Historical Crime Fiction

Volha Korbut Salman

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The aim of this study is to provide an all-encompassing examination of historical crime fiction. The book constructs a multi-layered definition of historical crime fiction as a subgenre of crime fiction, traces its far from unidirectional history, frames its theoretical and structural paradigm grounded on the notion of generic flexibility, and analyses the body of diverse and far from univocal literary criticism on the subjects of mimesis, representation, and interpretation of historical truth. At the same time, the study provides a comprehensive analysis of two major types of historical crime fiction by means of an in-depth examination of Agatha Christie's Death Comes as the End (1944), as an embodiment of the first, traditional type of historical crime fiction, in which the incident is set in the ancient past, however the novel itself is written in modernity. The second type of historical crime fiction is exemplified through the analysis of Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs (1942), as a specimen of trans-historical crime fiction, in which the past crime is narrativized by its former participants in the present. Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951) serves as an example of trans-historical crime fiction, in which a modern investigator re-opens a criminal case from the distant past, while Ahmet Ümit's To Kill a Sultan (2012) is examined as an embodiment of trans-historical mapping of a well-known historical murder onto an ordinary modern homicide case, as well as an example of historical crime fiction from beyond the boundaries of the anglophone world.