Published: 2023-11-23

On Police Violence in the Polish Crime Fiction and More

Wolfgang Brylla Logo ORCID

Abstract

The subject of the article is non(violence)in the Polish crime fiction in the context of the form of presenting the main protagonist – a (private) detective, a militiaman or a policeman. Both literary protagonists and TV- movie characters (captain Sowa, Halski) or those connected with a widely-understood pop culture (a comic Żbik) undertook a diachronic-comparative analysis. A connecting brace, as well as a starting point for considerations, is work of Raymond Chandler considered one of the authors of so called black crime. The main question is if the Polish crime fiction has borrowed from American narrative patterns and to what an extent it has taken over the way of staging a detective as absolute and necessary Evil. The examples are detectives from militia detective stories of the People’s Republic of Poland, retro detective stories (Marek Krajewski and Marcin Wroński), and modern ones. The main aim, apart from previously mentioned analysis of the person of a Polish detective against the background of crime literature, is to bridge the gap in developing studies on a Polish-speaking crime story, and show a specific delay as far as responses to narrative trends the genre follows on the international level are concerned. It appears that the Polish crime
fiction has skipped the noir phase, which, in turn, is connected with a different attitude towards the aesthetics of violence.

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Citation rules

Brylla, W. (2023). On Police Violence in the Polish Crime Fiction and More. Postscriptum Polonistyczne, 32(2), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.31261/PS_P.2023.32.02

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Vol. 32 No. 2 (2023)
Published: 2023-03-29


ISSN: 1898-1593
eISSN: 2353-9844
Ikona DOI 10.31261/PS_P

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

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