What Is Left of the Genius? Sherlockian Legacy in Contemporary Crime Fiction

• Authors: Mydla, Jacek

Abstracts

EN

Arthur Conan Doyle famously popularised science in his series of detective stories by placing its three constitutive elements (scientific knowledge, the collection of evidence, and art of making inferences), in his protagonist Sherlock Holmes. The legacy is present in contemporary crime fiction, but the competencies have been distributed among a group of individuals involved in the investigation. This distribution has affected and changed the position of the detective vis-à-vis scientific expertise. Science, chiefly in the form of different branches of forensics, is as indispensable as the detective, and authors have been working out different ways of making the two work together. As an example of this cooperation, the paper examines Mark Billingham’s 2015 novel Time of Death.

Keywords

EN

Sherlock Holmes; science of deduction; forensics; contemporary crime fiction

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Bielsko-Bialski
• Journal: Świat i Słowo
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 36(1)
• Pages: 137-150

Dates

published

2021-03-11

Contributors

author

Mydla, Jacek