. The principle of “coincidence” of two storylines is predetermined by strict criteria for selecting the depicted phenomena of reality: everything that does not correspond to two lines at the same time is discarded, with the exception of special “inhibiting” or “distracting” elements. The apparent lack of development of characters in a detective story is a consequence of the same type of encounters in which it is revealed; in fact, the schematism encountered is explained not by the principles of the detective story, but artistic level works. In the best detective stories, writers created a number of bright types of detectives: S. Auguste Dupin (E.A. Poe), Father Tabaret and Lecoq (E. Gaboriau), Sherlock Holmes (A. Conan-Doyle), Rouletabille (G. Leroux), Pastor Brown (G.K. Chesterton), Eruol Poirot and Miss Marple (A. Christie), Nero Wolfe (R. Stout), Perry Mason and Donald Lamb (E. S. Gardner), Commissioner Maigret (J. Simenon). No less significant in a detective story are sometimes the types of villains, their victims, as well as other participants in the events; it is on the same degree of development of the characters of the real criminal and the imaginary criminals that the novels of A. Christie (18910-1976) are built.

Required Features

For a detective, the motive of mystery and riddle is mandatory; Moreover, unlike mysticism, in a detective story it is assumed in advance that the mystery is not absolute, but relative in nature, being a consequence of a combination of objective circumstances and some kind of malicious intent, and its resolution is possible and feasible for a person who is able to put together information scattered in parts and correctly comprehend her. The detective story is often seen as a hymn to the human mind, solving any riddle and standing up for good in the fight against evil, especially since the attitude of many authors, starting with E. Poe, who sang “the analytical abilities of our mind,” corresponds to this. “Analytical” detective stories usually have an element of play with the reader, who is informed of all the information that the detective has and is offered to solve the riddle before the main character. However, a keen mind is not a necessary quality for a detective; heroes can solve riddles thanks to their activity, strength, dexterity, cunning, perseverance (J.H. Chase, M. Spillane. G. MacDonald), thanks to luck or coincidence (I. Khmelevskaya). The genre forms of the detective story are diverse: there is detective drama, detective stories, stories, novels, psychological, adventure, social, satirical, ironic detective stories are created; In the second half of the 20th century, the so-called “action” developed rapidly. The principle of cyclization is often used, when a whole series of works is written, united by the common image of a detective. It is necessary to distinguish from detective novels police and criminal novels that depict the world of police officers or the world of criminals as one of the social and everyday spheres, as well as socio-psychological novels that use criminal plots (Crime and Punishment, 1866, F.M. Dostoevsky), and adventurous prose, which is characterized by a fundamentally different type of conflict, including works about the adventures of successful criminals (The Adventures of Rocambole, 1859, P.A. Ponson du Terrail, the cycle about Arsene Lupine by M. Leblanc). At the same time, in a number of cases, detective stories use “deception of the reader” - a deliberate violation of the canonical scheme (the investigation is led by the criminal himself, the crime is imaginary, all suspects turn out to be criminals); in this case, the violation is revealed only at the moment of denouement, and until then the narrative is correlated by the author and readers with the canon.

Detective in Russia and the USSR

In Russia and the USSR, the detective story was first established mainly as pseudo-translated literature: the anonymous “Nat Pinkerton”; “Mess-Mend” (1924-25) by Jim Dollar (M. Shaginyan), and then a special type of Soviet detective story developed, which became widespread in other socialist countries, in which the conflict of good and evil is considered within the framework of the contradictions of antagonistic classes, and then transformed in the conflict of the social and antisocial, interpreted in accordance with the dominant ideological position; antagonistic contradictions persist at the level of confrontation between two systems and are reflected in literature in the spy detective story. In Soviet literature of the post-war years, books by A.G. Adamov, Yu.S. Semenov, brothers A. and G. Vainer became famous; in post-Soviet times, A. Marinina’s cycle stands out, where the traditions of the Soviet “police” detective are combined with elements of the French police novel.

The word detective comes from English detective - detective and from the Latin detectio, which means disclosure.

