Detective fiction in Britain and France

At first glance, the formula of a detective story is deceptively simple: there is a crime and its perpetrator, a detective and a victim. But why does this genre, with elements of thriller, horror, politics, espionage and science fiction, never cease to capture our imagination? 

The structure of the detective story has served as the basis for many other genres of suspense fiction, but has been rejected by some writers who have made their own revisions of the genre’s identity, adding domestic detail (as Simenon did), focusing on the psychoanalytic component (as Henry James did), or simply emphasising the narrative itself, language and intertextuality (as Nabokov did). 

Some of the earliest examples of mysterious crimes in fiction are considered to be the works of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, but the genre really took off in England. 

Agatha Christie created a new kind of English detective story, one that could not be compared to the logical works of Edgar Allan Poe or the bohemian style of Sherlock Holmes with his deductive method. 

Mary Clarissa Agatha Miller (the real name of the queen of the detective genre) wrote around 70 novels, plays and short stories, with a total worldwide circulation of around half a billion copies. Thus, in 1920, the Belgian Hercule Poirot appeared in literature, followed by a couple of amateur detectives, Tommy and Tuppence, a year later—Colonel Race, followed by Superintendent Battle. 

Ten years after Poirot’s debut, the literary world was graced by the observant old lady Miss Marple, famous for her excessive meticulousness. Often, Christie’s stories offer the key to unravelling a convoluted plot from the start, which doesn’t stop her works from being incredibly fascinating to read to this day. 

So what are the main rules of the genre, and what works deserve to be called detective fiction? 

Lecturer 

Nina Scherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature. 

The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of SPbU—Russia’s first university.

Registration