D. Sharov, Is there classical detective fiction in Russian literature?

[gilliash]

Apparently, one should start with the fact that classical detective story did not develop either in pre-revolutionary Russia or in the USSR, where it was replaced by the “militsia novel.” The reasons for this and the general state of affairs in Soviet criminal literature are the subject of my separate article (https://gilliash.livejournal.com/1742.html), and this work is its continuation. Nevertheless, since the purpose of this article is an overview of specific examples of Russian-language detective fiction that have significant interest, but are little known abroad, it is worthwhile to describe in more detail few examples of late Soviet literature (only Russian-language, because there were some examples at least in Latvian or Belorussian) that still adjoin detective fiction to a greater or lesser extent and contributed something in its development.



First of all, these are novels of Pavel Shestakov. In his first four books he tried to use, to a greater or lesser extent, the schemes of the classical detective story. Thus, in the first novella “Through the Labyrinth” (Через лабиринт) the solution to the murder is a famous method dating back to the times of Arthur Conan Doyle, but it is still a detective technique helped to hide the culprit. In “Fear of Heights” (Страх высоты) the sudden suicide of a promising young scientist forces the investigator to delve into the deceased's past and expose secrets in the closets of his acquaintances, but ultimately there is no mystery here, since the explanation of the events lies in a non-detective plane. In “The Game Against Everyone” (Игра против всех) a complicated case, where at least one detail constantly doesn’t add up, ultimately breaks down into several simple mysteries. Finally, “Vacations in Dagezan” (Отпуск в Дагезане, also published as “Three Days in Dagezan”, Три дня в Дагезане) is a rare example of a classical detective novel in a Soviet setting - a murder in a mountain village cut off from the world, where the professional detective (long-running author's hero, police investigator Mazin) is forced to act as a private citizen. In the background, there is an impossibility: the only footprints left by the dead man’s shoes lead to his corpse that fell from the cliff, but he died much earlier than these footprints were left. Despite the simple solution, this is apparently the first Soviet example of an “impossible” puzzle. Harsh criticism of this book forced Shestakov to return to the templates of the “militsia novel”.

Simultaneously with Shestakov, Viktor Smirnov began working in the genre, breaking in the story “Night Motorcyclist” (Ночной мотоциклист) the “iron alibi” of the culprit, but after writing one more story he moved away from deductive schemes. Dmitry Tarasenkov in “The Man in the Passage Yard” (Человек в проходном дворе) forced the former collaborator, almost obligatory for the Soviet “militsia novel” to hide among equally suspicious civilians and be exposed purely by deduction. Unfortunately, Tarasenkov does not have general scheme behind the large number of suspects, and any of them could be made a culpit by slightly changing the plot. Finally, the scheme of the novella “We Were Thirteen” (Нас было тринадцать) by L. Bobrov (the pseudonym of an unknown scientist) is interesting, because its main character, finding himself at a scientific station cut off from the world high in the mountains, where one of his colleagues mysteriously died, strives not to find the culprit, but to establish an alibi for each of his colleagues, acquitting them and, therefore, refuting the likelihood of murder, and only going this way he involuntarily leads to the culprit. However, in Bobrov's case such construction is not a conscious expansion of the boundaries of the genre, but the desire to avoid violating the unwritten rules of the “militsia novel”, in which honest citizens should not be suspected of a crime committed for personal reasons (although a professional criminal or former collaborator could be hiding under the mask of an honest citizen).

In addition, it is also necessary to dwell on two Russian-language works written during this period in exile. Back in 1956, in Argentina, Mikhail Boykov, who fled the USSR along with the Nazis during WWII, published the novel “The Hand of Major Gromov” (Рука майора Громова) which takes place in the dungeons of the NKVD in 1937. However, its plot is designed in the form of a correctly solved “impossible” detective puzzle: the ghost of the executed Major Gromov kills all the security officers guilty of his illegal arrest, and the investigation is led by one of the prisoners named Holmin. In 1977, another original “impossible” detective novella appeared in émigré literature - “Death Reveals Itself” (Смерть выдаёт себя) by musician and writer Leonid Girshovich, in which a famous violinist is poisoned during a performance. This book is written in a humorous manner, and its action takes place in an alternative Russia, where the October revolution did not happen.