It’s been a long time since we dived into the hopeless abyss of genre literature, didn’t revel in the gray monotony, and then a wonderful opportunity appeared - this week I came across an interesting classification of detective stories online, which I hasten to introduce you to today. And although the detective story is one of my least favorite genres, the classification below is so elegant and laconic that it just begs to be written down. And it will be even more useful for beginners to know it.

Let me remind you once again that we are talking about a classic detective story, the plot of which is built around a mysterious murder, and the main driver of the plot is the search and identification of the criminal. So…

Classification of detective stories.

1. Fireplace detective.

This is the best thing ever traditional type detective story in which a murder has occurred and there is a narrow circle of suspects. It is known for certain that one of the suspects is the killer. The detective must identify the criminal.

Examples: numerous stories by Hoffmann and E.A. By.

2. Complicated fireplace detective.

A variation of the previous scheme, where a mysterious murder also takes place, a limited circle of suspects is outlined, but the killer turns out to be someone outside and usually completely invisible (a gardener, a servant or a butler). In short, a minor character we couldn’t even think of.

3. Suicide.

The introductory ones are the same. Throughout the entire story, the detective, suspecting everyone and everything, searches for the killer to no avail, and in the end it unexpectedly turns out that the victim simply took her own life, killing herself.

Example: Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.

4. Gang murder.

The detective, as always, has outlined a circle of suspects and is trying to identify the criminal. But there is not just one killer among the suspects, because everyone killed the victim through joint efforts.

Example: Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express."

5. Living corpse.

There has been a murder. Everyone is looking for the criminal, but it turns out that the murder never took place, and the victim is alive.

Example: Nabokov's "The True Life of Sebastian Knight."

6. The detective killed.

The crime is committed by the investigator or detective himself. Perhaps for reasons of justice, or perhaps because he is a maniac. By the way, it violates commandment No. 7 of the famous ones.

Examples: Agatha Christie “The Mousetrap”, “Curtain”.

7. Killed by the author.

The introductory ones are practically no different from the above-mentioned variations, however, the scheme implies that the main character should be the author of the story. And in the finale it suddenly turns out that he was the one who killed the unfortunate victim. This scheme, used by Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, initially caused real anger from critics, because... violated the first and main Ronald Knox's 10 Detective Commandments: « The criminal should be someone mentioned at the beginning of the novel, but it should not be a person whose train of thought the reader was allowed to follow" However, the technique was subsequently called innovative, and the novel was recognized as a true masterpiece of the genre.

Examples: A.P. Chekhov “On the Hunt”, Agatha Christie “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”.

Addition.

As a bonus, I will give three additional original diagrams, used only a few times, but clearly expanding the above classification:

8. Mystical spirit.

Introduction into the narrative of a certain irrational mystical force (a vengeful spirit), which, possessing the characters, commits murders at their hands. In my understanding, such an innovation takes the story into the related area of ​​a fantastic (or mystical) detective story.

Example: A. Sinyavsky “Lyubimov”.

9. Killed by a reader.

Perhaps the most complex and tricky of all possible schemes, in which the writer strives to build a narrative so that in the end the reader is surprised to discover that it was he who committed the mysterious crime.

Examples: J. Priestley "Inspector Ghoul", Kobo Abe "Ghosts Among Us".

10. Dostoevsky's detective.

The phenomenon of Dostoevsky's novel " Crime and Punishment", which undoubtedly has a detective basis, lies in the destruction of the traditional detective scheme. We already know in advance the answers to all the questions: who was killed, how and when, the name of the killer and even his motives. But then the author leads us through dark, untrodden labyrinths of awareness and comprehension of the consequences of what was done. And this is something we are completely unaccustomed to: the simplest detective story evolves into a complex philosophical and psychological drama. All in all, this is a wonderful illustration of the old saying: “ where mediocrity ends, genius just begins».

That's all for today. As always, I look forward to your feedback in the comments. See you soon!

The main feature of a detective story as a genre is the presence in the work of a certain mysterious incident, the circumstances of which are unknown and must be clarified. The most frequently described incident is a crime, although there are detective stories in which events that are not criminal are investigated (for example, in The Notes of Sherlock Holmes, which certainly belongs to the detective genre, in five stories out of eighteen there are no crimes).

