PRESENTATION OF IMAGES IN DETECTIVE STORIES

Abstract

INTRODUCTION In detective stories an important character is a detective. The authors of these stories, trying to write such books, must find out about duties and responsibilities of real detectives in the country they intend to write about, in England, for example, they cannot wave weapons. Most of their actions are free of tension: they look for thieves in stores, follow unfaithful husbands or wives, look for the missing and get all the information their clients cannot get. For the needs of this genre of literature, the detective must be involved in murder. In old-fashioned stories, it happens that the ruffled police inspector calls for help a private detective to solve the case. It is ironic that the stereotype of the method is transferred to the subject of research; there is an accusation here that detective story is schematic. A much greater sense of the essential features of the detective’s stories has a more naive approach, for example in Cawelti’s book 1 . In spite of the wide-scale theoretical assumptions and clear main weaknesses the results of typically American strain allowed Cawelti achieved more than the relatively narrow theoretical framework of his work. According to J.G. Cawelti Hammett is artistically more convincing than Chandler, because for Chandler a source evil is only social depravity, while Hammett presents a deep cosmic vision of evil: a source of unhappiness it is indifferent, condemned to the randomness of the universe without God 2 . On the other hand Cawelti of course must acknowledge that Hammett, speaking explicitly political views was a radical – while Chandler’s ideology is left-wing, although it still fits within the bourgeois limits of liberalism. From this contradiction Cawelti seems to rescue in such a way that contradiction for him simply means contradiction: against the radical political tendency Hammett has defined political tendencies as a deeper existential experience of the absurdity of human existence in a random universe without God. The absurdity of this, of course could not be finished by revolutionary upheaval in social relations, because it is deeper – it relies on the very deep relationship between the man and the universe. It might be considered as paradox, that it is Hammett who sees the source of evil in the universe, and not only in the demoralization of