‘Lost Detectives’

Lost detectives - ballroom This project grows out of Claire Whitehead’s research into the earliest examples of crime fiction written in Russian during the late Imperial period of 1860-1917. It is a collaborative project with the author and illustrator, Carol Adlam, that aims to bring these ‘lost’ works of crime fiction to a wider, non-Russian-speaking public through various acts of adaptation.

Claire Whitehead began working on Russian crime fiction in 2005 and her monograph, The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction, 1860-1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection appeared with Legenda in 2018, with a cover image designed by Carol Adlam. However, the phenomenal popularity of crime stories in various media in contemporary culture (television, radio, podcasts, literature) convinced them of the value of sharing these Russian works with a non-academic audience.

Lost detectives - Murder Funded by the Knowledge Exchange and Impact fund at the University of St Andrews, ‘Lost Detectives’ now features several strands of adaptation. At the project’s heart is Carol’s graphic-novel adaptation of Semyon Panov’s 1872 novella, Three Courts, or Murder during the Ball. Under the working title, The Russian Detective, this graphic novel, which recounts the investigation into the murder of Elena Ruslanova at her engagement party, is under contract with the publisher, Jonathan Cape, and will appear in 2024. Proof-of-concept pages from Carol’s novel were displayed to the public in the cloisters area of St Salvator’s Chapel in May/June 2019 and the project has been discussed at a number of events, including a Byre World ‘In Conversation’ evening in November 2020. Audiences have expressed their fascination with the original works and their admiration for Carol’s images.

Lost detectives - poster Other strands of adaptation include the interpretation of Nikolai Timofeev’s 1872 collection of stories, Notes of an Investigator, into the script for a fictionalized version of Radio 4’s flagship Today news programme (Today in 1864). Aleksandr Shkliarevskii’s 1881 story, ‘A Secret Investigation’, has also been adapted into a radio play script, entitled ‘Curare’ after the poison used in a string of crimes. A future adaptation is also planned for the 1892 novel, The Song Has Been Sung, written by Russia’s first female crime writer, Aleksandra Sokolova.

More details on the ‘Lost Detectives’ project, as well as episodes of our accompanying podcast series, can be found at the 'Lost Detectives' web site.