An essential feature of the detective story is that the actual circumstances of the incident are not communicated to the reader, at least in its entirety, until the investigation is completed. Instead, the reader is led by the author through the investigative process, given the opportunity at each stage to construct their own versions and evaluate known facts. If the work initially describes all the details of the incident, or the incident does not contain anything unusual or mysterious, then it should no longer be classified as a pure detective story, but rather among related genres (action film, police novel, etc.).

Features of the genre

An important property of a classic detective story is the completeness of facts. The solution to the mystery cannot be based on information that was not provided to the reader during the description of the investigation. By the time the investigation is completed, the reader should have enough information to use it to find a solution on their own. Only certain minor details may be hidden that do not affect the possibility of revealing the secret. At the end of the investigation, all mysteries must be solved, all questions must be answered.

Several more signs of a classic detective story were collectively named by N. N. Volsky hyperdeterminism of the detective's world(“the world of a detective is much more orderly than the life around us”):

• Ordinary surroundings. The conditions in which the events of the detective story take place are generally common and well known to the reader (in any case, the reader himself believes that he is confident in them). Thanks to this, it is initially obvious to the reader which of what is described is ordinary and which is strange, beyond the scope.
• Stereotypical behavior of characters. The characters are largely devoid of originality, their psychology and behavioral patterns are quite transparent, predictable, and if they have any distinctive features, they become known to the reader. The motives for the actions (including the motives for the crime) of the characters are also stereotypical.
• The existence of a priori rules for constructing a plot, which do not always correspond to real life. So, for example, in a classic detective story, the narrator and detective, in principle, cannot turn out to be criminals.

This set of features narrows the field of possible logical constructions based on known facts, making it easier for the reader to analyze them. However, not all detective subgenres follow these rules exactly.

Another limitation is noted, which is almost always followed by a classic detective story - the impossibility of random errors and undetectable coincidences. For example, in real life, a witness can tell the truth, he can lie, he can be mistaken or misled, but he can also simply make an unmotivated mistake (accidentally mix up dates, amounts, names). In a detective story, the last possibility is excluded - the witness is either accurate, or lying, or his mistake has a logical justification.

Typical characters

• Detective - directly involved in the investigation. A variety of people can act as detectives: law enforcement officers, private detectives, relatives, friends, acquaintances of the victims, and sometimes completely random people. The detective cannot turn out to be a criminal. The figure of the detective is central to the detective story.
  • A professional detective is a law enforcement officer. He may be a very high-level expert, or he may be an ordinary police officer, of which there are many. In the second case, in difficult situations, he sometimes seeks advice from a consultant (see below).
  • A private detective - crime investigation is his main job, but he does not serve in the police, although he may be a retired police officer. As a rule, he is extremely highly qualified, active and energetic. Most often, a private detective becomes a central figure, and to emphasize his qualities, professional detectives can be brought into action, who constantly make mistakes, succumb to the provocations of the criminal, get on the wrong trail and suspect the innocent. The contrast “a lonely hero against a bureaucratic organization and its officials” is used, in which the sympathies of the author and the reader are on the side of the hero.
  • An amateur detective is the same as a private detective, with the only difference being that investigating crimes for him is not a profession, but a hobby that he turns to only from time to time. A separate subtype of amateur detective is a random person who has never engaged in such activities, but is forced to conduct an investigation due to urgent necessity, for example, to save an unjustly accused loved one or to divert suspicion from himself. The amateur detective brings the investigation closer to the reader, allowing him to create the impression that “I could figure this out too.” One of the conventions of detective series with amateur detectives (like Miss Marple) is that in real life a person, unless he is professionally involved in crime investigation, is unlikely to encounter such a number of crimes and mysterious incidents.
• A criminal commits a crime, covers his tracks, tries to counteract the investigation. In a classic detective story, the figure of the criminal is clearly identified only at the end of the investigation; up to this point, the criminal can be a witness, suspect or victim. Sometimes the actions of the criminal are described during the course of the main action, but in such a way as not to reveal his identity and not to provide the reader with information that could not be obtained during the investigation from other sources.
• The victim is the one against whom the crime is directed or the one who suffered as a result of a mysterious incident. One of the standard options for a detective story is that the victim himself turns out to be a criminal.
• A witness is a person who has any information about the subject of the investigation. The criminal is often first shown in the description of the investigation as one of the witnesses.
• A detective's companion is a person who is constantly in contact with the detective, participating in the investigation, but does not have the abilities and knowledge of the detective. He can provide technical assistance in the investigation, but his main task is to more clearly show the detective’s outstanding abilities against the background of the average level of an ordinary person. In addition, the companion is needed to ask the detective questions and listen to his explanations, giving the reader the opportunity to follow the detective's train of thought and draw attention to certain points that the reader himself might miss. Classic examples of such companions are Dr. Watson from Conan Doyle and Arthur Hastings from Agatha Christie.
• A consultant is a person who has strong abilities to conduct an investigation, but is not directly involved in it. In detective stories, where a separate figure of the consultant stands out, she may be the main one (for example, the journalist Ksenofontov in the detective stories of Viktor Pronin), or she may simply turn out to be an occasional adviser (for example, the teacher of the detective to whom he turns for help).
• Assistant - does not conduct the investigation himself, but provides the detective and/or consultant with information that he obtains himself. For example, a forensic expert.
• Suspect - as the investigation progresses, an assumption arises that it was he who committed the crime. The authors deal with suspects in different ways; one of the frequently practiced principles is “none of those immediately suspected is a real criminal,” that is, everyone who comes under suspicion turns out to be innocent, and the real criminal turns out to be the one who was not suspected of anything. However, not all authors follow this principle. In Agatha Christie's detective stories, for example, Miss Marple repeatedly says that "in life, it is usually the one who is suspected first that is the criminal."

