Professor Hamlet Isaxanli, Founder of Khazar University, Chairman, Board of Trustees and Directors, and Dr Bahman Amani, the Head of the Department of English Language and Literature, managed to see through the publication of an article in a reputable and respectably indexed journal. Evoking a unique and refreshingly interdisciplinary area of English language and literature, the article is entitled “From Hamlet to Holmes: literary detective tradition”, published in Linguistics and Culture Review (LingCuRe).

This article is the fruit of a long-standing research tradition and dedicated work. The article explores the character of young Hamlet and the solving of his father’s mysterious death in the longest tragedy of Shakespeare. The article traces the long historical journey of detective literature, in the sustaining and progress of which William Shakespeare seems to have played a prominent but little-treated role by initiating a new subgenre in drama which may have later on been converted into an independent subgenre in the detective novel by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie through their imaginative characters like Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes and the famous pair Hercules Poirot and Miss Marple. Even Fyodor Dostoevsky may be seen as having picked up on this Hamletian thread in his Crime and Punishment. This tertium comparationis tying these important works of fiction, triggered and championed by Shakespeare, involves the fictional plotting of a perfect crime by the murderers and the public popularity of the plan, on the one hand, and the invincible mind of the hero which ultimately undoes the seemingly unsolvable puzzle, on the other; all this is the common denominator running across the very core of all these cornerstones of detective literature in the works of Shakespeare, Poe, Doyle and others.

This work of research has met very favourable reviews in its unique and innovative outlook on the origins of detective fiction and the historical journey this sub-genre of English and world literature has traversed. Khazar University is proud and congratulatory on this achievement.  

The full text of the article is available to global community via DSpace at the following link:

http://dspace.khazar.org/handle/20.500.12323/5154