Russian detective fiction began to actively develop only with the collapse of the USSR. At this time, foreign, primarily English-language, detective stories were being translated en masse. Ignoring copyright, which continued until the mid-1990s, allowed to release a significant number of famous books, albeit rather chaotically. At the same time, translations were often of low quality, and Carr could appear alongside Spillane under the same cover. The reason for this largely lied in the fact that since the Soviet period in the Russian language the word “detective fiction” (детектив) began to be identified with the English “crime fiction”, thus unjustifiably expanding its scope. As a result, any literature of a criminal nature, from Dostoevsky’s novels to low-grade action books, began to be classified as examples of detective fiction, both in scientific works and critical articles. The large number of low-quality crime fiction declared being “detective fiction” contributed, in turn, to the growth of a contemptuous attitude towards detective stories (especially Russian-written ones) in the educated community, which, as is known, constituted a significant part of the audience for the English-language detective fiction of the “Golden Age”. Despite a certain improvement in the situation, associated both with the emergence of original Russian-language authors and with the translation into Russian of a significant number of foreign detective novels and, especially, high-quality television series that have gained wide popularity in Russia, this problem has not yet been overcome.

However, already during the period of perestroika, several original authors appeared who influenced the further development of the genre. Thus, Viktor Pronin, who previously worked in the field of “militsia novels,” came up with a series of original stories, “Sucker Punch” (Запрещённый приём). Most of all they resemble Harry Kemelman's series about Nicky Welt. Here, too, a professional detective constantly turns, when faced with one or another insoluble problem, to his friend, the journalist Ksenofontov, who, without leaving his seat, comes to a solution solely with the help of logical reasoning. At the same time, in Pronin’s stories, the solution often does not include the names of the suspects - Ksenofontov draws up a kind of portrait of the culprit, irrefutably following from the seemingly mysterious clues, and the capture of the criminal with its help remains outside the scope of the plot.

In 1987 Leonid Yuzefovich, a professional historian, published “Contribution” (Контрибуция, later also published as “Hunting with the Red Gyrfalcon”, Охота с красным кречетом). This is an “impossible” detective plot, where in one of the provincial towns in the vast expanses of Russia torned by the Civil War, a valuable jewel disappears without a trace from a locked room. The solution is not very original, but this story is distinguished by its literary merits and historical accuracy. Later, however, Yuzefovich moved away from the detective fiction, and his novels about the real imperial detective Putilin are more of a historical adventure fiction with an emphasis on describing the underworld.

Another young author, Azerbaijani Chingiz Abdullayev, who has been working fruitfully in a variety of crime fiction fields to this day, began immediately with “impossibility” - a rather banally solved murder in a locked room - in the story “Crimes in Montpellier” (Преступления в Монпелье) in 1989. Although his recurring character, the enigmatic intelligence expert Drongo, seems straight out of a spy novel, Abdullaev has repeatedly used Golden Age schemes, including murders in locked rooms, isolated mansions and flying airplanes. Although his puzzles cannot be called bright and original, his work played a certain role in the development of the Russian language detective fiction and maintaining readers' interest in classical deduction.

A much more interesting author was Inna Bulgakova (namesake of the famous Mikhail Bulgakov), who debuted in 1987. In her first two works, the novel “Just Don’t Tell Anyone” (Только никому не говори, an investigation of a crime being unsolved for a long time) and the novella “Guests Flocked to the Dacha” (Гости съезжались на дачу, poisoning at a party in a country house with a closed circle of suspects), she followed the canon of the English GAD story, skillfully transferring its templates into life and customs of the late Soviet intelligentsia. Both of these books are strong detective plots with a completely satisfactory solutions, undoubtedly surpassing in its merits all the previously listed books. However, with her third novel, “Sonya, Insomnia, Sleep” (Соня, бессонница, сон), Bulgakova discovered her own original style, which made her perhaps the most significant author in the entire history of the Russian-language detective fiction. It is a combination of traditional GAD designs with a strong influence from Boileau-Narcejac. Bulgakova's books are highly psychological, include internal monologues of characters and touch on the dark sides of the subconscious, thanks to which she was able to come up with a number of very original motives. The plot usually centers on the victim of a crime, or at least a person morally damaged by the crime, who takes up the investigation in order to avoid external danger (including false accusations from the official sleuths) or to overcome internal trauma. In some cases, the amateur sleuth is a character who sympathizes with or is in love with the victim. At the same time, if Boileau-Narcejac’s plots often gravitated towards a thriller, where the solution arises regardless of the actions of the main character, Bulgakova’s plots, despite greater or lesser thriller elements, invariably remain read whodunits, where the main character (or characters) purposefully conducts an investigation and in the end reaches an unexpected solution in a rational way. In addition, a graduate of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow University, Bulgakova often used as the main key, resembling Queen and Boucher, a certain mysterious phrase, the understanding of which requires a high level of erudition. Opinions about Bulgakova's best novel differ among her fans. Among them we can highlight “The Last Freedom” (Последняя свобода) with a unique motive of the killer, “The Heart of the Statue” (Сердце статуи), where Bulgakova offers an original approach on a global scale, arguing with Boileau-Narcejac, how to combine in one person the victim, the criminal and the detective at the same time, as well as “Death is looking from garden” (Смерть смотрит из сада), in which Bulgakova’s interest in pathologies is taken to the limit, giving rise to an implausible but exquisite plot, which could be compared only with eccentric movie “Les yeux sans visage” by Georges Franju in its fabulously gothic atmosphere.