Detective story

The first works of the detective genre are usually considered to be the stories of Edgar Poe, written in the 1840s, but elements of the detective story have been used by many authors before. For example, in William Godwin's novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) one of central characters- amateur detective. The “Notes” of E. Vidocq, published in 1828, also had a great influence on the development of detective literature.

The detective genre becomes popular in England after the release of W. Collins's novels The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). In the novels “The Hand of Wilder” (1869) and “Checkmate” (1871) by the Irish writer Ch. Le Fanu, a detective story is combined with a Gothic novel. The founder of the French detective story is E. Gaboriau, the author of a series of novels about the detective Lecoq. Stevenson imitated Gaboriau in his detective stories (especially The Rajah's Diamond).

Some types of detectives

Closed detective

A subgenre that usually most closely follows the canons of the classic detective story. The plot is based on the investigation of a crime committed in a secluded place, where there is a strictly limited set of characters. There could be no one else in this place, so the crime could only have been committed by someone present. The investigation is conducted by someone at the scene of the crime, with the help of other heroes.

This type of detective story is different in that the plot, in principle, eliminates the need to search for an unknown criminal. There are suspects, and the detective’s job is to obtain as much information as possible about the participants in the events, on the basis of which it will be possible to identify the criminal. Additional psychological tension is created by the fact that the criminal must be one of the well-known, nearby people, none of whom, usually, resemble the criminal. Sometimes in a closed-type detective story a whole series of crimes occurs (usually murders), as a result of which the number of suspects is constantly reduced - for example

• Cyril Hare, A Very English Murder

Psychological detective

This type of detective story may deviate somewhat from the classical canons in terms of the requirement for stereotypical behavior and the typical psychology of the heroes. Usually a crime committed for personal reasons (envy, revenge) is investigated, and the main element of the investigation is the study of the personal characteristics of the suspects, their attachments, pain points, beliefs, prejudices, and clarification of the past. There is a school of French psychological detective.

• Boileau - Narcejac, She-Wolf, She Who Wasn't There, Sea Gate, Outlining the Heart
• Japrisot, Sebastien, Lady with glasses and a gun in a car.
• Calef, Noel, Elevator to the Scaffold.

Historical detective

A historical work with detective intrigue. The action takes place in the past, or an ancient crime is being investigated in the present.

