Lost Detectives: Early Russian Crime Fiction, Visual Adaptation, and the Art of Waiting (with Claire Whitehead & Carol Adlam)

According to Susan Sweeney, ‘in its formal elements, such as sequence, suspense, and closure, as well as in content, the detective story dramatizes the workings of narrative itself’. Although late nineteenth-century examples of Russophone crime fiction differ in some significant respects from the archetypal detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle envisaged by Sweeney, they nevertheless provide fertile ground on which to consider the impact of storytelling devices. This paper, in two complementary parts, will examine the role of narrative focalisation, temporal organisation and information gaps in works of late imperial Russian crime fiction and their adaptation. In the first part, Claire Whitehead will discuss Aleksandra Sokolova’s 1890 novel, Without a Trace, and the various ways in which it exploits diegetic devices to explore issues related to the marginalisation and brutalisation of women in a patriarchal society. In the second part, Carol Adlam will discuss her graphic novel The Russian Detective (Penguin Books, 2024), a free adaptation of Semyon Panov’s 1872 novel, Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball, and a response to the genre of early crime fiction more broadly. Carol will discuss her deployment of varied visual codes as analogues to the original text’s devices of digression, hesitation, and suspense. 

This event will be hosted virtually on Zoom. 

Claire Whitehead is a Reader in the Department of Russian at the University of St Andrews in the UK. Her current research focuses on female-authored late imperial Russophone crime fiction. She is the author of the 2018 monograph, The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction, 1860-1917: Deciphering Tales of Detection published by Legenda. Since 2019 she has collaborated with Carol Adlam on a research ‘impact’ project, ‘Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts for New Media’, designed to bring the results of her research to wider, non-Russian-speaking audiences.

Carol Adlam is Associate Professor of Illustration in the Nottingham School of Art & Design and a former Senior Lecturer in Russian. She is a writer and artist specialising in narrative and book illustration (graphic novels, children’s books, and reportage) and creative writing (scripts for graphic novels; picturebooks; creative non-fiction). Her graphic publications include The Russian Detective (Penguin Books/ Vintage/ Jonathan Cape, 2024), Girton Time (Beam Editions, 2023), Thinking Room (2017; World Illustration Award winner 2018), Ministry of Women (2017; WIA shortlisted), Amy in Love (2016), Suzanne’s Story (2015; WIA shortlisted), and The New Wipers Times (2014). She is the Creative Director of the crime fiction multimedia adaptation project Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts for New Media. She was a Visiting Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge in 2021-2022 and in 2021 she was Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews. Clients include The Guardian, Delayed Gratification: The Slow Journalism Magazine; The National Archives, UK.

Illustration © Carol Adlam