Unfortunately, such a bright and complex author not only did not receive translations into foreign languages, but also turned out to be unclaimed by the Russian reader en masse, so as a result by the early 2000s Bulgakova practically ceased to be published. It occured not only because of the sophistication of Bulgakova’s plots, but also because it did not fit into the prevailing trends, as a result of which the crime fiction in Russian literature began to gravitate towards certain poles, which gathered their own specific audience.

First of all, the emergence in the 1990s of so-called “female ironic detective novel” (which sometimes loses the character of “ironic”, invariably remaining “female”) played a significant role here. It was mostly influences by the books of the Polish writer Joanna Chmielewska, whose heroine, the writer Joanna, the author’s alter ego, constantly finds herself in humorously described criminal situations and so is forced to act as a detective.

In the plots of this purely Russian genre, amateur sleuths are also usually women (especially middle-aged), although sometimes there are also men in this role. "Female detective fiction" follow a pattern where a crime occurs at the beginning and its explanation is given at the end. The investigation itself, quite unsystematic, tends either to adventures described with simple humor, or to melodrama, during which the heroine solves the problems of her personal life. In Russian market, this genre has become the main reading for an unassuming female audience, occupying the niche of "regency romance". Its authors are usually extremely prolific, releasing several books a year. Daria Dontsova, the author of more than 300 novels written over the past 25 years, has become a unique symbol of such creativity. Dontsova for a long time ranked first in circulation among all Russian-language authors in general, but was repeatedly accused of plagiarism and the use of ghostwriters, and the low quality of her works significantly damaged the reputation of the detective fiction in the eyes of educated readers.

Paradoxically, at this field of crime fiction, the books of not the most notable (and those who put their abilities on stream), but of secondary authors, are more related to true deduction. Among their works there are some that fully meet the criteria of a properly constructed detective story and even include “impossible crimes”, but their solutions are most often primitive and secondary. The exception is Elena Mikhalkova, a representative of the younger generation who began working in the 2000s. Although most of her numerous books can hardly be classified as real detective fiction, sometimes she shows ingenuity. One of her stories, “A Black Cat in a White Room” (Чёрная кошка в белой комнате), involves the disappearance of a thick notebook from a room under surveillance. In addition, Mikhalkova wrote several collections of pastiche stories starring the Victorian governess Mrs. Norwich as a detective. It is, despite the earlier time of action, more or less correct stylizations of the English GAD stories. Here one can note the banal, but originally described disappearance of a woman from a locked room in “The Gloves of Gloria Cadish” (Перчатки Глории Кэдиш) and the witty, intentionally Chestertonian solution to the problem of servants going crazy one after another in “The Phantom of Ashtonville Manor” (Призрак поместья Эштонвилл).

At the same time, namely the “female ironic detective fiction” gave birth to such a unique author as Vera Rusanova. In 1999, three novels were published under this name, but nothing is known about the author’s biography. Remaining completely within the framework of the style of the “female ironic detective fiction”, Rusanova incorporated original detective schemes into it. The first novel, “A Play for the Doomed” (Пьеса для обречённых), uses a structure similar to Noel Vindry's “The House That Kills”: the plot reaches a resolution halfway through, after which a new case arises that directly follows from the previous one. But unlike Vindry, here the first half of the book contains clues to the puzzle from the second half. “A Bouquet for a Future Widow” (Букет для будущей вдовы) proposes a rational solution to the problem of an false maniac, completely in keeping with the spirit of the GAD. "The Foggy Shore" (Туманный берег), unlike the two previous books, tended towards melodrama rather than comedy, contains an original mystery of the murder of a married couple in the same place, eight hours apart. Finally, all three books are filled with a large number of false and well-reasoned versions. Moreover, Rusanova's main plot device is a detailed and very convincing version in the middle of the book, which later turns out to be erroneous, but to some extent is connected with the true solution.