• Chesterton, Gilbert Keith "Father Brown"
• Boileau-Narcejac "In the Enchanted Forest"
• Queen, Ellery "The Unknown Manuscript of Dr. Watson"
• Boris Akunin, Literary project “The Adventures of Erast Fandorin”

Ironic detective

The detective investigation is described from a humorous point of view. Often works written in this vein parody the cliches of a detective novel.

• Varshavsky, Ilya, The robbery will occur at midnight
• Kaganov, Leonid, Major Bogdamir saves money
• Kozachinsky, Alexander, Green van
• Westlake, Donald, The Cursed Emerald (Hot Pebble), The Bank That Gurgled

Fantastic detective

Works at the intersection of science fiction and detective fiction. The action may take place in the future, an alternative present or past, in a completely fictional world.

• Lem, Stanislav, "Investigation", "Inquiry"
• Russell, Eric Frank, "The Routine Job", "The Wasp"
• Holm van Zaychik, series “There are no bad people”
• Kir Bulychev, cycle “Intergalactic Police” (“Intergpol”)
• Isaac Asimov, series Lucky Starr - space ranger, Detective Elijah Bailey and robot Daniel Olivo

Political detective

One of the genres quite far from the classic detective story. The main intrigue is built around political events and rivalry between various political or business figures and forces. It also often happens that the main character himself is far from politics, however, while investigating a case, he comes across an obstacle to the investigation from the “powers that be” or uncovers some kind of conspiracy. A distinctive feature of a political detective story is (although not necessarily) the possible absence of completely positive characters, except for the main one. One of the prominent writers in this genre is the Azerbaijani Chingiz Abdullayev. His works have been translated into many languages ​​of the world. This genre is rarely found in its pure form, but can be an integral part of the work.

• Levashov, Victor, Conspiracy of Patriots
• A. Hall, Berlin Memorandum (Quiller Memorandum).

Spy detective

Based on the narrative of the activities of intelligence officers, spies and saboteurs both in wartime and in peacetime on the “invisible front”. In terms of stylistic boundaries, it is very close to political and conspiracy detective stories, and is often combined in the same work. The main difference between a spy detective and a political detective is that in a political detective the most important position is occupied by the political basis of the case under investigation and antagonistic conflicts, while in a spy detective the attention is focused on intelligence work (surveillance, sabotage, etc.). A conspiracy detective can be considered a variety of both spy and political detective

• Agatha Christie, "Cat Among the Pigeons"
• John Boynton Priestley, "Mist over Gretley" (1942)
• Dmitry Medvedev, “It was near Rovno”

Detective in the cinema

Detective is a subgenre of the more general category of crime films. It focuses on the actions of a detective, private investigator, or novice sleuth in unraveling the mysterious circumstances of a crime through clue-finding, investigation, and skillful deductions. A successful detective film often hides the identity of the criminal until the end of the story, then adds an element of surprise in the process of arresting the suspect. However, the opposite is also possible. Thus, the hallmark of the Columbo series was the demonstration of events from the point of view of both the detective and the criminal.

Suspense is often retained as an important part of the plot. This can be done with the help of a soundtrack, camera angles, shadow play and unexpected plot twists. Alfred Hitchcock used all of these techniques, occasionally allowing the viewer to enter a state of foreboding danger and then choosing the most opportune moment for dramatic effect.

Detective stories have proven to be a good choice for a movie script. The detective is often a strong character with strong leadership qualities, and the plot may include elements of drama, suspense, personal growth, ambiguity and surprise distinctive features character.

At least until the 1980s, women in crime fiction often played a dual role, having a relationship with the detective and often filling the role of "woman in danger." The women in those films are often resourceful individuals, being self-confident, determined and often two-faced. They can serve as an element of suspense as helpless victims.

Detective (English detective, from Latin detego - I reveal, expose) is a literary genre whose works describe the process of investigating a mysterious incident in order to clarify its circumstances and solve the riddle. Usually such an incident is a crime, and the detective describes its investigation and determination guilty, in this case the conflict is built on the clash of justice with lawlessness, ending in the victory of justice.

