Arabic Detective Fiction for Adolescents

Arabie Detective Fiction for Adolescents by Sylvia Patterson lskander Detective fiction, especially in series, is a favorite among young readers in the Arab world. The Middle East has several series comparable to the Stratemeyer Syndicate books in the detective stories of The Three Adventurers and The Four Adventurers, written by various authors, and The Five Adventurers, perhaps the best of the series, written primarily by Mahmoud Salem. A book in each series is currently being published monthly in Cairo in modem standard Arabic, rather than the Egyptian dialect, perhaps in order to expand the audience beyond Egypt. These formula stories of approximately 15,000 words, usually concluding with a puff for the next book in the series, are all set in Egypt Dennis Porter's belief that Western detective fiction is a "valuable barometer of [a] society's ideological norms" (1) is also accurate for Eastern fiction. The latter series have all the hallmarks of detective fiction for the young: improbably young heroes and heroines solving crimes which adults have not been able to unravel; past villainy limited to smuggling, theft, or perhaps kidnapping, but usually not murder or terrorism; the dilution of curent danger (Fisher 280, 278, 283); the affirmation of moral order; the belief in deductive reasoning; and the creation of a culturally acceptable hero. The sequence of events that define a detective story includes the crime, its discovery, the search for clues (some red herrings), the recognition of the criminal, the chase and capture, and the final explanation. Young readers with prior experience in the genre especially enjoy the contrast between the "safety famHtar" and the "tantalizingly new and different" (Billman 37), the rarity of the crime, the clever solution to a common crime, the development of suspense, and the pleasurable arousal of the reader's emotions (Porter 236). As Anne Scott MacLeod has said, "The real protagonist of [formula fiction] is the reader; the real plot is a satisfying vicarious experience that also—and not incidentally-conveys messages the reader wants and Is able to hear" (129). Both Eastern and Western tales affirm their readers' beliefs; indeed, "the persistence of certain recognizable national cultural traditions within the large corpus of detective fiction" is, according to Porter, "remarkable" (127). I not only agree, but also propose to demonstrate how the cultural differences permeate aspects of the characterization, the action, and the methods for creating suspense. An Egyptian story differs by its expansive cast of characters from a Nancy Drew mystery. In The Mystery of the International Smuggler and The Mystery of the Dead End Street, two of the more than two hundred books in The Five Adventurers series, the five protagonists range in age from seven to fifteen. The oldest, Tawfiq, whose nickname Takhtakh appropriately means "tubby," excels in logic and ratiocination; he bears no stigma in the Middle East for being a little overweight. His companions, two sets of brothers and sisters, Mohib and Nousah, AtK and Lozah, do not possess the same intellectual prowess. The girls, Nousah and Lozah, play small rotas, not because of their sex, but because of the difficulty of sustaining roles for five detectives. The two, who serve traditional female functions such as preparing food, nevertheless, accompany their brothers, indicating a move toward female equality. Occasionally, they even contribute to a mystery's solution; for example, in The Dead End Street the detectives know that a key was used in a robbery, but the keeper of the keys is innocent of any wrongdoing. Nousah's theory that the key was duplicated some months earlier when the keeper was on vacation and had a substitute proves correct. The males' behavior is a model of decorum, indicating respect for the girls and each other. The dialogue reveals a lack of competition and jealousy among the youths, unusual by American standards. When an infrequent disagreement occurs, quiet discussion with some deference shown to Takhtakh as the smartest resolves the issue. This behavior is probably no more unrealistic than some other assumptions behind juvenile detection, such as child sleuths solving crimes that adults cannot solve. Margery Fisher enumerates the chId-Investigator's natural advantages for detection: "curiosity, an eye for insignificant detals, the power to...