Another subtype of crime fiction rapidly developing in modern Russia is the historical detective fiction, or, more precisely, the retro detective fiction, since its action usually takes place in a certain conventional setting of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries (in some cases it is the first half of the 19th century or the first decades of the existence of the USSR).

Its origin is associated with the name of Boris Akunin, one of the most iconic figures in the history of Russian detective fiction (and, apparently, the only one whose works have been translated into English). Working under this pseudonym, Grigory Chkhartishvili, educated as a translator from Japanese, selected modern detective and crime novels for translation in one of the publishing houses in the 1990s before trying his hand at this genre. His main character is Erast Fandorin, who became the most famous Russian sleuth. Fandorin is an aristocrat, official and diplomat, whose biography runs through all the novels about him. Its action is arranged in chronological order from the 1870s to the 1917 Revolution and the subsequent Сivil War. Initially, each of the novels about Fandorin differed in plot terms from the others, representing one or another subtype of the genre. At the same time, focusing on the extremely broad understanding of the word “detective” that has developed in Russian-language practice, Akunin included in these subspecies such strange definitions as “conspiracy detective novel”, “detective novel about a hired killer” or “decadent detective novel”. In fact, most of these books are of an adventure nature. Only “Leviathan” (Левиафан, translated into English as “Murder on the Leviathan”) corresponds to the classical canon, because it is characterized by the author as a “hermetic detective novel” and deliberately written in the manner of the Golden Age: a murder takes place on an ocean liner with a closed circle of suspects. But despite some clever twists, the puzzle in this novel is unlikely to be difficult for genre connoisseurs, and it is spoiled by Akunin's traditional love of super-villains. In addition, several stories about Fandorin have deductive nature, moreover, in “Table-talk of 1882” (Table-talk 1882 года) the author confronts Fandorin with the disappearance from a locked room, but its solution, unfortunately, is copied from one of John Dixon Carr’s classic works. Akunin’s two novels about the detective nun Pelagia are much more interesting as detective plots. The first of them, “Pelagia and the White Bulldog” (Пелагия и белый бульдог) is the most canonical detective story among all Akunin's books. It is initially built on the unusual mystery of the poisoning of an elderly landowner’s bulldogs, but by the end its plot becomes much more banal. In the second, “Pelagia and the Black Monk” (Пелагия и чёрный монах) the heroine faces impossible crimes committed by the ghost of a monk. The story behind is more like the works of Jules Verne, although the explanation of the “impossibility” is quite rational and does not require fantastic assumptions.

In addition to Akunin, important contribution to the formation of this sub-genre was made by the dilogy of Vitaly Danilin, which appeared in the mid-2000s (in fact, the co-authors were science fiction writer Vitaly Babenko and detective writer Daniel Kluger), in which young Vladimir Ulyanov (the future Lenin) is the sleuth. The first of the novels, “Liszt's Twentieth Rhapsody” (Двадцатая рапсодия Листа), in terms of the level of detective puzzle corresponds only to a minor novel of the "Golden Age", but is correctly structured, vividly written and, unlike many detective stories with famous real persons as sleuths, convincingly motivates the appearance of Lenin in this role. The second novel, “The Fourth Victim of Lilacs” (Четвёртая жертва сирени), where Lenin catches a maniac, is much weaker, and the series was not continued then.

Currently, the retro detective fiction is represented in Russia by a number of actively working authors, some of whom, following Akunin, gravitate towards the adventure fiction, while others use the traditional detective schemes. The complexity of the solutions to these works is reminiscent of English-language detective stories of the Victorian era. This should be explained more by the weakness of the authors’ imagination than by deliberate stylization. Nevertheless, somehow the retro detective fiction occupies a niche of authentic detective stories actually absented in Russia at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.

