| Summary: | The study analyses composition, motifs and stylistic structure of Doyle´s Holmes detective stories. The author of the study tries to determine their value in the context of their development within transformations of the detective genre. He studies the Doyle´s texts in regard with the Victorian cultural code and parallel literary worldview movements. For the most important category of the construction of Holmes´ rebuses he determines a category of weird and bizarre, sometimes even grotesque. The evil plan or breaking an order (natural or social) comes forth onto phenomenal surface in the form of series of weird and absurd events appearing that way to a person, who is trapped in “hands” of criminals. If the reason embodied in the person of a genial detective reveals the right motivation, the odour of strange disappears: detective´s achievement (searching and resolving) brings back to an absurdly looked world the rational order. Only minority of later texts fulfil the rules of the “standard” type of a classical detective prose. Progressing schematisation of the genre eliminated the most characteristic part of Doyle´s herritage: category of strange that is finally suppressed by operation of shifting and reduction: in the further development of the genre it is applied to motif of murder (it makes murder more peculiar and masks it). It is not applied to general motif of rebus as it was in case of Doyle.
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