Is the author pulling our leg? With Chekhov we can never be entirely sure.

The narrative of The Shooting Party is elaborately and ironically framed. An unknown writer (with a mysterious badge in his hat) deposits a manuscript with a publisher. The unsolicited package is, the stranger says, the record of a ‘true event’. Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev’s physiognomy would seem to confirm his bona fides – or does it? As the Editor notes:

His entire face simply radiated ingenuousness, an expansive, simple character, truth. If it isn’t a lie that the face is the mirror of the soul, I could have sworn from the very first day of my meeting with the gentleman with the badge that he was incapable of lying. I might even have laid a bet on it. Whether I would have lost or won, the reader will discover later [p. 4].

‘There’s no art’, as Chekhov’s beloved Shakespeare would say, ‘to find the mind’s construction in the face’. Unless, of course, you are a Holmes, a Lecoq or an Ebenezer Gryce. The editor also has a detective’s instincts. Kamyshev claims he is broke, and has written his ‘From the Memoirs of an Investigating Magistrate’ (also known as The Shooting Party) for a quick rouble. But the diamond ring on his finger ‘didn’t tally at all with having to write for a living’. The game, we apprehend, is afoot.

The Editor puts off reading The Shooting Party for a couple of months, until he has some leisure time at his summer villa. It is, he discovers, that most valued thing among connoisseurs of the genre, a ‘page-turner’. It costs the Editor a night’s sleep, so unputdownable is the story. But, gripping as it is, it is no masterpiece. Chekhov (typically) offers – via the Editor’s judicious verdict – his own self-deprecating evaluation of the detective fiction of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov:

It’s really a very ordinary story, containing many longueurs and in places the style is very uneven. The author has a weakness for striking effects and resounding phrases. Obviously he’s writing for the very first time, with an inexperienced, untrained hand. For all that, his story makes for easy reading. There’s a plot, it makes sense and – most important of all – it’s original, with a very distinctive character – it’s what one would call sui generis. And it does have some literary merit [p. 8].

Indeed it does.

The narrative which follows is an autobiographical account – written as a kind of pseudo-journal at the same time as the events it describes – by an investigating magistrate. The Russian legal system at this period resembled that of the French. When a notifiable crime was committed, evidence was first collected and evaluated by an investigating magistrate who combined the role of detective and Director of Prosecution. This functionary had the privilege of having all the evidence made immediately available to him, while it was still warm. He did not have to hunt it down (the police had already done that for him); he did not have to work outside the law – unlike Sherlock Holmes, for example, who can only trespass on the crime scene by permission of the bone-headed Inspector Le Strade (Conan Doyle’s little Anglo-Saxon sarcasm against his rival’s Inspector Lecoq).

From the point of view of the writer of detective fiction, the investigating magistrate has advantages over some of the traditional types of detective in the Anglo-Saxon literary traditions. Those who spring immediately to mind are the amateur sleuth (Hercule Poirot), the private eye (Philip Marlowe), the spinster detective (Miss Marple), the flatfoot (Inspector Morse) and the defence-lawyer detective (Perry Mason). The nearest equivalent to the investigating magistrate in current bestsellers in the genre would be a chief medical examiner, such as Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta.

The Shooting Party is arranged around three major narrative events: an orgy, a wedding and a murder. The crime is held off until very late (chapter xx) and – in a brilliantly conceived deception on the reader – seems destined to remain, if not forever unsolved, at least inadequately explained.

As we first encounter him, the hero, investigating magistrate Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev, is wallowing in that state of ennui which afflicts many of Chekhov’s characters (most eloquently, the drunken Chebutykin in Three Sisters).