D. A. Mis­hani is an Israeli crime writer, edi­tor, and lit­er­ary schol­ar, spe­cial­iz­ing in the his­to­ry of detec­tive fic­tion. His first detec­tive nov­el, The Miss­ing File, was pub­lished in by Harp­er. He will be blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

My fas­ci­na­tion with detec­tives start­ed very ear­ly on. 

I remem­ber that one of my strongest read­ing expe­ri­ences as a child — when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old — was dis­cov­er­ing with grow­ing ter­ror and amaze­ment The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. I was read­ing at night, in bed, under the blan­ket, and I knew I was intim­i­dat­ed by this strange char­ac­ter, Mr. Sher­lock Holmes, even more than I was by the mon­strous giant dog he was chasing. 

And there’s anoth­er expe­ri­ence I remem­ber very strongly:

I was 11 or 12 years old and I had already fin­ished all the Agatha Christie nov­els avail­able in the adult sec­tion of the munic­i­pal library in my home town, Holon, an urban sub­urb of Tel Aviv. I was stand­ing in front of the library shelves that offered almost no oth­er detec­tive nov­els and asked myself: And now what? Are there real­ly no oth­er detec­tives in the world for me to read?

Many years lat­er, as a young lit­er­ary schol­ar pre­tend­ing to write a PhD the­sis on the detec­tive nov­el, I found myself going back to these two impor­tant moments in my per­son­al his­to­ry of read­ing. This time I could ask myself the ques­tions I could­n’t for­mu­late as a child: How did I come to read the ter­ri­bly hor­ri­fy­ing sto­ry of the hound of the Baskervilles when I was only 8 years old? And why was it that the shelves in the munic­i­pal library in Holon offered no oth­er detec­tive nov­els after hav­ing fin­ished all of Her­cule Poirot’s inves­ti­ga­tions?

I under­stood then, that my own inti­mate his­to­ry of read­ing, as a child in Israel in the 1980’s couldn’t be sep­a­rat­ed from the big­ger social his­to­ry of read­ing in Mod­ern Hebrew. I was fac­ing the mys­tery of the Hebrew detec­tive, or the mys­tery of the detec­tive in Hebrew: Why is it so dif­fi­cult to write a detec­tive in Hebrew?

And for me, at that moment in life, it was­n’t just a the­o­ret­i­cal ques­tion, but a very per­son­al one, almost a ques­tion of life and death, because secret­ly, with­out any­body know­ing, I was­n’t going to fin­ish my PhD the­sis on the genre; instead, I was plan­ning to write my own detec­tive, in Hebrew. I was going to write the first inves­ti­ga­tion of police inspec­tor Avra­ham Avraham. 

Read the sec­ond install­ment of D. A. Mis­hani’s ​“The Mys­tery of the Hebrew Detec­tive” here.