A Shot in the Back. Doomed to Win

The name of Nikolai Leonov is well known to fans of the detective genre. In the 1950s and 1960s, the future writer worked in the Moscow criminal investigation department, and after leaving the Ministry of Internal Affairs with the rank of captain, he took up literary creativity. He is the author of numerous novels and stories, recognized as classics of domestic detective fiction and became a "school" for the next generation of writers. Leonov skillfully wrote both historical detectives (for example, the famous "Tavern on Pyatnitskaya" and "Operation 'Viking'") and detectives from everyday life. A major success for the writer was the cycle of popular detective stories about inspector Leo Guryev. "The Confession" is the first work in the cycle and the first case of Guryev, where the image of an investigator who can think out of the box and carefully studies the psychology of the criminal emerges. In this and in the following stories ("A Shot in the Back", "The Trap" and "Doomed to Win") included in this publication, Investigator Guryev faces a challenging task - to identify the criminal with a limited number of suspects and the absence of direct evidence. In each of his works, Leonov masterfully builds the plot and maintains intrigue until the end. The stories about investigator Guryev are well known through their adaptations, and Nikolai Leonov himself wrote the scripts for the films; in the early 2000s, A. Bashirov filmed the series "Good Luck to You, Detective" based on this cycle.