Między powieścią sensacyjną a literaturą detektywistyczną. „Tajemnica dorożki” Fergusa Hume’a

Abstract

Although Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) is a continuation of the convention of the English sensational fiction, popular in the 1860s and 1870s, one can notice there patterns which will later be typical of detective literature. While the reader of a sensational novel was not ‘invited’ to solve the detective puzzle (provided there is any) by himself/herself and so to act as a rival of the fictional detective, in Hume’s text the way in which the narrative discourse is carried provokes the reader to speculate on the motive of the murder and the perpetrator. The reader is thus presented with the data allowing him/her to draw conclusions on his own, independently from the detective, although he/she is sometimes put on a wrong track. Thus on the one hand the reader is offered an opportunity to ‘enter’ the presented reality and follow the sensational course of events as they ‘happen,’ on the other this reality is revealed as a construction subordinated to particular laws and principles — the tale is a puzzle containing clues necessary to solve it, while the reader’s role is to link the seemingly unconnected elements into one logical whole.

Keywords

• literatura detektywistyczna
• powieść sensacyjna
• fergus hume
• rola czytelnika