Detective and mystery stories, English

G. K. Chesterton is known for writing detective fiction, his Father Brown crime stories being his most popular works. Chesterton, however, wrote more than a hundred books. The Man Who Was Thursday is Chesterton's fictional masterpiece. The novel reveals the author as a creative genius, at least equal to now-better-known writers of his time, such as Conrad and Kafka. Chesterton tells detective Gabriel Syme's tale in the novel, which also exudes an autobiographical flavor, giving fragments of Chesterton's own story of his escape from fin-de-siecle pessimism. As literary art, the novel merges the detective genre with the genre of the fantastic. The result is a wild tale of fun and romance, with more than a little philosophical argument in the mix. Using Tzvetan Todorov's theory of structuralism, I unveil the many masks of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. The outcome is a better understanding of G. K. Chesterton's rebellion into orthodoxy.

Sherlock Holmes has been popular in Japan since the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912), but no critic has yet connected Holmes and the protagonist of the recent graphic novel Death Note (2003-2006). While American detective fiction has defined itself somewhat in opposition to Arthur Conan Doyle, Japan embraced Sherlock Holmes and created a series of detectives modeled on the English icon. These characters live and work in Japan, but they are never more than Japanese versions of an English original. Although Japan has a long history of adaptations and translations of Doyle's writings, no Japanese character has exemplified Holmes as fully as L, the protagonist of Death Note. While L is clearly similar to Holmes, he also blends English and Japanese characteristics in a way that no Japanese detective figure before him managed to do, and thus becomes the first quintessentially Japanese Sherlock Holmes.