The Baskerville Mystery: A Study in Detective Tones

Daniel Kluger’s book demonstrates how strangely close detective literature is to "high" epic poetry, to ancient myths and the philosophical quests of our time, to the most subtle psychological dramas and magical fairy tales. Before the reader is the second edition of "The Baskerville Mystery," significantly supplemented and revised compared to the first edition, which was published by "Text" in 2005. What is a detective story? It seems to be something not too complicated, sometimes bordering on the primitive. An unserious genre. But... On one hand, there truly are many cheap (in every sense) little books, "Pinkerton stuff," an abundance of shoddy works. But on the other hand - the founders of this "primitive" are E. T. A. Hoffmann and E. A. Poe, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, pillars of world literature. And in the 20th century, genuine classics made their mark in the detective genre - Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco and Ray Bradbury, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Gilbert Chesterton: