The Suicide Quartet

Abstract

Guest Editor’s Note: ‘The Suicide Quartet’ is the first translation into English of Mima Simić’s short story ‘Kvartet samoubojica’ from the collection Pustolovine Glorije Scott (The Adventures of Gloria Scott), published in 2005 in Croatian (Zagreb: AGM). The short stories chronicle the surreal cases of the detective Gloria Scott from the perspective of her faithful companion Mary Lambert. Named after a ship from Arthur Conan Doyle’s story about Sherlock Holmes’s first case (‘The Adventure of the Gloria Scott’, 1893), Gloria Scott is the famous detective’s very opposite: relying on intuition rather than deduction, on wild guesses rather than empirically derived conclusion, Scott shoots first and asks questions later. The short story collection plays with the Holmes canon and offers a topsy-turvy hybridisation of the Victorian detective story. As its characters, the collection includes the names of selected authors of classic literature as well as real-life figures from popular culture (like in the story below), mixing various elements of the English literary canon with those from Croatian and other non-Anglophone literary traditions. Relying on a thoroughly dark sense of humour, the collection offers a gender-bending queering of the Victorian detective. (AP)