RECONSTRUCTIONS OF 19TH CENTURY CRIMINAL STORIES AND 21ST CENTURY “CRIME NOVELS”

Abstract

The books by Róbert Milbacher’s Léleknyavalyák – avagy az öngyilkolás s egyéb elveszejtő szerek természetéről (Soul Maladies – or On the Nature of Suicide and Other Destructive Substances) published in 2018, and László András’s A vörös korona: Mindenkiből lehet áldozat (The Red Crown: Anyone Can Become a Victim) which came out in 2021, both reflect on the nature–or rather the absence–of 19^th-century Hungarian crime stories. The former’s self-fiction draws on methods used in Fanni hagyományai (Fanni’s Traditions), the Testvériség-trilógia (Brotherhood Trilogy), and Pokolkerék (Hell’s Wheel): it defines its place in literary history as if it were a belated reconstruction of a missing, lost or forgotten work/genre. In László’s novel, however, the protagonist, the detective Endre Harmath, speaks about the nature of 19th-century crime cases, especially about the phenomena experienced in this field in the 1880s, claiming that the most authentic portrayal of these can be found in Péter Lengyel’s 1988 novel Macskakő (Cobblestone). These reflections might suggest that due to the absence of “ingenious”, large-scale, or surreal crimes (like The Murders in the Rue Morgue) in 19^th-century Hungary–except for the era portrayed by Lengyel around the turn of the century–the genre itself is also missing from the representation of this period in Hungarian literature. Hence, as Milbacher does with Léleknyavalyák, the genre needs to be retrospectively created. This research aims to investigate, map out, and present how and in what form the genre might have existed in 19^th-century Hungarian literature, and how it has been passed down in 20th- or 21st-century crime novels.