City and/or Crime The Importance of Urban Scenery for the Theory of Detective Novel

Abstract

The subject of the article is the analysis of the relationship between a crime novel and the city inscribed in it. The city is understood both as a literary being and as a real space, with its toponymy and anthroponymy, axiology and history. As a real-fictional creation, the city becomes an element with the same importance in the crime novel as the crime and the detective. Interpretations of this topic are preceded by a four-element typology of significant varieties of reading a crime novel based on the state of research. These varieties are determined on the basis of the main problem, that is: the poetics of the novel, the history of the genre, anthropological approach and sociological approaches. Among the proposals discussed are those by Stanco Lasić, Stanisław Barańczak, Roger Caillois and Helmut Heissenbüttel. The authors also propose their own interpretation of the city crime story based on the analysis of Piotr Bojarski’s crime novels based in Poznań, showing that a new look at the city allows us to divorce the crime novel from the schematic structures of the genre.