CITY AS A CHARACTER OF THRILLER

Abstract

The city as an artificial environment was mentioned and sometimes described throughout the whole history of literature. One of the first texts in which we see the slums of a metropolis as a location both commonplace and exotic, and completely necessary for the narrative as a whole, is Petronius’s “Satiricon”. Some of its characteristics were later reproduced in the Picaresque and still later, in some of the budding genres of the XIX ct. literature. For instance, that century was formative for the genres of detective and thriller. For them the big city became the perfect location. The specific places (buildings, streets, infrastructure etc.) helped to define the characters’ fortune, to determine the plot development and to create the emotional atmosphere of the text. Gradually there formed a special myth of a big city, with its specific variants (for instance, the myth of London). The genres of thriller and detective were (and are) some of the main factors in formation of this myth. The city as a character of a novel can be represented with various degrees of accuracy, beginning with the almost-perfect description and coming to the pure fantasy.