Mysteries and Conspiracies in Pre-War Warsaw: Network Analysis of Conflict and Stability in Crime Novels

In his book Mysteries and Conspiracies, Luc Boltanski explores the modern detective novel as an expression of political imagination. He argues that this genre was a specific product of the 19th-century nation-state. Detectives and investigators served as guardians and controllers of the nation-state's function of maintaining and enforcing justice, whose stability was threatened by both external and internal enemies.

The English and French states developed different ways of exercising power, which is reflected in their crime novels. In England, detectives – most notably Sherlock Holmes – navigate social spaces primarily within the elite classes. The detective acts as a guardian of the hierarchical class order, protecting the elite from the exposure of scandals affecting them. In the French context, represented by Inspector Maigret, the source of order is found in the administration. The investigator disregards class differences and strives to ensure "objective" order for all citizens.

My focus is on the Second Polish Republic – a state that existed from 1918 to 1939. The society of the Second Polish Republic resembled a mosaic of classes characterized by enormous stratification and conflict. The aim is to reconstruct the map of social relations of main characters in the novels and to answer the question: to what extent they serve the republic or private interests of the elites?

I use a corpus of crime novels to reconstruct the map of relationships in which the detectives and investigatos engage. I employ the extraction of interpersonal relationships within the text. This involves the automatic detection of individuals appearing in the text and the verb phrases linking them. The next step is to reconstruct the relational network in each novel, where each character in the text is a node, and the direct actions involving two or more individual form the edges.