At the same time, the so-called “militsia novel” dominated at the field of crime fiction in Soviet times, has lost its leading position in the new Russia. On the one hand, the growth of organized crime in the 1990s forced such works to evolve towards action books (which in Russian practice is often also included in the detective fiction), on the other hand, the most popular representative of this trend, Alexandra Marinina, paid so much attention to biography and the personal life of her constant feminine sleuth, that she began to merge with the direction of the “female”, albeit not “ironic” in her case, detective fiction.

Finally, a number of original authors, like Inna Bulgakova, do not fit into any of these directions. It should be noted that I list here not the all authors trying to write in a classical manner but those who succeeded in developing their original style or plot tricks (especcially “impossibilities”). One of them was Vera Belousova, as well as Bulgakova a graduate of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow University. Her first novel, “I Don’t Shoot on Saturdays” (По субботам не стреляю) was written in the style of an “ironic detective fiction”, but then she developed her own style in four novels about Inspector Myshkin. In its plots, motifs and topoi from famous works of mainly Russian classics were transformed postmodernistically into detective plots. If the first novel, “There Once Lived a Poor Knight” (Жил на свете рыцарь бедный) fairly straightforwardly played up the crime plot of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” (after its hero Belousova’s sleuth got his last name), in “The Second Shot” (Второй выстрел) the original detective puzzle (the victim was shot at the same time by two different and, apparently, unrelated murderers) skillfully contaminated in its plot and solution the motifs of both Turgenev’s “First Love” and Goethe’s “Faust”, at the premiere of which the murder took place.

Pesach (Pavel) Amnuel, a Russian-language author working in Israel, paid tribute to “impossible crimes”. In the collection of novellas “A Purely Scientific Murder” (Чисто научное убийство) the "impossibilities" are solved by complex and unconvincing scientific hypotheses, but this collection also includes elegant pastiches of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Amnuel also wrote more than a hundred short stories about detective Berkovitch's investigations, and many involve “impossibilities” too. Although its solutions are not particularly complex, some of the stories about Berkovitch stand out for its original formulation of the problem. Among puzzles in this cycle there are the transformation of water into wine in a vessel under surveillance, the transformation of an authentic drawing of a great artist into a crude forgery that retains the original signatures of experts on the back, and the murder of a victim with an antique sword, although at the time of the murder there were several knives around. The above-mentioned Daniel Kluger, better known for his participation in the “Vitaly Danilin” project and his popular works on the theory and history of the crime fiction, also created several not too complex detective novels and stories based on Israeli material.

Extremely noteworthy is the cycle of stories written by Sergei Sakansky, “My Friend the Detective” (Мой друг сыщик) whose characters, journalist Zharov and his friend police detective Pilipenko, are constantly faced with eccentric crimes which occured in Yalta. Sakansky, apparently, did not purposefully strive for this aim, but many of his stories contain “impossible crimes”, although such puzzles do not always occupy a central place in the plot. The ideas of these “impossibilities” are often very original: once every 34 years, in the same park grotto, someone kills his wife; in different cities, the wives of the same man, who has an unconditional alibi and is the only one who benefits from their death, are killed one by one; the victims of the maniac dream in advance of how exactly they will be killed, and the maniac kills them after his undoubted death; from the labyrinth, the entrance to which is under surveillance, two people and a goat pellet disappear without a trace, being replaced by the corpse of a third person who did not go there. Probably the best one: the victims are mauled to death by a freshly killed and buried cat.