The main feature of a detective story as a genre is the presence in the work of a certain mysterious incident, the circumstances of which are unknown and must be clarified. The most commonly described incident is a crime, although there are detective stories that investigate events that are not criminal.

An essential feature of the detective story is that the actual circumstances of the incident are not communicated to the reader, at least in its entirety, until the investigation is completed. Instead, the reader is led by the author through the investigative process, given the opportunity at each stage to construct their own versions and evaluate known facts. If the work initially describes all the details of the incident, or the incident does not contain anything unusual or mysterious, then it should no longer be classified as a pure detective story, but rather among related genres (action film, police novel, etc.).

An important property of a classic detective story is the completeness of facts. The solution to the mystery cannot be based on information that was not provided to the reader during the description of the investigation. By the time the investigation is completed, the reader should have enough information to use it to find a solution on their own. Only certain minor details may be hidden that do not affect the possibility of revealing the secret. At the end of the investigation, all mysteries must be solved, all questions must be answered.

“The world of a detective story is much more orderly than the life around us,” was N. N. Vasiliev’s opinion about the “detective” genre.

What is often found in the detective genre:

Ordinary surroundings. The conditions in which the events of the detective story take place are generally common and well known to the reader (in any case, the reader himself believes that he is confident in them). Thanks to this, it is initially obvious to the reader which of what is described is ordinary and which is strange, beyond the scope.

Stereotypical behavior of characters. The characters are largely devoid of originality, their psychology and behavioral patterns are quite transparent, predictable, and if they have any distinctive features, they become known to the reader. The motives for the actions (including the motives for the crime) of the characters are also stereotypical.

The existence of rules for constructing a plot that do not always correspond to real life. So, for example, in a classic detective story, the narrator and detective, in principle, cannot turn out to be criminals.

Another limitation is noted, which is almost always followed by a classic detective story - the inadmissibility of random errors and undetectable coincidences. For example, in real life, a witness can tell the truth, he can lie, he can be mistaken or misled, but he can simply make an unmotivated mistake (accidentally, mix up dates, amounts, names). In a detective story, the last possibility is excluded - the witness is either accurate, or lying, or his mistake has a logical justification.

Evolution of the genre

The first developers of the genre were such famous writers as E. A. Poe, G. K. Chesterton, A. Conan Doyle, G. Leroux, E. Wallace, S. S. Van Dyne, D. Hammett, E. Quinn and etc.

Perhaps the first theorist of the detective story as a special genre was G. K. Chesterton, who published the article “In Defense of Detective Literature” in 1902. In his essay, Chesterton emphasizes that "the detective novel or short story is a perfectly legitimate literary genre." “The most important advantage of the detective story is that it is the earliest and so far the only form of popular literature in which a certain sense of the poetry of modern life was expressed.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, attempts were made to develop standards in accordance with which works of the detective genre would be created. So, in 1928, the English writer Willard Hattington published his set of literary rules, calling it “20 rules for writing detective stories.”

Among modern detective researchers one should name A. Adamov, G. Andzhaparidze, N. Berkovsky, V. Rudnev, A. Vulis. Their works trace the history of the genre, analyze its poetics, and explore artistic parallels in the works of different authors.

According to V. Rudnev, a detective story is “a genre specific to mass literature and cinema of the twentieth century.” Rudnev explains the peculiarity of the detective genre by the fact that “ main element as a genre lies in the presence of a protagonist - a detective detective (usually a private one) who detects a crime. The main content of the detective story is, therefore, the search for truth.

Let's look again at the definition of genre:

DETECTIVE (lat. detectio - disclosure of English detective - detective) is a work of fiction, the plot of which is based on the conflict between good and evil, realized in solving a crime.

It turns out that the educational and psychological aspects come to the fore in a detective story: a detective story must show the triumph of good, the inevitability of punishment for evil, and it also makes it possible to reveal the nature of the crime. How does a person become inclined to commit a crime? How does this happen: is the environment to blame for everything or does he tend to do it himself?

The detective story shows a person in a rare situation - during a personal or social drama. Detective is an intense struggle, be it an intellectual battle, interrogation, chase, shooting or hand-to-hand combat.

