SOURCE: "Tales from One Pocket: Detective and Justice Stories of Karel Čapek," in The Structure of the Literary Process: Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Felix Vodička, edited by P. Steiner, M. Červenka, and R. Vroon, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 95-107.

In the essay below, Davydov measures the stories in Čapek's Tales from One Pocket against the traditional detective genre.

When Karel Čapek began his Tales from One Pockety he intended to write a series of detective tales. However, what appeared in 1929 under this title can hardly be termed "detective tales" in the conventional sense. Only half of the stories deal with classic mystery; the rest preserve only the detective situation or focus on aspects lying beyond the interest of the detective genre. Čapek wrote about the composition of the Tales:

My first authorial interest in detective stories originated with the problem of epistemology—how does...