Abstract
This paper aims to study humour in the First Republic Brazilian detective stories, using as main source the crime novel The mistery, written in 1920 by Afrânio Peixoto, Viriato Correia, Medeiros e Albuquerque and Coelho Netto. Our objective is to show that this novel represents the Brazilian reception of the detective fiction spread in the country since 1907. Our focus is Conan Doyle’s detetive fiction because it so marked Brazilian readers’ imagination. Sherlock Holmes had several imitators in such a way that his deductions were applied by newspaper readers and journalists in crimes reported in press, being also a model to policing inquiry, at that time marked by a widespread scientific criminology. We will show how all these phenomena were represented inside The mistery, used as a satire against police and Brazilian society.
Keywords
Detective fiction; pulp fiction; humour; Sherlock Holmes; sherlockism