The Weiner brothers noted that a prerequisite for a detective is sociality. And since the subject of the detective story is crime, he “takes a slice of life in which explosive forces have accumulated, in which the “negative aspects” have broken through the social foundations of morality and legality. It is detective writers who resolutely and mercilessly expose the ulcers and festerings of society.”

Charles P. Snow wrote that detective literature is a sign of civilization and the investigation of crime is a symbol of everything positive that exists in the modern world, romance in the full sense of the word. This property of a detective is especially valuable now, at a time of acute shortage of true romance, a dangerous fight against evil, its exposure and punishment.

Speaking about the detective story, one cannot ignore the writer who revolutionized the genre, immortalizing the classic detective story. This is, of course, Agatha Christie! She introduced the world to a new concept of prose, which proclaimed the rule of law and the triumph of reason, protecting society as a whole and individuals in particular against the threat of someone encroaching on the rights and freedoms of others. The genius Edgar Allan Poe, who founded the detective story as such, gravitated towards mysticism, and therefore did not form the “idea of ​​Nemesis”, justice over criminals, which was later discovered in Christie; Arthur Conan Doyle made a significant contribution to the development of this genre, proposing a universal image of the hero - the legendary Sherlock Holmes, famous for his logic and determination; Issues of morality were repeatedly considered by the respected Keith Gilbert Chesterton, through his main character - Father Brown - addressing the attentive reader. But it was a woman who was destined to lead the victorious march of the detective, who in the 1920s and 1930s became a confident representative of the middle class of Westerners. Making close to ideal justice and the inevitability of punishment for the criminal the leitmotif in her works, Christie did not forget about literature directly, with her piercing simplicity winning the trust of readers, heating up the intrigue to the limit and describing the everyday conflicts of good old Britain.

Analysis of Agatha Christie's work

"The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"

For analysis, the novel “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” was taken, recognized at one time as one of Agatha Christie’s best creations and a masterpiece of the genre.

The novel takes place in the fictional English village of Kings Abbot. The story begins with the death of Mrs. Ferrar, a wealthy widow rumored to have murdered her husband. The villagers believe that the widow committed suicide until Roger Ackroyd, a widower who was planning to marry Mrs. Ferrar, dies.

Hercule Poirot, who arrived at the scene, begins an investigation, having many suspects around - Ackroyd's relatives and acquaintances, each of whom was interested in his death. One of them, the last person to see Ackroyd alive, Dr. James Shepard, is the narrator of the story and traces Poirot's actions step by step, acting as a kind of "Dr. Watson" - the professional detective's assistant and biographer. Here and there in the text of the novel, “keys” to the mystery are scattered - hints, reservations, details - which, with careful reading, can open your eyes to what is happening long before the denouement of the story.

The key word, which, in our opinion, forms the basis of the novel is the word “weak-willed”. It is first spoken in Chapter 17 by Dr. Shepard, and then by his sister Caroline in relation to himself.

“We started talking about Ralph Paton.

“He’s a weak-willed man,” I insisted, “but not vicious.”

A! But weakness, where does it end?

That’s right,” said Caroline, “take James, for example, as soft as water.” If I weren't there to look after him

My dear Caroline,” I said irritably, “could you please not get personal?”

“You’re weak, James,” she continued, completely unmoved by my remark, “I’m eight years older than you Oh! I don’t mind if Monsieur Poirot knows about it.”

It is weakness of will that leads to dramatic consequences: blackmail, incitement to suicide, murder of a person and betrayal of a friend for the sake of personal interests. Here's how Hercule Poirot puts it:

“Let's take a man - himself an ordinary person, who doesn’t even have thoughts of murder. But somewhere in the depths of the soul lurks a certain tendency towards weakness. Nothing affects her, and she does not express herself. Perhaps it will never manifest itself, and the person will go to his grave honest and respected by everyone. But let's say something happened. He finds himself in a difficult situation. Or not even that. He accidentally learns some secret, a secret on which someone’s life or death depends. His first instinct is to talk about it, to honestly fulfill his duty as a citizen. And then his tendency to weak will manifests itself. He sees that he can get money - big money. But he needs money, he craves it. And it's so easy. He doesn't have to do anything to get them. He just needs to be silent. This is the beginning. But the passion for money is growing. He needs more and more! He is intoxicated by the discovery of a gold mine at his feet. He becomes greedy, and in his greed he outsmarts himself.”