Finally, two novels by Nikolai Slobodskoi, also one of the most curious phenomena in the Russian-language detective fiction, are devoted exclusively to “impossible crimes.” Initially, it came out as a literary hoax - works by an unknown author, allegedly written in Soviet times, when its plots took place. In fact, their author was Nikolai Volsky, a biologist from Novosibirsk, who wrote a number of valuable studies on the theory of the detective fiction and created an Internet fan site dedicated to this theme and contained many rare studies and articles, as well as texts of little-known and hard-to-find detective stories (here I must express my gratitude to Nikolai Volsky, without whose website I would not have become acquainted with many of the works analyzed here). Slobodskoi’s novels are an attempt to create a classic detective fiction, as it would have developed within the framework of Soviet literature, presuming it had been allowed there, in the days of its author’s youth. These novels are written in a strictly realistic manner, making it easy to imagine their mysteries in real life, and contain numerous digressions and prolonged historical and philosophical reflections of the author. It the first novel, “The Prophetess” (Пророчица) the author offers to readers an original murder and robbery in a locked house. The “impossibility” here is twofold: if the murderer is someone from outside, then he could not get into the locked house and get out of it, and if the murderer is one of those inside, then he could not take stolen things out of the house that disappeared without a trace. There is also a second, simpler “impossibility”: a few days before the crime, an old woman who had come into the house predicted it. In Slobodskoi’s second novel, “He Comes on Fridays” (Он приходит по пятницам) there are also two “impossibilities”. In the corridor of the research institute, every week at night the corpse of a stranger appears and disappears, until the third time it finally appears, being fresh. Moreover, the only entrance to the institute is under surveillance, so the killer and victim could not get there. A rare mystery with a disappearing corpse has an original (being compared with Knox or Berkeley variants) solution, which may seem hooligan and is based largely on a very peculiar manner of narration that confuses the reader and uses a unique, as far as I know, way of creating an “unreliable narrator” (who, not being a direct participant in the case, relies exclusively on other characters' words in his description of events, but remains one of the characters himself, recounting everything in the first person). In addition, Slobodskoi wrote the “impossible” novella “On the Third Try” (С третьей попытки) in which the same person is irrefutably identified as dead three times by equally credible witnesses and is buried in three different places. Unfortunately, the desire to present the plot realistically forces the author here to give an answer too quickly, but mystery itself is original, albeit with a very simple solution.

Finally, speaking about Russian-language “impossible crimes”, it is necessary to mention two collections specifically dedicated to this theme. Firstly, this is the collection “Murder in a Locked Room. Best Stories” (Убийство в запертой комнате. Лучшие рассказы) released in 2014. Most of the works included are extremely banal, but Alexander Prokopovich's story “Death in an Elevator” (Смерть в лифте) offers an original solution to the mystery of a murder in a moving elevator, where the victim rode alone, spoiled by the fact that key evidence is hidden from the reader. Secondly, in 2008, on the initiative of the popular Russian fantasy author Max Frei, the collection “Where Did Phillimore Gone? Thirty-eight answers to the puzzle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" (Куда исчез Филимор? Тридцать восемь ответов на загадку сэра Артура Конан Дойла) appeared. Unfortunately, most of these answers belong more to the realm of pure fantasy fiction, but two stories, “A Provincial Affair” (Провинциальное дело) by Yulia Borovinskaya and “The Disappearance of Phillimore Jr.” (Исчезновение Филимора-младшего) by Alexei Kartashov offer quite convincing solutions. If Borovinskaya transfers the action to pre-revolutionary Russia, changing the circumstances of the case, Kartashov creates skillful pastiche about Sherlock Holmes, and his version is quite capable of competing with the classic ones of Ellery Queen and John Dixon Carr.

In addition to Kartashov and the above-mentioned Amnuel, a number of other pastiches (as well as publishing hoaxes) for English-language detective fiction also arose in Russian-language literature. Its first example, apparently, is Elisabeth Rolle (actually Elizaveta Yelskaya), who published in the early 1990s six detective novellas set in England during the “Golden Age”. One of these novellas includes an original, although not reflected by the author himself, “impossible” poisoning. The remaining ones are interesting because most of its plots are occupied by events before the crime, which occurs towards the end and is revealed almost immediately. However, the descriptions of these events contain clues. Subsequently, most of such pastiches remained within the framework of web fiction. One can highlight Alex Nork (pseudonym of Alexander Chesnokov), who created a number of successful stylizations of American GAD whodunit, as well as translator from English and Shakespeare scholar Ekaterina Rakitina. She has written three “impossible” stories about Sherlock Holmes, offering answers to controversial questions in the biography of the great detective (one of them brings him together in a common investigation with the young Miss Marple), although its solutions correspond to the level of minor authors of the late 19th century, and very original crossover that brings together Hercule Poirot, Peter Pan and Mary Poppins.

In general, the Russian-language detective fiction suffers from the lack of a unified environment that would unite its authors, who work separately. The community of fans is quite narrow and disunited too, moreover, it is extremely weakly interconnected with authors working professionally (as well as foreign, especially English-language fan communities because of poor knowledge of any foreign language by most of the Russian audience). Individual examples of fan fiction, in turn, remained on webpages of specialized forums and websites of amateur fiction, without interfering with the book market. As a result, a great number of original works created in such conditions are unknown to foreign readers due to the almost complete lack of translations into other languages.