The Detective Genre in Azerbaijani and English Literature: Structure, Themes, and Narrative Strategies

Résumé

The detective genre occupies a distinctive position in world literature as a narrative form that combines formal structural rigor with profound cultural specificity: while its plot architecture — crime, investigation, and resolution — remains remarkably stable across literary traditions, the social meanings it encodes vary deeply with the cultural, political, and institutional contexts in which it is produced. This article presents a comparative analysis of the detective genre in Azerbaijani and English literature, examining the structural conventions, thematic preoccupations, and narrative strategies that characterize each tradition. The English tradition is traced from its foundational formation in Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle through the Golden Age puzzle narratives of Agatha Christie to the moral complexity of later crime writing, while the Azerbaijani tradition is examined through its Soviet-era emergence in the work of Jamshid Amirov and its post-Soviet international expansion in the prolific oeuvre of Chingiz Abdullayev. Drawing on structuralist narratology, genre theory, and postcolonial perspectives on popular literature, the analysis demonstrates that the two traditions share the genre’s fundamental dual-story structure — the story of the crime and the story of the investigation — while diverging significantly in their construction of the detective figure, their treatment of justice and the state, their representation of social order, and their narrative handling of suspense and resolution. The article argues that the Azerbaijani detective tradition, far from being a derivative imitation of Western models, constitutes a creative adaptation that reconfigures the genre’s conventions to articulate distinctively national experiences of law, morality, and social transformation. The comparative study of detective fiction thus offers a productive lens for understanding both the universality of narrative form and the cultural particularity of its realization.