FRINGES OF THE NARRATOURBOLOGICAL BELGRADE: DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE SWERVE AWAY FROM THE URBAN

Abstract

Narratourbological mapping foregoes the idea of the literary as nostalgically turned towards the natural and away from the industrial in favour of the idea of the literary as historically moving toward the urban, and participating in its construal. Detective fiction, at the same time, appears a genre inherently urban, from the early modern, to the contemporary instances (from the prototypical Dupin to Auster’s Quinn). Mapping and accordingly analysing Christie’s popular detective’s short stopover at Belgrade and its context, however, allows an opportunity for reading it as gesturing away from the urban. The plotted line of movement of Christie’s fiction, though connecting urban entities, takes centre stage, drawing away from its subservient construing points. The scarce, short urban stopovers are exposed as representations not of the urban, but of leaving the urban. The excluded urban is argued to have been relegated to the role of quasi-retarding devices (foreshadowed or hind sighted) images and counterpoints of the fiction’s ‘grand arrest’ – the fatal (and final) stop containing both the crime and its solving, outside of the urban.