Of all the literary genres, detective fiction (‘mysteries’, as they are aptly called) is the most gamesome.

The setting up of organized police forces, with detective bureaux in London (Scotland Yard) and Paris (the Sûreté) in the 1830s was a necessary precondition to the genre’s emergence. First came the detective service, then the detective novel. The genre as we know it took a distinctive turn in the English-speaking world with Dickens’s Inspector Bucket (based on the Yard’s best-known thief-taker, Inspector Field) in Bleak House (1852–3). Dickens’s favourite protégé, Wilkie Collins, patented what would become central conventions of the genre with his 1860s whodunits, The Woman in White (who murdered Laura Glyde, and was she in fact murdered?) and The Moonstone (who stole the most precious gem in England? Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard will investigate). Then, in the mid 1880s, appeared the writer who would elevate the detective novel to a level of popularity it has never since lost – Arthur Conan Doyle, with his Sherlock Holmes stories.

Like other Russian writers of the period, Chekhov was clearly more alert to French literary influence than English although, as chauvinists will approvingly note, there are numerous allusions to Shakespeare in The Shooting Party. The most direct foreign source for the novel would seem to be Emile Gaboriau, whose series hero, Inspector Lecoq, was introduced in L’Affaire Lerouge (1865–6), a pioneering story of murder and criminal impersonation super-ingeniously solved. Chekhov refers frequently throughout his novel to Gaboriau (one of Chekhov’s hero’s nicknames is ‘Lecoq’).

There is – following Poe – a strong American input into early detective fiction. Many historians of the genre, for example, would see Anna Katherine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878) (with its series hero, Ebenezer Gryce) as one of the great progenitors and also a forecast of the strong presence which women writers will have in the field. In 1886, a few months after the publication of The Shooting Party, there appeared The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by an obscure young New Zealander named Fergus Hume. It sold a quarter of a million copies in a year (Chekhov should have been envious), widening the appeal for the genre and creating its mass-reader base.

Members of the twenty-first-century reader base have become accustomed to a dash of internationalism in their favourite reading matter (Peter Hoeg, Umberto Eco, Henning Mankell and a mountain of Maigret are all to be found on the shelves of most high-street bookshops), but they should prepare themselves for two surprises in The Shooting Party. The first is where the book comes from. The otherwise majestic Russian novel – if we discount Crime and Punishment – has never been a strong presence in detective fiction. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the author himself. Chekhov is as internationally renowned as any of his compatriots – but he is known for his drama and his short stories. Neither the achievement represented by The Cherry Orchard (1904), nor ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), can prepare us for The Shooting Party. This is, of course, an early work (juvenilia almost) dating from a period when Chekhov was ‘feeling his way to a method’, Thomas Hardy’s description of his own early foray into crime fiction.1 It was published between August 1884 and April 1885, when the author was still in his early twenties. He was also writing for a living: as a newly qualified doctor he had to support his family by writing for pulp magazines. Chekhov’s apprenticeship, like that of many writers, was served in the depths of the book world, inhabited by hacks, bloodsucking editors and uncultivated readers. The Shooting Party was consciously designed as a feuilleton – or serial – for a low-grade (and spectacularly low-paying) journal.

The detective novel would, as we now know, prove a dead end for Chekhov, but his exploration of it remains fascinating nonetheless. As Chekhov’s most recent biographer, Donald Rayfield, observes, ‘The Shooting Party is unjustly ignored’.2

It is tempting to suggest a link between the young Chekhov and his exact contemporary, Conan Doyle, who brought out the first of the Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. Neither, of course, can have read the other’s work (The Shooting Party had not yet been published in English), but there are piquant points of contact. Both authors were newly trained doctors. The link between the physician, diagnosing a disease from inscrutable ‘symptoms’, and the detective, cracking a case by close examination of mysterious ‘clues’, is a standard observation in the history of the genre. (Whether Chekhov was influenced by a mentor like Doyle’s Joseph Bell, the original of Holmes, is not known.)

For most readers of The Shooting Party it is not so much the similarities with our familiar classics of the genre than strange dissimilarities which will be most striking. In one of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950), Mars is described as being just like earth for its colonizing earthlings except that the sandwiches have an odd tendency to turn blue. Readers steeped in an Anglo-Saxon, American or French tradition of detective fiction will experience the same disconcerting feeling in The Shooting Party.

The action of the story is set in a mythic southern Russia countryside in the 1870s. There is a strange, at times allegorical, feel to the landscape – thunderstorms are apocalyptically loud, forests impenetrably dense, the atmosphere unnaturally sultry. There is lively dispute among Chekhovian experts about the tone of the work, as there almost always is with this author. Is it ‘Parodic’? ‘Sensational’? ‘Hyper-realistic’? It opens with the ominous shriek: ‘A husband murdered his wife!’ It is, we discover, not a bulletin from some crime scene, but the hero’s parrot. It is indeed hard to take seriously a narrative which begins with a prophetic parrot call.