Although it may seem counter-intuitive to discuss the crime novel in the context of superhero stories, this impression is deceiving. Once we attend to the several registers on which it operates, the superhero figure turns out to be a complimentary designation.
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“Sir, if you will, everything but
the criminal case is a puzzle;
the case becomes a fragment
carefully extracted from reality,
just a snippet of it, momentarily
caught in the spotlight.”[1]
The structural parameters for crime literature have been the subject of numerous overviews, critical essays, and recapitulations.
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The contemporary Polish crime novel is a fascinating but unusually complex phenomenon. It would be difficult to sketch out a Polish school of crime literature, as we might do more easily in the Scandinavian context. Nor is it easy to identify commonalities among Polish authors.
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