Around the turn of the last century, as its
factories pulled workers from the countryside and its population
boomed, Zvlotsk was afflicted with many of the urban ills of its time:
slums, houses of prostitution, and unsolved murders of a rough and
ready sort. If not for the work of the forensic genius Herr Dr. Oswald
Lügenmetzger, Zvlotsk might have continued to endure these plagues in
gritty mediocrity.
Though he also broke racketeering rings by reasoning out their webs
of suppliers and customers, specified the precise alloy to be used in
police badges, and liberated poor girls from the slavery of
prostitution through the exercise of Kantian metaphysics,
Lügenmetzger's true metier was the murder case. He could often solve
murders before they occurred: it then became merely a matter of
stationing an officer where he could observe the foul deed and
apprehend the evildoer.
Lügenmetzger's savaging of the criminal underworld could not long
escape notice. Soon an entire industry of tabloid journals, pulp
editions of victims' memoirs, and theatrical reenactments grew up
around his accomplishments. Thousands of would-be detectives were sold
Starter Kits containing magnifying glasses, fingerprinting equipment,
and copies of the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. By 1912, the popularization of detective work accounted for a third of the Zvlotskian economy.
Dr. Lügenmetzger's answer to this tawdry circus, the Zvlotsk School
of the Forensic Sciences, was an immediate sensation. But after the
First World War, his cerebral style became increasingly unfashionable.
In contrast, the Modern Academy of Detective Work offered a two-fisted,
emotionally involved approach that eschewed antiseptic ratiocination.
By the late twenties, the schools had by any measure wildly
succeeded. Detection rates were stratospheric, and criminals fled
Zvlotsk en masse for less demanding cities. The falling murder rate
squeezed the city's detective industry, imperiling the economy.
Editorials lambasted the cowardice of the fleeing criminals, and the
Gridnovsky publishing empire threw its weight behind a variety of
remedies: Murderer Starter Kits, sponsorship deals for elegant
archvillains, and women's magazine articles with titles like "Ten Ways
To Find Out If He's Cheating On You (And Deserves To Die)."
In the thirties, economic privation and anger restored the murder
rate to its proper levels, and Zvlotsk boomed. As murderous and
detection-happy immigrants crowded into the city, a snob hierarchy
developed. The disaffected mugger and the enraged cuckold were despised
as lowbrows; the true craftsmen of murder inaugurated ever more
elaborate schemes. Both murderers and detectives sported flamboyant
costumes and exotic monikers, attempting to distinguish themselves from
the common herd.
The Second World War dealt a major blow to amateur detectivism, and
under the Communist regime it was outlawed as a form of bourgeois
sentimentality. Both murder and police work became as drab as the
endless rows of concrete block housing which grew up around Zvlotsk's
smokestacks. Dissidents lit candles to the spirit of Lügenmetzger and
privately circulated illicit copies of true crime stories in the
Gridnovskian mode.
After the Revolution of 1989, there were great hopes that Zvlotsk's
unique prewar culture of crime and detection would again flourish. But
while the youth of Zvlotsk have embraced American-style serial killing
along with MTV and McDonald's, they find crime-solving prohibitively
boring. The intellectuals of the University of Zvlotsk have declared
detection an obsolete attempt to impose a totalizing narrative on the
pure sign of murder. At present, Zvlotsk is a city with many murderers,
but very few detectives.
Originally published at strangehorizons.com