Who knows how many more murders could have followed if the criminal had not been stopped? The people closest to you could also come under attack.

“But what scared me most was Caroline. I thought she might guess. She spoke strangely that day about my tendency to be weak-willed.”

The most notable technique, the use of which has led to much discussion, is the use of an unreliable narrator who ends up being the murderer. In his final confession, Dr. Sheppard tries to justify himself from possible accusations of lying:

“I'm quite pleased with myself as a writer. What could be more accurate, for example, the following words: “The letter was brought at twenty minutes to nine. It remained unread when I left at ten minutes to nine. Having already grabbed the doorknob, I hesitantly stopped and looked around, wondering if I had done everything. Without thinking of anything, I went out and closed the door behind me.”

Agatha Christie's idea was that Dr. Sheppard does not hide the truth and does not lie - he simply does not say anything. In particular, he "forgets" to mention what happened between 20.40 and 20.50, when Roger Ackroyd was actually killed.

Events take on new meaning in the reader's eyes when the killer becomes known. Dr. Sheppard himself is amazed at his duplicity, the complexity of the investigation and the fact that so many people were under suspicion. On the one hand, he is overcome by the fear of exposure, on the other hand, he admires and is proud of his cunning, the fact that he can fool such a famous detective as Poirot!

Even after exposure, the killer does not regret what he did, the lives lost, believing that they received a well-deserved punishment and retribution. He doesn't even feel sorry for himself. He is dejected by one thing: that Hercule Poirot appeared there.

“And then what happens next? Veronal? It would be like retribution from above, something like poetic justice. I do not consider myself responsible for the death of Mrs. Ferrars. It was a direct result of her own actions. I don't feel sorry for her. I don't even have pity for myself. So let it be veronal. But it would be better if Hercule Poirot never retired and came here to grow pumpkins."

So, based on the above, we can draw the following conclusions

1. Having worked out the definition of the “detective” genre and examined the evolution of this genre, we found out that the distinctive property of the classic detective story is the moral idea or morality inherent in it. Thus, in the novels of A. Christie, the matter always turns out to be the punishment of the criminal and the triumph of justice.

2. In detective stories you can catch a lot of educational and even warning; situations related to universal human vices are given. Usually, the heroes are placed in very extreme situations, which helps the author to identify hidden personality traits in apparently prosperous people.

What do we see in Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?

Betrayal of a loved one for the sake of self-interest

Betrayal of a friend for personal interests

What is the result?

Easy money that doesn't bring happiness

Drive to suicide

Killing a man

Constant fear of exposure

But why, one might ask, does a person need any additional problems, because life is already full of various troubles. Being driven into a dead end, financial disadvantage and other problems gradually break a person, and soon he succumbs to vices, stooping, for example, to theft or blackmail. Then a moment of insurmountable fear comes, and as a result you have to commit another, more serious crime in order to avoid punishment for the first.

Does the person at this moment think that he is making his situation twice as difficult? Evil eats away at a person, one vice leads to another, and easy money only goes to waste, as easily as it is obtained, so easily does it go away.

In this work, the main character begins to write a novel about everything that happens. Why did you need to write about your own crime? It's all about the incredible confidence of a man who competently built an alibi for himself and hoped to send this book to Hercule Poirot as the first unsolved crime in his practice. And what didn't work out in the end?

People should not forget that any crime does not go unpunished, and if the verdict is not passed by the court, then it will be handed down by life, which is more severe and merciless.

Exploring the world, people become wiser and purer. A detective novel is also a kind of knowledge - through observation to “insight”, to the discovery of the truth. Human dramas in Agatha Christie's novels they are not put in the foreground, they always remain in the depths, which is why they make such a strong impression. It’s as if in pursuit of an entertaining plot you pass by human destinies.

The materials of this study can be used when conducting extracurricular activities in literature, in lessons when studying foreign literature of the 20th century as additional material.