Elementary Ratiocination: Anticipating Sherlock Holmes in a Slovene Setting

Abstract

The paper reevaluates an obscure, German-language crime novel from the nineteenth century and its better-known English translation: Carl Adolf Streckfuss’s Das einsame Haus: nach den Tagebüchern des Herrn Professor Döllnitz: Roman (1888), translated as The Lonely House (1907). Although written in German by an author from Berlin, the novel is set on the territory of Slovenia. The paper situates the novel geographically and historically, while considering its place in the developing genres of crime and later detective fiction. Moreover, the novel’s depiction of intraethnic tension in the Slovenian village where the crime occurs will be shown to reflect the ethnic tensions on the frontiers of Austro-Hungarian territory, and to align with later trends in English detective fiction towards the use of ethnic taxonomies in constructing and solving crime.