– is a variant of the so-called “academic” or “campus novel” that is popular in Anglophone literary culture and makes sporadic appearances in Polish literature. The defining feature of this (thematic) genre is campus life:1 into this setting, the academic murder mystery introduces the crime motif (typically involving murder) and the narrative thread of the investigation that then ensues.
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Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen’s book, published in 2017 and not yet translated into Polish, should offer a solid knowledge base for both the scholar of Scandinavian literature and culture and the average amateur reader who is simply a devoted fan of the crime genre. (...)
In Search of Operational Knowledge
A few years ago, I crossed the barricade and began to write crime novels. These days, I am slowly coming to terms with the extent to which this moment was a powerful turning point in my career as a literary critic.
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“The noir sensibility is truly international”1.
Crime fiction’s rising popularity in recent years has revived an interest in more experimental takes on the genre. In Polish literature, there is an emerging trend of authors and poets who have never before expressed an interest in this area of mass culture suddenly writing crime novels.
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Eberhard Mock is a really fictitious figure. Marek Krajewski invented him. He made Mock the protagonist of a series of crime novels, that Krajewski started to publish at the beginning of this century. They are hugely successful and translated into many languages.
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We publish Polish translation of Stewart King’s “Crime Fiction as World Literature”, A Journal of Detection, Volume 32, Number 2, Fall 2014, pp. 8-19. Published by McFarland & Company, Inc..
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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