Po trosze powieść kryminalna. Przypadek Zbigniewa Białasa
A bit of a criminal novel. The case of Zbigniew Białas

Author(s): Dariusz Nowacki
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: Zbigniew Białas; crime fiction; detective and historical fiction; Sosnowiec
Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the book series written by Zbigniew Białas referred to as “Sosnowiec chronicles”, which were announced in the years 2011–2015. The writer employed some elements belonging to the convention of the urban vintage crime fiction, especially in the first and second parts of the trilogy. The author of the article reflects on the usefulness of the solutions employed by the writer, inquiring what he has achieved with them, how he has modelled the plot, and what prompted him to choose the formula of the historical detective novel as a matrix. These considerations are embedded in a broader genological context. Also, the author discusses the career of a sub‑genre of contemporary crime fiction initiated by Marek Krajewski’s first novel and its transformations, as well as critical literary reactions to this sub‑genre. The author pays special attention to the links between the urban vintage crime fiction and the so‑called literature of little homelands, a trend that dominated the Polish literature of the 1990s. He asks about the possibility of literary „splendouring” of urban space, demonstrating various solutions in this matter. At the same time, he reflects on socio‑literary transformations, pointing out that the authors of vintage crime novels – with few exceptions – have enjoyed only local fame, and their works seem to have been a response to local needs, often associated with the promotion of particular cities. Then he presents the image of the city (Sosnowiec) which emerges from Białas’s trilogy, focusing on the differences in the approach to spatial issues that are observed in the three subsequent volumes. At the end of the article, the author wonders about the perspectives of the story about Sosnowiec.

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