Children's Literature

The international smuggler Kent was able to slip through the hands of the police in many countries. Suddenly Inspector Sami received a message stating that this dangerous smuggler had arrived in Egypt. . . . The five adventurers appeared in the heart of the chase. Were they able to reach John Kent? Were they able to succeed where police from all over the world had failed?

[International Smuggler, preface]

With this opening Mahmoud Salem hooks his adolescent readers into one of the Five Adventurers series; other contemporary series in Arabic—the Three Adventurers and the Four Adventurers—begin in similar fashion.¹ These contemporary Arabic Adventurers series, set in Egypt, invite comparison with the American Three Investigators series, particularly the earlier volumes by Robert Arthur.² Arabic series of detective fiction, a fairly recent development, have become popular among Middle Eastern children, who have not had their own children's literature until this century (Ghurayyib 17), much later than European and American children.3

John Cawelti's description of "the world of a formula . . . as an archetypal story pattern embodied in the images, symbols, themes, and myths of a particular culture" (16) and Dennis Porter's belief that Western detective fiction is a "valuable barometer of [a] society's ideological norms" (1), although written about detective fiction for adults, are both valid concepts for adolescent fiction whether Eastern or Western.⁴ The formula for detective fiction largely remains constant, but cultural differences clearly distinguish the Eastern Adventurers series from the Western Investigators; furthermore, techniques for creating suspense subsequently produce a slower pace in the Arabic stories.⁵

Stories from both cultures generally adopt the viewpoint of the youthful detective, never that of the criminal. Because romanticizing [End Page 118] crime or criminals is not acceptable in Middle Eastern culture, the Arabic stories do not focus on the criminal;⁶ Western stories for children also do not romanticize the criminal, though some adult American stories may. The attitude toward crime, however, can be significantly different in Eastern and Western detective fiction. The attitudes that crime is a social problem and that criminal acts are "not evil deeds but the result of defective social arrangements or heredity" (Cawelti 57) do not coincide with Islamic law, which, rather than faulting society, generally punishes the individual doer of the act.

In spite of their different attitudes toward criminals, both Eastern and Western youths with prior experience in reading detective fiction enjoy the contrast between the "safely familiar" 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 arousal of the reader's emotions (Porter 236). As Anne Scott MacLeod has written, "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). Although Porter speaks of fiction for adults, his remarks prove valid for children's fiction in which cultural differences permeate the characterization, action, and setting, as well as the methods for creating suspense and the resulting pace of the story.

All detective stories obviously require a victim, a criminal, a detective, and others who, though involved with the crime, are incapable of solving it. The victim must not be so prominent as to overshadow the detective's role, but the reader must know enough about the victim to care about the crime's solution (Cawelti 91). In some Arabic stories, such as The Bride of Sinai, the reader knows almost nothing about the bride but can sympathize with her having been kidnaped from her wedding without knowing her more intimately. Rules exist for the creation of the criminal as well; his or her motives must not be probed too deeply, the goal of the detective story being to establish clearly the criminal's guilt (Cawelti 92). In the Arabic and American...